If you read dissident literature and the literature of the exile you quickly internalize Hannah's generalized law of evil: It's so banal, to recall how LB, an once aspiring student in English at a time you were still teaching, phrased it. Indeed, oppression is a folksy enterprise and while it may be the staging of a maleficent mind (or a few) in the magnetic fields of betrayal, it is the enactment of grand cowards, a handful of intellectual mignons, their school of ticks, and a vast sea of benevolent irked ma's, pa's, and their ennuied petulant offspring, all flocking behind a crisp impeccable banner of moral righteousness just-bleached and starched to conceal the unctuous soils of greed, envy, and hate and a deep-seated sickening desire to control, humiliate, and spoliate.
A prompted you once:
"You'd be surprised to know how many things people would do for free. ",
but you just couldn't see it that way then. It is, perhaps, the greatest hidden obvious truth
ever revealed to you the more you learned, the more you lived. However, the who and the what are often talked about and a tad less devious than the how. How
to build an enemy asks the author- or an inspired editor- how to excel and medal in this
sport of character assassination asks the oppressive grub. And the mirror
eagerly blurts back: " You take whatever perceived "enemy", invade their privacy, publicly deride their physical
appearance, question their morality and sexual orientation, sever or skew all their
attachments, have their family betray them and then, if need really be,
discredit them professionally, caricature their intellect, strip them of basic goods (home, job, etc), and practice
daily mind games that may ultimately challenge their sanity." In other words, inoculate & manipulate, panem et circenses. History has shown repeatedly that for an aberration to take life all you need is a bit of fear, time, and the willingness to bullhorn it three times to the right righteous crowd. Slander, slander, slander, and something will stick! Commonly, the
first four maneuvers would suffice to secure a satisfactory degree of compliance easily maintained with periodic scare tactics and proportional garnish of more spicks and spans of eclectic calumny. And then, of course, when all the scourge and alienation is not enough to break one's spine, there is literal poison too. Why HM's account is
particularly remarkable is that she goes through all these rings of fire, for an
extended period of time, and she holds on to this immutable belief in her vision of humanity
and citizenship despite this harassment, but it may just be precisely because
of it. And so did DP, PG, PT, NS, and so many others. Yet, too few others. Often, intellectuals and prelates resisted longer, because they had vast inner worlds of certainties to live in even when their house was trespassed, their lives broken, their books desecrated, everything in a puerile scheme to restore or to maintain a paper-thin evergreen ideal. So, when LB asked smugly, as a teenager who made the first subtle
connections, while unconsciously grasping the many appeals of aestheticism: "
How is it that dissident literature matters and realist-socialist doesn't? They
are both highly ideological, pro-an ideal and against a matter of fact, a
certain world order? " , all you really needed to say was: " Isn't it obvious?
". "Almost, but not quite."
, she grinned back. (I wonder where she stands today.)
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