Nelidov, Dmitiri. "Ideocratic Consciousness and Personality." In The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian 'Samizdat'- An Anthology. Edited by Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shagrin. Translated by Nicolas Lupinin. 19-46. Massachusetts: Nordland Publishing Company, 1977.
1973
"The culture of social adaptation or the negative ideology of which we speak and which firs into a sepcial, semi-displaced, semi-conscious part of the soul, is at the same time a system of internal filters or censorship. Censorship forms as the results of the hardening of settled reactions to ideological energy impulses which are regularly sent and organized in a special way. It pre-determines the mastering of information being received, enlivening and coloring some, sterilizing and ousting others." (M-A, 274)
"Today we see the consequences of this process in the culture of social adaptation (i.e. in the meaning which this idea acquires), in the attempt to raise a new type of people whose ctions and views are already predetermined prior to birth. People are born condemned to atheism, doublethink, and ideological instincts. The oppresion of the truth imposed on them is far more serious than the oppression of sultan or dictator. Truth not only demands that you sacrifice be brought to it. Truth breaks into the consciousness and creeps into the heart. It wishes to rule you from the outside." (M-A, 278)
healing the double speak
"A government, after al, which endlessly speaks about freedom and the thorough development of the personality, cannot simply write in its constitution: there is no freedom of conscience, there is no freedom of the press, there is no freedom of speech nd of demonstration. It acs much more cunningly. It concludes something like a secret agreement with its citizens. I will speak to you of your freedom but you act as if there was no freedom. And, in general, that was how the citizens behaved. Otherwise they would not have had to pay so deatly. These are the elementary ethics of doublethink, understandable to a child." (M-A, 281)
"An elementary reflection, i.e. a certain rejection of these contradictions, speaks of erosion of such consciousness. Reflection makes the accommodation purely external. It makes its realization possible and, in individual cases its repudiation. It is precisely from this simple realization (accepted spiritually, not cynically) and the rejection of doublethink which followed that the 'Democratic Movement' began." (M-A, 282)
"Special mention must be made about the publication of the Chronicle of Current events which, it is possible, was not the direct labor of the 'movement,' but which was contiguous to it. The Chronicle elicited the greatest fear in the State's subconscious. This was not slow in appearing in those repressions which it drew upon itself. In its form, the Chronicle is most inoffensive. It has only information regarding the persecution of ideologically inconvenient people: the arrests, searches, protocols of trials, starvation in camps, the closing of churches, or simply the addresses of the incarcerated. Only information, almost no commentary, and no emotion. Here is just on example..." (M-A, 282)
"These names are not a secret and nothing will happen if they will be known. These, after all, are criminal offenders condemned by Soviet laws and for the most part, probably in juridically normal trials. Nothing will hapen even if the facts about them are openly published and anyone who wishes will be able to find them out, to know the length of their sentences, their guilt, their age. Everyone knows that the State is is not the kind fairy, that is has long hands and cold nerves. And no one will be particularly surprised at such publicity. Nevertheless, some instictive, not fully realized wisdom forces it conceal this as much as military secrets. If one speaks of this publicly, some rules of the game are violated. Toorrow there may be other rules but today in our country, as well as in the "international arena," as few people as possible should know about the composition of the women's labor camp, ZhKh 385/3, or about political prisoners in the Soviet Union in general. All of these not even longs lists somehow out of rhythm with the great stride of the magnanimous patron of of the poorly developed nations and the implacable champion of democracy And it is quite indecent to recall this after so many words regarding the 'thorough development' or 'dirty slanderers,' know all the properties very well and know perfectly well how to exclude all that people should not know about." (M-A, 284)
"The Chronicle witnesses to coercion and, in so doing, draws coercion upon itself. IT cites facts of government cruelty which are so systematically and shamelessly concealed. It thus forces one to look at that which is forbidden by some unaccountable law. All of this is done with blindfolded eyes so as not to know, not to see, so as to forget. Even those at whose hands this is done are afraid to take full account of themselves." (M-A, 284)
"The perversion of consciousness becomes a principle which attempts to impose itself on vision, hearing, and speech. The Chronicle, in calling things by their real names, opposed this perversion. It is percisely to the perverted consciousness that it appears to be deliberatley criminal. If this is analyzed, the whole system of the coercions of a totalitarian state proves to have grown out of the ancient sub-conscious fear of the magical significance of certain works." (M-A, 285)
"The essential point is not that a person is put in jail for expressing his convictions (even though they be in the form of objectionable information). It is in the fact that even prior to any jailing he is deprived of the right to the fundamental, universal choice of his spiritual orientation. Then, by the very means of punishment, the attempt is to physically destroy the possibility of this choice. It has already left the sphere of ideological hypnosis and ceremony is not stood upon in relation to it. What is particularly astounding is a certain petty calculatedness of this overwhelming cruelty: the instructions to organize starvation, cold, searches, denunciations, eavesdropping and the sadism of political indoctrination. THe idea of the punishments is to have the political prisoner lose his personality, to have him accept the imposed scenario or vanish completely. But the pressure of the jail is not enough and someone's fantasy events imprisonment in psychiatric hospitals." (M-A, 285)
"This is no simply a 'change in the means of repression.' It is a revolutionary leap. The quantity of the punishment transforms into quality. The political prisoner remains a personality. He can announce a hunger-strike write a letter to the prosecutor on a scrap of paper, and no matter how much was added on to his sentence, it would still end one day and he would be released. The mental patient is deprived of being a personality. His protests can be ignored, his hunger-strike may only be a symptom of his illness, he can be legally beaten, poisoned with medicine for the sake of his well being, and subjected to insulin shock. He is not given a pen, is kept with the truly ill, and can only leave when he is considered by the doctors to have recovered. Healthiness means the acceptance of stipulated rules,of the laws of doublethink, of the 'culture of social adaptation.' What is demanded are not prescribed thoughts but accepted gestures, and conditioned instincts. The norm of doublethink put forth its human norm and man's full value was gauged by it. THe whole idea of the political protest of the 'democratic movement; consisted in the fact that it showed a different norm of human health which turned out to be intolerable to a society infected by a spiritual epidemic." (M-A, 286)
Showing posts with label double think. Show all posts
Showing posts with label double think. Show all posts
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
Meerson-Aksenov "The Dissident Movement and Samizdat"
Meerson-Aksenov, Michael. "The Dissident Movement and Samizdat." In The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian 'Samizdat'- An Anthology. Edited by Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shagrin. Translated by Nicolas Lupinin. 19-46. Massachusetts: Nordland Publishing Company, 1977.
"The dissident movement and samizdat are two sides of the very same process which may be called the awakening of the consciousness of Soviet society." (M-A, 19)
"Literally ideocracy means the supremacy of an idea-in our age of totalitarian societies, it means the supreme rule of a government ideology. The later is possible only in the absence of competing ideas. Ideology predominates only in full isolation, for there is a great difference between ideology in the singular and the plural. In free press societies competing ideologies exist with political groupings behind them. Any kind of party membership assumes the sense in which totalitarian society knows it. (M-A, 19)
"Reality begins to demand ideological interpretation; ideology is a deformation of this reality. For example, key ideas of communism such as "proletarian revolution," "class enemies," "ideological struggle," "enemies of the people," "building communism," and others do not reflect reality." (M-A, 20)
"In this way, irrespective of the private opinions of ideologues, ideology must remain true to itself. Aristing from this, at the level of principle, in the necessity of correlating it with objective information. This, in turn, leads to dual consciousness. However, this trait is particularly inherent in the layer of the Soviet intelligentsia whose function is, on the one hand, the preparation of ideological information, and, on the other, the extraction of 'pure' information to supplement ideology." (M-A, 22)
"Ideocracy needs a mentor in ideological catechism,--the intelligentsia which simultaneously turns out to be the servitor and the victim of ideology. It is the servitor because it is precisely to it, and not to the strata of administrators, party workers, manufactures and the military, that ideology is obliged for its worldly activity. At the same time it is the material foundation of its being. It is the victim because, consciously or unconsciously, it suffers from its mercenary role and the subjection of its labors to ideological goals which deprive it of its own professional values and which subsitute for professional honest. The historian, philosopher, literateur, teacher, journalist, writer, etc...are judged not by their professional qualities but by the degree of their 'ideological function.' (M-A,23)
"The ruling party apparatus, recognizing its dependence on ideology, and through it also its dependence on the intelligentsia, watches the latter with a sleepless eye. From the start it attempts to quash any tendency toward free thought or even cultural pluralism in the intelligentsia, for this would be destructive to its monolithic nature. If a significant part of the intelligentsia considers this position of "service" to be normal and even propitious insofar as it guarantees certain privileges, then it produces a moral conflict in the other sector of the intelligentsia between its professional consciousness and human virtue and that ideological role which it is forced to play. In the main this relates to the humanitarian intelligentsia whose activity is wholly drawn into the sphere of "ideological struggle." (M-A, 23)
"This Anglo-Saxon term, which initially signified a certain sectarian alienation of the minority from the ideological 'monolith' of the majority, especially in reference to the opposition movement in the USSR, is unusually good. A. Amal'rick very accurately noted that opposition first arose among the acadmic and creative intelligentsia and that the dissident movement commenced in the form of 'cultural opposition.' The intelligentsia came out for the 'separation of ideology from culture' not in the form of some kind of public announcement or an appeal to the party, but in the form of a free creativity frequently parallel to teh activity within the framework of the system's "official culture." This was the birth of samizdat an independent, subculture in the womb of of which a social consciousness began to be formed." (M-A,24)
"Furthermore, the possibility of 'ideocracy' assures an ideological hypnotization of society, its rejection whether voluntary or forced, of consciousness. It assumes an ideological state signifies the rejection of personal values with that which is called ideology." (M-A, 25)
"In a certain sense, samizdat always existed in Russia, whether in the form of Prince Kurbskii's letters to Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the writing of archpriest Avvakum, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the unpublished letters of Chaadeaev, or, finally in the Soviet period, in the from of factional party polemics in the '20s and various works in the '30s that could not be published." (M-A, 25)
"Despite Stalinist terror, samizdat in this form was bever crushed. Even in the fiercest year, 1936-1938, there were small groups of intellectuals that passed around within the group typed literature which was forbidden or not publishable." (M-A, 25)"
"It was transformed from an incidental use of forbidden information to a form expressing social consciousness, when it began to grow into an independent area of culture that saw itself not as a corrective or a supplement to official Soviet culture but as a self-contained and singularly original sphere for the realization of society's spiritual and intellectual life." (M-A, 26)
27: Pasternak as catalyst- "With its full weight it fell upon the writer. It showed all the intellifentia what an improper interpretation of "freedom," "liberalization," and "Creative collaboration" could lead to." (M-A, 27)
"Historical foresight has chosen as the creator of samizdat as a phenomenon which arouses man's social being toward independence-a quite unexpected social champion, one quite distant from this role, a writer taken up with the inner life of the spirit, deaf to political history and a social in the whole tone of his works. Spirit stands at the cradle of Russian samizdat. With Pasternak it began as process of the creative formation of consciousness. At first it was in literature, the poetry, the arts...Then it grew into a spontaneous social process expressed in hundreds of letters, complaints, witnessing the violation of 'human rights.' Finally, it gave birth to independent political and social thought. (M-A, 28)
"The subsequent growth of a 'legal' samizdat literature revealed: letters of protest to native and foreign organizations which witness widespread violations, a whole literature that calls for a formal adherence to socialist law and, finally, the emergence of the bulletin Khronika and the Committee for for teh Defense of Human Rights in the USSR." (M-A, 31)
"The movement is characterized by an 'absence of ideals' and by empiricism: its purpose is to defend, on the basis of law, those who are under attack by the regime; and hence it can function without overly concentrating on the nature of the regime itself." (M-A, 33)
"In the role of a disseminator of samizdat, typed in six to fifteen copies on a typewriter, I have heard the following requests many times from the reader: 'Please give me one of the first copies. In five years of reading samizdat I have managed to ruin my eyesite. In the last five year an anecdote about samizdat has made the rounds: a father of a family type out Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace--a classic Russian work that may be bought cheaply in any book store. When he is asked why he is doing this he answers: ''My son is in school where they are studying War and Peace. He must read it for the course but he refuses to read anything that is not in samizdat.' This anecdote, by the way, demonstrates a growing lack of faith in the printed word in the USSR as such, no matter what is printed." (M-A, 38)
"The dissident movement and samizdat are two sides of the very same process which may be called the awakening of the consciousness of Soviet society." (M-A, 19)
"Literally ideocracy means the supremacy of an idea-in our age of totalitarian societies, it means the supreme rule of a government ideology. The later is possible only in the absence of competing ideas. Ideology predominates only in full isolation, for there is a great difference between ideology in the singular and the plural. In free press societies competing ideologies exist with political groupings behind them. Any kind of party membership assumes the sense in which totalitarian society knows it. (M-A, 19)
"Reality begins to demand ideological interpretation; ideology is a deformation of this reality. For example, key ideas of communism such as "proletarian revolution," "class enemies," "ideological struggle," "enemies of the people," "building communism," and others do not reflect reality." (M-A, 20)
"In this way, irrespective of the private opinions of ideologues, ideology must remain true to itself. Aristing from this, at the level of principle, in the necessity of correlating it with objective information. This, in turn, leads to dual consciousness. However, this trait is particularly inherent in the layer of the Soviet intelligentsia whose function is, on the one hand, the preparation of ideological information, and, on the other, the extraction of 'pure' information to supplement ideology." (M-A, 22)
"Ideocracy needs a mentor in ideological catechism,--the intelligentsia which simultaneously turns out to be the servitor and the victim of ideology. It is the servitor because it is precisely to it, and not to the strata of administrators, party workers, manufactures and the military, that ideology is obliged for its worldly activity. At the same time it is the material foundation of its being. It is the victim because, consciously or unconsciously, it suffers from its mercenary role and the subjection of its labors to ideological goals which deprive it of its own professional values and which subsitute for professional honest. The historian, philosopher, literateur, teacher, journalist, writer, etc...are judged not by their professional qualities but by the degree of their 'ideological function.' (M-A,23)
"The ruling party apparatus, recognizing its dependence on ideology, and through it also its dependence on the intelligentsia, watches the latter with a sleepless eye. From the start it attempts to quash any tendency toward free thought or even cultural pluralism in the intelligentsia, for this would be destructive to its monolithic nature. If a significant part of the intelligentsia considers this position of "service" to be normal and even propitious insofar as it guarantees certain privileges, then it produces a moral conflict in the other sector of the intelligentsia between its professional consciousness and human virtue and that ideological role which it is forced to play. In the main this relates to the humanitarian intelligentsia whose activity is wholly drawn into the sphere of "ideological struggle." (M-A, 23)
"This Anglo-Saxon term, which initially signified a certain sectarian alienation of the minority from the ideological 'monolith' of the majority, especially in reference to the opposition movement in the USSR, is unusually good. A. Amal'rick very accurately noted that opposition first arose among the acadmic and creative intelligentsia and that the dissident movement commenced in the form of 'cultural opposition.' The intelligentsia came out for the 'separation of ideology from culture' not in the form of some kind of public announcement or an appeal to the party, but in the form of a free creativity frequently parallel to teh activity within the framework of the system's "official culture." This was the birth of samizdat an independent, subculture in the womb of of which a social consciousness began to be formed." (M-A,24)
"Furthermore, the possibility of 'ideocracy' assures an ideological hypnotization of society, its rejection whether voluntary or forced, of consciousness. It assumes an ideological state signifies the rejection of personal values with that which is called ideology." (M-A, 25)
"In a certain sense, samizdat always existed in Russia, whether in the form of Prince Kurbskii's letters to Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the writing of archpriest Avvakum, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the unpublished letters of Chaadeaev, or, finally in the Soviet period, in the from of factional party polemics in the '20s and various works in the '30s that could not be published." (M-A, 25)
"Despite Stalinist terror, samizdat in this form was bever crushed. Even in the fiercest year, 1936-1938, there were small groups of intellectuals that passed around within the group typed literature which was forbidden or not publishable." (M-A, 25)"
"It was transformed from an incidental use of forbidden information to a form expressing social consciousness, when it began to grow into an independent area of culture that saw itself not as a corrective or a supplement to official Soviet culture but as a self-contained and singularly original sphere for the realization of society's spiritual and intellectual life." (M-A, 26)
27: Pasternak as catalyst- "With its full weight it fell upon the writer. It showed all the intellifentia what an improper interpretation of "freedom," "liberalization," and "Creative collaboration" could lead to." (M-A, 27)
"Historical foresight has chosen as the creator of samizdat as a phenomenon which arouses man's social being toward independence-a quite unexpected social champion, one quite distant from this role, a writer taken up with the inner life of the spirit, deaf to political history and a social in the whole tone of his works. Spirit stands at the cradle of Russian samizdat. With Pasternak it began as process of the creative formation of consciousness. At first it was in literature, the poetry, the arts...Then it grew into a spontaneous social process expressed in hundreds of letters, complaints, witnessing the violation of 'human rights.' Finally, it gave birth to independent political and social thought. (M-A, 28)
"The subsequent growth of a 'legal' samizdat literature revealed: letters of protest to native and foreign organizations which witness widespread violations, a whole literature that calls for a formal adherence to socialist law and, finally, the emergence of the bulletin Khronika and the Committee for for teh Defense of Human Rights in the USSR." (M-A, 31)
"The movement is characterized by an 'absence of ideals' and by empiricism: its purpose is to defend, on the basis of law, those who are under attack by the regime; and hence it can function without overly concentrating on the nature of the regime itself." (M-A, 33)
"In the role of a disseminator of samizdat, typed in six to fifteen copies on a typewriter, I have heard the following requests many times from the reader: 'Please give me one of the first copies. In five years of reading samizdat I have managed to ruin my eyesite. In the last five year an anecdote about samizdat has made the rounds: a father of a family type out Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace--a classic Russian work that may be bought cheaply in any book store. When he is asked why he is doing this he answers: ''My son is in school where they are studying War and Peace. He must read it for the course but he refuses to read anything that is not in samizdat.' This anecdote, by the way, demonstrates a growing lack of faith in the printed word in the USSR as such, no matter what is printed." (M-A, 38)
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