September 15, 2013 The Dynamics of Tyranny By Stella Morabito
Before George Orwell wrote 1984, there was Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. If you're not acquainted with Zamyatin's novel, you will find it an extraordinary study on the dynamics of tyranny.
Zamyatin, a Russian, wrote We around 1921. It was immediately banned by the Soviet censorship board, but was smuggled abroad. For many decades, copies of the book were extremely difficult to find. . . . Many of us brood that we're living in an emerging dystopia, similar to 1984. Political correctness generates Orwellian Newspeak. A news anchor trashes the existence of "private" families, claiming all children "belong to" the collective. A president is re-elected through a campaign that promotes with impunity an infographic that brazenly glorifies a policy of government meddling in our lives from womb to tomb. Surveillance and invasions of privacy proliferate. Journalists suppress news rather than report it. We have government by cult figure. Justifications for anxiety abound.
Yet Zamyatin's novel We offers perhaps an even more instructive picture than either 1984 or Brave New World about where we are headed. While 1984 and Brave New World serve as mirrors of today's political surrealism, We functions more as a microscope that magnifies in starker and deeper detail the gestation and inner workings of dystopia. . . . We describes a society in the midst of being "perfected." Human beings are more equal than ever, overcoming their individualism and their "irrational" resistance to collectivist forces. They experience the "happinesss" of living in synchronicity within the Great Machine of "The One State," due to the generosity of their "Benefactor." . . . Indeed, Zamyatin himself warned -- in his essay "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy" -- that societies are forever in the midst of a guessing game about what happens next. The only bulwark against tyranny are people he dubs "heretics," those who can connect the dots and then display the picture to others.
Like children with healthy curiosities, heretics ask questions that are "so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex." They "recklessly burst into today from tomorrow," and tend to be exterminated for doing so. But, in the end, Zamyatin insists: "someone must speak heretically today about tomorrow" because "heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought."
Herein lies Zamyatin's enduring lesson for each of us: utopian models breed tyranny in which only complete obedience -- in thought, word and deed -- will do. A balance between individual rights and government is never an option in them. The OneState can only be sustained by a never-ending quest to wipe out any inkling of dissent -- usually through a combination of punishment, vilification, and mockery that instills the primal fear of isolation in any potential dissenter . We all know how the guardians of groupthink usher folks away from truth-tellers by employing labels such as "haters" or "tinfoil hats" or "bigots."
But the dirty little secret of the tyrant (a secret we may instinctively know but fear to act upon) is that tyrannies can withstand very little human resistance. Even one person's defiant expression of individuality and childlike truth-telling can create ripple effects that thwart the forces of totalitarianism. . . ."
RIGHT'S RIGHT 
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Mon Sep 16, 2013 7:22 pm
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