All of them. Walking down the street near my house, I saw dozens of BLM signs in the windows, and I couldn't help but think that every single one had the subtext of "Don't burn me down."
There is so much of a cautionary tale here. When people see institutions that have protected their voice cave to 'The Message' and they try to speak truth but get silenced or told they are wrong, they retreat to a survival state. They give up their free soul in exchange for being left alone. But, as one US general once said, "We do not fight wars to have peace. We fight wars to have a peace worth having." In this case, what's worth having is individual freedom.
God damn. I needed that. Posted “magical words” on my Jeep last summer (“Trans is a Mental Illness”), and the bold ones in the community pressured my landlord, who eventually pressured me to remove the words. I refused and started parking on the street in front of my marina. The final result - street parking the Jeep allowed the local progressive hooligan mob (probably kids of lawyers of U of Washington professors; might’ve even been CHAZ/CHOP fools from 3 years ago) to steal the words. I can’t say I understood precisely why I did it, at the time - something about reverence for truth and a disgust towards lies. I am more convinced than ever - lies are death which must be fought against, even at risk of losing everything.
The words were printed, white on a black background, on a vinyl tire cover. You know - Jeep Wranglers have a spare tire mounted at the back. Perfect for hipster Seattle youth to be set boiling while I wait for the light to turn green. Lots of “eff you”s, one egg. But when I drove to the far out Seattle ’burbs, where my elderly parents live, lots of young male drivers giving me thumbs up. It was just held in place by elastic. I refused to get too militant about protecting it. Still pissed me off, though. I think election year in Seattle I may have to up my “I will not comply” game.
I kept parking on the street and after three weeks of cuts to the vinyl, some prissy little privileged kids finally figured out how to remove a vinyl tire cover. Wallingford neighborhood in Seattle, on the Lake Union waterfront.
You know what though? I can see that the powerful here do have the upper hand. That’s a grim thing to see. But my “give a damn” is almost completely busted. And here we are...
I don’t know how the Czech people were able to completely turn their situation around. I think we might have to truly hit some type of ‘bottom’ for enough people to finally see we’re heading in the wrong direction. Right now there are enough free thinkers expressing their concerns but not enough people are listening or care.
The free thinkers might express their concerns, but there seems no way to get traction toward any sort of change.
In the US we approach - or are already arrived at - the point JFK spoke of: when all avenues of peaceful change are closed, then violent change is necessary. (paraphrase)
I’ve had that same thought. Yuri should make bumper stickers and other signs like that and then start posting them everywhere. I bet the Regime would freak.
It's a very nice essay -- the famous greengrocer part especially -- but mostly irrelevant to our current situation.
The Cold War had two sides -- dissidents from the side that eventually lost had an "outside", a literal place to which some of them could defect, and a huge, rich audience in that outside which could circulate and promote their dissidence such that even people not connected to dissident circles "inside" could hear of it.
There is no "outside" to the current Western ecumene. There is no big powerful alternate world to which you can flee if things get bad, and which is funding and promoting dissident literature and dissident thinkers. So while Havel's essay is very nice, it teaches us nothing about how to "harness the power of the powerless" in the present situation.
Havel's essay is one of my favorite pieces ever. I've written about it and linked to it multiple times because I don't think it can ever be read enough by Americans re: the current situation. His description of the "post-totalitarian" system/state so perfectly captures the whole thing.
Eisenhower's administration experimented on US troops and his nod to the MIC looks more like a limited hangout than anything truly "dissident", in my opinion. Smedley Butler was railing about the MIC - and naming names - LONG before Eisenhower. Smedley had the receipts, too, as the kids like to say.
And thank you for pointing out that Eisenhower was not the hero he is depicted as. Very few people know about the 1 million Germans who died as a result of how he ran his open-air "concentration camps" after the end of WWII.
'George Weiss, a tank repairman who now lives in Toronto, recalls of his camp on the Rhine: “All night we had to sit up jammed against each other. But the lack of water was the worst thing of all. For three and a half days, we had no water at all. We would drink our own urine….”
Private Heinz T. (his surname is withheld at his request) had just turned eighteen in hospital when the Americans walked into his ward on April 18. He and all his fellow patients were taken out to the camp at Bad Kreuznach in the Rhineland, which already held several hundred thousand prisoners. Heinz was wearing only a pair of shorts, shoes, and a shirt.
Heinz was far from the youngest in the camp, which also held thousands of displaced German civilians. There were children as young as six among the prisoners, as well as pregnant women, and men over sixty. At the beginning, when trees still grew in the camp, some men managed to cut off limbs to build a fire. The guards ordered the fire put out. In many of the enclosures, it was forbidden to dig holes in the ground for shelter. “All we had to eat was grass,” Heinz remembers.'
It drives me nuts that all anyone remembers about Eisenhower was his speech about the Military Industrial Complex. The man was a war criminal. He deserves to be remembered as one of the least honourable military commanders in American history.
His warning came when he was no longer in a position to do anything about it. Also Eisenhower used the CIA to regime change Guatemala. This gave a huge boost to those conducting foreign policy by covert means. Not a hero is correct.
I read that Churchill wanted to use anthrax against Germany. He whole heartedly waged the terror bombing of civilians. Planned disastrous campaigns in both world wars etc etc. I’d call him a war criminal too
I wanted to reply with a pithy comment about how, after the war ended, US General Patton said something along the lines of, "We [the US] fought on the wrong side of this war" ... and that shortly afterwards, he mysteriously died in a vehicle accident.
But trying to find the original quote, and the details of Patton's death, sent me down way too interesting of a rabbit hole to capture in a short comment. Oh Vey.
Patton figured out a lot in the short time he spent in Germany at the end of WWII: he came to think of the Germans as the best people in Europe; he was disgusted with the Soviet generals and leadership; and he was shocked by the uncivilized behaviour of the "displaced persons" (DPs) - that is, the Jews from Poland and Russia - who swarmed into Germany after the war expecting (and getting) free housing.
Perhaps most prophetically, he realized that if we didn't stop the Soviets from expanding into Eastern Europe after the war (as they did), Europe would eventually fall to communism (which it has).
Feeling like a trip down this rabbit hole? Start with these two sources:
The "best people in Europe"? Did he totally deny the genocide of the Jews? And yes, the Jews did deserve at least some (temporary) "free housing" after having been uprooted from their homes and murdered en masse. If that is all the "uncivilized behavior" you can come up with, you have a very poor case to plead.
Also, a minor correction: The Soviets expanded westward, not "eastward" after the war.
Thank you for pointing out my mistake about the Soviet Union expanding “eastward.” I’ve made the correction in my original comment.
I can understand your reaction to what I wrote. I would have had the same feelings 10 or 15 years ago. What I’ve come to realize is that, in the aftermath of WWII, there was a strong need for a narrative to justify why we just fought that horrible war. Europeans in the West and East had suffered terribly, and the East was in the process of being handed over to the Soviets. People could rightly ask, what did we just “win” here?
You’ve probably heard that history is written by the victors. And after WWII, one of the main tasks of the “victors” was to come up with a narrative that would satisfy their populations that all their sacrifices had been worth it.
One group of people was set up as a group of victims - a group with lots of experience in identifying as victims; and another group - who’d been set up as the villain in the lead up to war – was further vilified.
Not terribly creative, but it did the job. It’s interesting to see how the people who were cast in the victim role then are behaving now.
There is an inherent difficulty in untangling what is true and untrue about an historical event. It’s not like most of us alive today were there. But questioning the established narratives becomes even more difficult because, like it or not, they become part of who we are. As intelligent, social creatures, we human beings form and adopt narratives all the time to help explain to ourselves who we are.
When someone presents information that puts those narratives into question, it can feel like we are being attacked on the level of who we are – or, more precisely, who we *think* we are.
So I understand and empathize with your reaction to my comment. If you’re interested in learning more, you can follow the links I posted in my original comment. If not, I wish you well.
If you don't already know it from previous comments of mine, I'm Jewish and live in Israel, and I'm personally acquainted with lots of people who either themselves survived the Holocaust or are children of those who did. These are ordinary decent, honest people who have zero motivation or even ability to lie and their story fits perfectly with the 'official' version. This is why I have no patience at all with Holocaust deniers. Of course, this does not give anyone a blanket permit to do anything to anyone else, but liars do not interest me at all.
“The greengrocer had to put the slogan in his window, therefore, not in the hope that someone might read it or be persuaded by it, but to contribute, along with thousands of other slogans, to the panorama that everyone is very much aware of. This panorama, of course, has a subliminal meaning as well: it reminds people where they are living and what is expected of them. It tells them what everyone else is doing, and indicates to them what they must do as well, if they don't want to be excluded, to fall into isolation, alienate themselves from society, break the rules of the game, and risk the loss of their peace and tranquility and security.”
-------------------------------------
garments of obedience serve this purpose too. every cult imposes them and subversives within cults flout them by whatever means possible. the hijabi with painted eyes and lips, the mennonite girl in all-covering dresses tailored to show every curve of her body; the ultra-orthodox jewish woman in the most expensive human-hair wig styled in the latest cut--and of course the catholic school girl with her plaid skirt rolled up to mini-length whenever she's out of the building...
And materialist atheism is not a cult that forces its women to display their bodies whether they like the idea or not, making only young attractive ones feel good about their bodies while the rest become anorexic neurotics?
Legend. Was in Prague on the 20th anniversary of the velvety revolution roaming the streets with a bottle of wine and a brunette. What a glorious night.
Capitalism helped make it so with the warm accommodations of the Hilton. It's a long chapter in a novel I wrote about living in Prague and playing poker on the local circuit in mafia owned casinos.
This dissertation neatly shows how that evil (but surprisingly small) sub-species of people who wish to control everything never actually stopped trying - and mostly succeeding - to do so.
They merely modified their modus operandi as needed through the Treaties of Westphalia, Versailles, Rome etc and the Nuremberg trials and the 1960s protests, but were never actually derailed in any real sense.
“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. America and the rest of the western world are living this truism.
The only difference these days is that the Green Grocer has updated his "Workers of the World Unite" sign with a trans flag.
Excellent post.
How many BLM signs in shop windows carried the same message?
All of them. Walking down the street near my house, I saw dozens of BLM signs in the windows, and I couldn't help but think that every single one had the subtext of "Don't burn me down."
There is so much of a cautionary tale here. When people see institutions that have protected their voice cave to 'The Message' and they try to speak truth but get silenced or told they are wrong, they retreat to a survival state. They give up their free soul in exchange for being left alone. But, as one US general once said, "We do not fight wars to have peace. We fight wars to have a peace worth having." In this case, what's worth having is individual freedom.
God damn. I needed that. Posted “magical words” on my Jeep last summer (“Trans is a Mental Illness”), and the bold ones in the community pressured my landlord, who eventually pressured me to remove the words. I refused and started parking on the street in front of my marina. The final result - street parking the Jeep allowed the local progressive hooligan mob (probably kids of lawyers of U of Washington professors; might’ve even been CHAZ/CHOP fools from 3 years ago) to steal the words. I can’t say I understood precisely why I did it, at the time - something about reverence for truth and a disgust towards lies. I am more convinced than ever - lies are death which must be fought against, even at risk of losing everything.
Thank you for your service and continuing to fight for liberty as well as sanity. Live not by lies. How did the mob steal the words?
The words were printed, white on a black background, on a vinyl tire cover. You know - Jeep Wranglers have a spare tire mounted at the back. Perfect for hipster Seattle youth to be set boiling while I wait for the light to turn green. Lots of “eff you”s, one egg. But when I drove to the far out Seattle ’burbs, where my elderly parents live, lots of young male drivers giving me thumbs up. It was just held in place by elastic. I refused to get too militant about protecting it. Still pissed me off, though. I think election year in Seattle I may have to up my “I will not comply” game.
I kept parking on the street and after three weeks of cuts to the vinyl, some prissy little privileged kids finally figured out how to remove a vinyl tire cover. Wallingford neighborhood in Seattle, on the Lake Union waterfront.
Just an unreasonable fool here. Glad to know you, comrade.
This some high value subversion, sir. Well done!
You know what though? I can see that the powerful here do have the upper hand. That’s a grim thing to see. But my “give a damn” is almost completely busted. And here we are...
I don’t know how the Czech people were able to completely turn their situation around. I think we might have to truly hit some type of ‘bottom’ for enough people to finally see we’re heading in the wrong direction. Right now there are enough free thinkers expressing their concerns but not enough people are listening or care.
The free thinkers might express their concerns, but there seems no way to get traction toward any sort of change.
In the US we approach - or are already arrived at - the point JFK spoke of: when all avenues of peaceful change are closed, then violent change is necessary. (paraphrase)
They turned around their situation into another pitfall...
excellent and valuable post.
when it's been said by someone else clearly, fully and powerfully, the best thing is, as here, to let people read it for themselves.
well done, yuri.
We gain wisdom from the past. Appreciate the compliment from my best critic!
Ironically, ripping off the mask and posting a sign that reads "I am afraid, therefore I am obedient" might actually be the ultimate rebellion.
I’ve had that same thought. Yuri should make bumper stickers and other signs like that and then start posting them everywhere. I bet the Regime would freak.
How about:
"My silence is not acceptance of your lies."
It's a very nice essay -- the famous greengrocer part especially -- but mostly irrelevant to our current situation.
The Cold War had two sides -- dissidents from the side that eventually lost had an "outside", a literal place to which some of them could defect, and a huge, rich audience in that outside which could circulate and promote their dissidence such that even people not connected to dissident circles "inside" could hear of it.
There is no "outside" to the current Western ecumene. There is no big powerful alternate world to which you can flee if things get bad, and which is funding and promoting dissident literature and dissident thinkers. So while Havel's essay is very nice, it teaches us nothing about how to "harness the power of the powerless" in the present situation.
Ronald Reagan — 'If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.'
We must work from the inside. There are still elections, school board meetings, and social media. We must be brave.
Great post. I hate how much this reads like American life. History repeats itself.
Havel's essay is one of my favorite pieces ever. I've written about it and linked to it multiple times because I don't think it can ever be read enough by Americans re: the current situation. His description of the "post-totalitarian" system/state so perfectly captures the whole thing.
I would also put Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket" well-above Eisenhower's farewell address for the reasons I stated here - https://theabjectlesson.substack.com/p/the-big-lie-part-2.
Eisenhower's administration experimented on US troops and his nod to the MIC looks more like a limited hangout than anything truly "dissident", in my opinion. Smedley Butler was railing about the MIC - and naming names - LONG before Eisenhower. Smedley had the receipts, too, as the kids like to say.
"War is a Racket" is a must-read.
And thank you for pointing out that Eisenhower was not the hero he is depicted as. Very few people know about the 1 million Germans who died as a result of how he ran his open-air "concentration camps" after the end of WWII.
From https://nationalvanguard.org/2017/06/eisenhowers-death-camps/ :
'George Weiss, a tank repairman who now lives in Toronto, recalls of his camp on the Rhine: “All night we had to sit up jammed against each other. But the lack of water was the worst thing of all. For three and a half days, we had no water at all. We would drink our own urine….”
Private Heinz T. (his surname is withheld at his request) had just turned eighteen in hospital when the Americans walked into his ward on April 18. He and all his fellow patients were taken out to the camp at Bad Kreuznach in the Rhineland, which already held several hundred thousand prisoners. Heinz was wearing only a pair of shorts, shoes, and a shirt.
Heinz was far from the youngest in the camp, which also held thousands of displaced German civilians. There were children as young as six among the prisoners, as well as pregnant women, and men over sixty. At the beginning, when trees still grew in the camp, some men managed to cut off limbs to build a fire. The guards ordered the fire put out. In many of the enclosures, it was forbidden to dig holes in the ground for shelter. “All we had to eat was grass,” Heinz remembers.'
It drives me nuts that all anyone remembers about Eisenhower was his speech about the Military Industrial Complex. The man was a war criminal. He deserves to be remembered as one of the least honourable military commanders in American history.
His warning came when he was no longer in a position to do anything about it. Also Eisenhower used the CIA to regime change Guatemala. This gave a huge boost to those conducting foreign policy by covert means. Not a hero is correct.
I read that Churchill wanted to use anthrax against Germany. He whole heartedly waged the terror bombing of civilians. Planned disastrous campaigns in both world wars etc etc. I’d call him a war criminal too
I wanted to reply with a pithy comment about how, after the war ended, US General Patton said something along the lines of, "We [the US] fought on the wrong side of this war" ... and that shortly afterwards, he mysteriously died in a vehicle accident.
But trying to find the original quote, and the details of Patton's death, sent me down way too interesting of a rabbit hole to capture in a short comment. Oh Vey.
Patton figured out a lot in the short time he spent in Germany at the end of WWII: he came to think of the Germans as the best people in Europe; he was disgusted with the Soviet generals and leadership; and he was shocked by the uncivilized behaviour of the "displaced persons" (DPs) - that is, the Jews from Poland and Russia - who swarmed into Germany after the war expecting (and getting) free housing.
Perhaps most prophetically, he realized that if we didn't stop the Soviets from expanding into Eastern Europe after the war (as they did), Europe would eventually fall to communism (which it has).
Feeling like a trip down this rabbit hole? Start with these two sources:
https://foundationfordisinfestation.com/2019/05/23/how-did-patton-feel-when-he-realized-we-destroyed-the-wrong-enemy/ (17-21 minute descent)
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2012/11/the_mysterious_death_of_gen_george_s_patton.html (9-12 minute descent)
The "best people in Europe"? Did he totally deny the genocide of the Jews? And yes, the Jews did deserve at least some (temporary) "free housing" after having been uprooted from their homes and murdered en masse. If that is all the "uncivilized behavior" you can come up with, you have a very poor case to plead.
Also, a minor correction: The Soviets expanded westward, not "eastward" after the war.
Thank you for pointing out my mistake about the Soviet Union expanding “eastward.” I’ve made the correction in my original comment.
I can understand your reaction to what I wrote. I would have had the same feelings 10 or 15 years ago. What I’ve come to realize is that, in the aftermath of WWII, there was a strong need for a narrative to justify why we just fought that horrible war. Europeans in the West and East had suffered terribly, and the East was in the process of being handed over to the Soviets. People could rightly ask, what did we just “win” here?
You’ve probably heard that history is written by the victors. And after WWII, one of the main tasks of the “victors” was to come up with a narrative that would satisfy their populations that all their sacrifices had been worth it.
One group of people was set up as a group of victims - a group with lots of experience in identifying as victims; and another group - who’d been set up as the villain in the lead up to war – was further vilified.
Not terribly creative, but it did the job. It’s interesting to see how the people who were cast in the victim role then are behaving now.
There is an inherent difficulty in untangling what is true and untrue about an historical event. It’s not like most of us alive today were there. But questioning the established narratives becomes even more difficult because, like it or not, they become part of who we are. As intelligent, social creatures, we human beings form and adopt narratives all the time to help explain to ourselves who we are.
When someone presents information that puts those narratives into question, it can feel like we are being attacked on the level of who we are – or, more precisely, who we *think* we are.
So I understand and empathize with your reaction to my comment. If you’re interested in learning more, you can follow the links I posted in my original comment. If not, I wish you well.
If you don't already know it from previous comments of mine, I'm Jewish and live in Israel, and I'm personally acquainted with lots of people who either themselves survived the Holocaust or are children of those who did. These are ordinary decent, honest people who have zero motivation or even ability to lie and their story fits perfectly with the 'official' version. This is why I have no patience at all with Holocaust deniers. Of course, this does not give anyone a blanket permit to do anything to anyone else, but liars do not interest me at all.
Thankyou. Yes, I am well versed in the great tragedy that was WW2 and it's horrific aftermath.
Thanks again and Best Wishes
Just read the opening line in your first article on your substack page:
"About 100 years ago an Austrian chap wrote a book."
I can't wait to read more.
I'd better get to work then 👍🏻
“The greengrocer had to put the slogan in his window, therefore, not in the hope that someone might read it or be persuaded by it, but to contribute, along with thousands of other slogans, to the panorama that everyone is very much aware of. This panorama, of course, has a subliminal meaning as well: it reminds people where they are living and what is expected of them. It tells them what everyone else is doing, and indicates to them what they must do as well, if they don't want to be excluded, to fall into isolation, alienate themselves from society, break the rules of the game, and risk the loss of their peace and tranquility and security.”
-------------------------------------
garments of obedience serve this purpose too. every cult imposes them and subversives within cults flout them by whatever means possible. the hijabi with painted eyes and lips, the mennonite girl in all-covering dresses tailored to show every curve of her body; the ultra-orthodox jewish woman in the most expensive human-hair wig styled in the latest cut--and of course the catholic school girl with her plaid skirt rolled up to mini-length whenever she's out of the building...
And materialist atheism is not a cult that forces its women to display their bodies whether they like the idea or not, making only young attractive ones feel good about their bodies while the rest become anorexic neurotics?
did you struggle to read my comment?
Not in the least; you're obviously an anti-religious fanatic eager to insert your ideology in a thread having nothing to do with it.
so you struggle with the meaning of words.
Thanks for sharing this Yuri. A very well written explanation of where we find ourselves.
Shallow displays òf virtue replace human morality.
I undesirable the meaning of DEmoralized better.
Legend. Was in Prague on the 20th anniversary of the velvety revolution roaming the streets with a bottle of wine and a brunette. What a glorious night.
Sounds like an epic story.
Capitalism helped make it so with the warm accommodations of the Hilton. It's a long chapter in a novel I wrote about living in Prague and playing poker on the local circuit in mafia owned casinos.
This dissertation neatly shows how that evil (but surprisingly small) sub-species of people who wish to control everything never actually stopped trying - and mostly succeeding - to do so.
They merely modified their modus operandi as needed through the Treaties of Westphalia, Versailles, Rome etc and the Nuremberg trials and the 1960s protests, but were never actually derailed in any real sense.
“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. America and the rest of the western world are living this truism.
Thank you
Awesome post! It's here--in the West--everything Havel, Solzhenitsyn, Bezmenov and others describe.
Why does this children's Christmas movie seem like it was written by a dissident? Why does the BurgermeisterMeisterburger sound like Kissinger?
This trailer is the "Nolanized" version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2qkv_RB9-o
Frightening accurate on the problem with ideology.