https://mailchi.mp/af49bac99832/krd-news-natan-sharansky-the-doublethinkers?e=93
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/natan-sharansky-doublethink?fbclid=IwAR3pb4Fso52-ea1gnwGHIaOOPcb0qMPdAOoiP_PxbpnWzzpWP6mYWhz6z-g
In assessing my own liberation, I recall a conformity that feels terrifyingly familiar today.
Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society.
My father, a journalist named Boris Shcharansky, was born in 1904 in Odessa, the cultural and economic center of the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian empire stuck most Jews. He studied in the Jewish Commercial Gymnasium, because most other gymnasiums accepted very few Jews, if any. By the time he was 16, he had already lived through the Czarist Regime with its anti-Semitic restrictions, the “February” Socialist Revolution, the “October” Bolshevik Revolution, and the years of civil war when power in Odessa seesawed back and forth from faction to faction, as hunger, pogroms, and destruction decimated the population.
When the Soviets finally emerged from the chaos, therefore, my father was hopeful. The Communists promised that a new life of full equality was dawning, without Pales of Settlement, without education restrictions, and, most important, with equal opportunities for all. Who wouldn’t want that? One of my father’s brothers discovered Zionism and went off to Palestine. But my father was excited about building a world of social justice and equality closer to his home.
From the time he was a kid, my bookish father loved making up stories. Lucky for him, Odessa was emerging as a center for a new cultural medium—cinema. As silent Charlie Chaplin-type movies started evolving into more scripted sketches, my father put his storytelling talents to work. Imagine his thrill when, as a twenty-something, he saw millions watch a script that he had written come to life.
Of course, to succeed in his career as a screenwriter, he had to follow certain rules. His scripts, like every other work of art, had to follow the script of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, seeing the world through the lens of class struggle and class exploitation. As Karl Marx argued, and the Bolsheviks now decreed, “the history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight.”
