Live Not by Lies

by Rod Dreher

  But truth cannot be separated from tears. To live in truth requires accepting suffering. In Brave New World, Mond appeals to John the Savage to leave his wild life in the woods and return to the comforts of civilization. The prophetic savage refuses the temptation.

  “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

  “In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

  “All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”1

  This is the cost of liberty. This is what it means to live in truth. There is no other way. There is no escape from the struggle. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance—first of all, over our own hearts.

  God’s Saboteurs

  “Modern history teaches us that the fight for freedom is always with us,” says Marek Benda, who fought the communist regime as a teenager alongside his mother and father. “A single generation always stands between us and tyranny. Many people can look back and see the lessons of history, but they are totally blind to the danger that these same things are happening now.”

  I hope that reading the testimonies of the men and women in this book has caused the scales to fall from your eyes. But as Father Tomislav Kolaković taught his disciples as the shadow of Soviet totalitarianism grew long over their land, seeing is only the first step. Think about what you see. Get together with others to talk about what you are all seeing. Analyze the facts and discern how your faith and your moral convictions should be applied concretely to the situation.

  Then act—while there is still time. As C. S. Lewis put it, the world is “enemy-occupied territory” for the Christian. “Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” The culture war is largely over—and we lost. The Grand March is, for the time being, a victory parade. But then, so were the May Day marches and pageants in all the cities and towns of the late Soviet Empire.

  The Marxist Mordor was real, but the faith of those who resisted outlasted it, because hard totalitarianism met something harder: the truth. In our time, the emerging totalitarianism is softer, smarter, and more sophisticated—but is no less totalitarian for it. Lubomir Gleiman, who listened to Father Kolaković’s Bratislava lectures in 1943, wrote in his 2006 memoir that Kolaković believed communism “was more ruthless than the Western secularized ‘soft’ totalitarianism,” and therefore the greater threat to Christianity at the time.2 But as Timo Križka, a son of the first generation of post-Soviet freedom, discovered, the totalitarianism that Father Kolaković identified as soft really exists. Like its more brutal older brother, it is built on the oldest lie of all, the one the serpent whispered in the Garden, the father of every other lie: “Ye shall be as gods.”

  Our cause appears lost . . . but we are still here! Now our mission is to build the underground resistance to the occupation to keep alive the memory of who we were and who we are, and to stoke the fires of desire for the true God. Where there is memory and desire, there is hope. Let all saboteurs for the Kingdom of God heed the stirring conclusion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 essay, “Live Not by Lies!,” which gives this book its title. It was his valedictory to the Russian people:

  And so: We need not be the first to set out on this path, Ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands—they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands—we will not recognize our country!

  But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—we do it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.

  And if from this also we shrink away, then we are worthless, hopeless, and it is of us that Pushkin asks with scorn:

  Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom?

  Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash.3

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am not at liberty to thank some of those who helped me research this book, because it would put them at risk of retaliation in the workplace. None of these anonymous helpers live in the former Soviet Bloc; all are Americans. That tells us something important. But you know who you are, and I thank you.

  This book exists because of Dr. John Schirger and his mother, Milada Kloubkova Schirger. It was she, a former Catholic prisoner of conscience in her native Czechoslovakia, who said to her US-born son that she was seeing things happening in America that reminded her of her own homeland under communism. Dr. Schirger passed his mother’s remarks on to me in 2015, but at the time he preferred to keep their identity private. His mother’s story was the genesis of Live Not by Lies. Milada Schirger died in 2019, at the age of ninety-two. In gratitude for her witness, her son gave me permission to identify them both. I hope this book is worthy of her legacy.

  My friends Béla and Gabriella Bollobás, who fled Hungary for freedom in Britain in the 1960s, first confirmed to me that I should take Milada Schirger seriously. This book is theirs too. I am grateful for all I have learned from them over the years.

  I want to thank the translators and guides who helped me overseas. Father Štěpán Smolen was my Virgil in the Czech Republic, with the help of Milan Žonca and Andrej Kutarna. Łukasz Kożuchowski was my right hand in Warsaw; in the Romaszewska interview there, I was also assisted by Aneta Wisniewska and Wojciech Kolarski. Matthew Casserly aided me in Moscow. Anna Salyi was my Budapest fixer and translator. Viliam Ostatník was my able assistant in Bratislava.

  I had other invaluable help setting up meetings with remarkable men and women. In Russia, I could not have done this work without the aid of Dmitry Uzlaner; I cannot thank him enough. In Slovakia, Juraj Šúst and Timo Križka introduced me to the world of the Slovak Catholic underground. Ryszard Legutko and Dariusz Karłowicz were key to my work in Poland. In fact, Ryszard’s great book The Demon in Democracy is an invaluable guide to understanding the soft totalitarianism of our time.

  Once again, I have the opportunity to express gratitude to my literary agent, Gary Morris of the David Black Agency, who, for the nearly two decades he has been in my life, has been everything a writer could hope for. This is the second book I have done with Bria Sandford, my editor at Sentinel. I appreciate her confidence in me and my ideas. I also owe a debt of thanks to my friend Dewey Scandurro, for his prayers and advice on the drafts of this book, as he has offered during the writing of almost all of my books.

  Thanks also to my wife, Julie, and children, Matthew, Lucas, and Nora, for their patience during my lengthy absences reporting this book. Kids, these stories are for you and your generation more than for your mother’s and mine.

  Finally I want to thank Frederica Mathewes-Green, one of my oldest and dearest friends. Her spiritual father was the Orthodox priest George Calciu, which is how I first learned of him and of the torture camp at Piteşti, in Romania. For over twenty-five years, Frederica has supported me with her friendship, her wise counsel, and through her willingness to listen to me and pray for me through my struggles, in particular with this project.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts; abr. by Edward E. Ericson Jr. (NY: Perennial, 1983). Quote taken from the author’s introduction to the abridgment (no page number).

  2. “In New Biography, Pope Benedict XVI Laments Modern ‘Anti-Christian Creed,’” National Catholic Register, May 4, 2020, ncregister.com/daily-news/in-new-biography-pope-benedict-xvi-laments-modern-anti-christian-creed.

  3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Live Not by Lies!,” in The Solzh
enitsyn Reader: New and Selected Writings, 1947–2005, eds. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009), 558.

  CHAPTER ONE: KOLAKOVIĆ THE PROPHET

  1. Václav Vaško, “Professor Kolaković: Myths and Reality,” trans. Google, Impulz no. 3 (2006), impulzrevue.sk/article.php?135.

  2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (NY: Harcourt, 1973), viii.

  3. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (NY: Vintage, 1990), 6.

  4. René Girard, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (NY: Orbis, 2001), 179.

  5. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983), 62.

  6. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 62.

  7. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 5.

  8. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 73.

  9. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Live Not by Lies!,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Selected Writings, 1947–2005, eds. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009), 556.

  10. Solzhenitsyn, “Lies!,” 559.

  CHAPTER TWO: OUR PRE-TOTALITARIAN CULTURE

  1. Nadine Gordimer, Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950–2008 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 474.

  2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts; abr. by Edward E. Ericson Jr. (NY: Perennial, 1983), 39.

  3. Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 36–37.

  4. Slezkine, House of Government, 40.

  5. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (NY: Anchor, 2013), 392.

  6. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (NY: Harcourt, 1973), 478.

  7. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 317.

  8. Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk), “It’s telling that, in the year of 2019, the notion that one purpose of civics education might be to . . .” Twitter, September 13, 2019, 10:59 a.m., twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1172540349622800384.

  9. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 330.

  10. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 332.

  11. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (NY: Vintage, 1970), 492.

  12. Billington, Icon and the Axe, 502.

  13. Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968 (Lexington, MA: Plunkett Lake Press, 2010), loc. 11 of 201, Kindle.

  14. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 333.

  15. Jake Silverstein, “Why We Published the 1619 Project,” New York Times, December 20, 2019, nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html.

  16. Jeff Barrus, “Nikole Hannah-Jones Wins Pulitzer Prize for 1619 Project,” Pulitzer Center, May 4, 2019, pulitzercenter.org/blog/nikole-hannah-jones-wins-pulitzer-prize-1619-project.

  17. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 353.

  18. Zack Goldberg (@zachg932), “1/n Spent some time on LexisNexis over the weekend. Depending on your political orientation, what follows will either disturb or encourage you. . . .” Twitter, May 28, 2019, 1:32 p.m., twitter.com/zachg932/status/1133440945201061888.

  19. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 351.

  20. N. V. Krylenko, “The Party Crushed,” in The Great Terror: A Reassessment, ed. Robert Conquest (NY: Oxford University Press, 1990), 249.

  21. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 339.

  22. Michael Kruse, “I Need Loyalty,” Politico, March 3, 2018, politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/06/donald-trump-loyalty-staff-217227.

  23. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), 38.

  24. Hunter, Change the World, 41.

  25. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (NY: Vintage, 1990), 3.

  26. Silvester Krčméry, MD, This Saved Us: How to Survive Brainwashing (self-pub., 1996), 222.

  27. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 440.

  CHAPTER THREE: PROGRESSIVISM AS RELIGION

  1. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (NY: Viking, 1987), 179.

  2. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (NY: Vintage, 1970), 504.

  3. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (NY: Harper & Row, 1984), 257.

  4. Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 107.

  5. President George W. Bush, “Bush: No Justice without Freedom,” CNN, January 20, 2005, cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/20/bush.transcript/index.html.

  6. John Gray, Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 273.

  7. Slezkine, House of Government, 54.

  8. Martin Latsis, quoted in Anna Geifman, Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 126.

  9. James A. Lindsay and Mike Nayna, “Postmodern Religion and the Faith of Social Justice,” Areo, December 18, 2018, areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-the-faith-of-social-justice/.

  10. Michael Hanby, “The Brave New World of Same-Sex Marriage,” The Federalist, February 19, 2014, thefederalist.com/2014/02/19/the-brave-new-world-of-same-sex-marriage/.

  11. Pope John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem, May 18, 1986, para. 38.

  CHAPTER FOUR: CAPITALISM, WOKE AND WATCHFUL

  1. Parag Khanna, “These 25 Companies Are More Powerful Than Many Countries,” Foreign Policy, March 3, 2016, foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/15/these-25-companies-are-more-powerful-than-many-countries-multinational-corporate-wealth-power/.

  2. Heather Mac Donald, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 30.

  3. Larry Fink, “A Sense of Purpose,” BlackRock, 2018, blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/2018-larry-fink-ceo-letter.

  4. Sarah Perez, “Over a Quarter of US Adults Now Own a Smart Speaker, Typically an Amazon Echo,” Tech Crunch, March 8, 2019, techcrunch.com/2019/03/08/over-a-quarter-of-u-s-adults-now-own-a-smart-speaker-typically-an-amazon-echo/.

  5. Shoshana Zuboff, quoted in “‘The Goal Is to Automate Us’: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” The Guardian, January 20, 2019, theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook.

  6. Caleb Parke, “Conservatives Call for PayPal Boycott After CEO Says Southern Poverty Law Center Helps Ban Users,” Fox News, February 28, 2019, foxnews.com/tech/conservatives-call-for-paypal-boycott-after-ceo-admits-splc-helps-ban-users.

  7. Michelle Malkin, “Is This Bank Chasing Away Conservatives?,” National Review, April 15, 2019, nationalreview.com/2019/04/chase-bank-conservative-customers/.

  8. Katanga Johnson, “U.S. Gun Lobby Takes Aim at ‘Gun-Hating’ Banks Citi, BofA,” Reuters, May 18, 2018, reuters.com/article/us-usa-guns-banks/u-s-gun-lobby-takes-aim-at-gun-hating-banks-citi-bofa-idUSKCN1IJ260.

  9. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (NY: Public Affairs, 2019), loc. 5421, Kindle.

  10. Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (NY: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019), loc. 2155, Kindle.

  11. Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (NY: Metropolitan Books, 2019), 178.

  12. Matt Sledge, “CIA’s Gus Hunt on Big Data: We ‘Try to Collect Everything and Hang On to It Forever,” Huffington Post, March 20, 2013, huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/cia-gus-hunt-big-data_n_2917842.

  13. Editorial, “How China Corralled 1 Million Uighurs into Concentration Camps,” Washington Post
, February 29, 2020, washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/a-spreadsheet-of-those-in-hell-how-china-corralled-uighurs-into-concentration-camps/2020/02/28/4daeca4a-58c8-11ea-ab68-101ecfec2532_story.html.

  14. John Lanchester, “Document Number Nine,” London Review of Books, October 10, 2019, lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/john-lanchester/document-number-nine.

  15. Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State, trans. Ruth Martin (London: Old Street Publishing, 2019), loc. 1213, Kindle.

  16. Strittmatter, Surveillance, loc. 1224, Kindle.

  17. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (NY: Harper & Row, 1984), 112–13.

  18. Jean Twenge, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?,” The Atlantic, September 2017, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/.

  CHAPTER FIVE: VALUE NOTHING MORE THAN TRUTH

  1. Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, trans. Paul Wilson (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 39.

  2. Havel, Powerless, 39–40.

  3. Havel, Powerless, 45.

  CHAPTER SIX: CULTIVATE CULTURAL MEMORY

  1. Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Annual Report on US Attitudes toward Socialism, Communism, and Collectivism (Washington, DC: 2019), victimsofcommunism.org/2019-annual-poll.

  2. Laura M. Nicolae, “100 Years. 100 Million Lives. Think Twice,” Harvard Crimson, November 20, 2017, thecrimson.com/article/2017/11/20/nicolae-one-hundred-million/.