Knowledge And Decisions

... there had to be established in the minds of all present a vivid picture of mankind under oppression. ... At last, the world, the national, and the local picture had been fused into one overwhelming drama of moral struggle in which everybody in the hall was participating. This presentation had lasted for more than three hours, but it had enthroned a new sense of reality in the hearts of those present, a sense of man on Earth. ... Toward evening the direct charges against Ross were made. ...

The moment came for Ross to defend himself. I had been told that he had arranged for friends to testify in his behalf, but he called upon no one. He stood, trembling; he tried to talk and his words would not come. The hall was as still as death. Guilt was written in every pore of his black skin. His hands shook, he held onto the edge of the table to keep on his feet. His personality, his sense of himself, had been obliterated. Yet he could not have been so humbled unless he had shared and accepted the vision that had crushed him, the common vision that bound us all together.

“Comrades,” he said in a low, charged voice, “I’m guilty of all the charges, all of them.”

His voice broke in a sob. No one prodded him. No one tortured him. No one threatened him. He was free to go out of the hall and never see another Communist. But he did not want to. He could not. The vision of a communal world had sunk into his soul and it would never leave him until life left him.²⁶

Conversely, without the commitment to the ideological vision, even the horrors of slave labor camps could not silence Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, or other Soviet opponents of totalitarianism.

Ironically, the first book that Marx and Engels wrote together, in 1843, contained a scathing indictment of the practice of first breaking down individual self-respect and personality, and then attempting to reconstruct a human being according to some preconceived plan. The hero of a contemporary novel had made a religious conversion in that way. Marx and Engels pointed out that with his “smooth, honeyed curse” he had first “to soil her in her own eyes” in order to make her receptive to the redemption he would offer.²⁷ The lofty motives with which this was done were simply camouflage for the zealot’s “lust” for “the self-humiliation of man”²⁸ Even in a political context, Marx had no use for the idea of state indoctrination.²⁹

“Confessions” to nonexistent crimes illustrate another characteristic of totalitarianism — the concept of “political truth.” Not only people and organizations are subject to total control, so too is the truth. Hitler’s use of the reiterated big lie, and numerous Soviet revisions of official history (complete with air brush erasures in historic photographs) are part of a pattern of control that extends to the basic data itself. This is more than the usual political lying common to systems of various sorts. It is monopolistic lying, with the exclusion of alternative sources of information. Moreover, it is lying on principle — or rather, it is a philosophy that regards what is said as largely instrumental, so that the very distinction between lying and the truth becomes blurred or even regarded as trivial or naive.³⁰ Political truth is whatever will advance the interests of the cause or movement. Quite aside from ethical questions, this approach makes the same assumption of omnicompetence that is central to totalitarianism as a whole.