FOREWORD

 

It is now more than twenty years since the communist regimes in Eastern Europe imploded, and a generation there has grown to adulthood without any experience of that strange atmosphere of boredom and fear, combined with grey material tawdriness, that only a few years earlier had seemed so permanent and immoveable a feature of life.

I am told that the young of Eastern Europe, like the young everywhere, evince little or no interest in their parents’ experience; this is always painful for parents, but never more so than when their experience has been of deep and prolonged suffering of a very special kind. To have lived through a prolonged cataclysm is bad in itself; to discover afterwards that people either want to forget it entirely or do not want to know about it in the first place is doubly distressing.

I went to the peripheral countries of the communist world, then in the process of dissolution, impelled first by curiosity, and second by a desire to add my mite to the testimony of those times. I wanted to pre-empt the nostalgia for what was an anti-human system in the likely event that the transition to something more normal would be difficult and unsatisfactory.

Apart from the massacres, deaths and famines for which communism was responsible, the worst thing about the system was the official lying: that is to say the lying in which everyone was forced to take part, by repetition, assent or failure to contradict. I came to the conclusion that the purpose of propaganda in communist countries was not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate and emasculate. In this sense, the less true it was, the less it corresponded in any way to reality, the better; the more it contradicted the experience of the persons to whom it was directed, the more docile, self-despising for their failure to protest, and impotent they became.

I have come to see over the years that we have no cause for complacency in the former west, where in the intervening years there has been a growth of official and commercial lying of a not dissimilar, though less gross, kind. When a recorded message on the telephone asks you to hang on because ‘Your call is very important to us,’ you know there is no ‘us’ to whom it is important. Moreover, what you know is that the message should really be, ‘We know the company has you over a barrel, and a senior manager has decided that it is more profitable to keep you hanging on than to have enough staff to answer the phone to all enquiries immediately.’ Nevertheless, you do not protest because you just want to get on with your life, though you despise yourself a little bit for meekly putting up with it. In any case, you know that the organisation that lies is bigger that you, so protest would be pointless as well as time-consuming.

An atmosphere of fear now pervades most organisations of any size or complexity, thanks largely to regulations supposedly to protect people from such unpleasantness as bullying or discrimination. People watch their tongue, trust no one, cannot joke, look over their shoulder to see who is present, fear to put anything in writing, etc.

It all reminds me, in a mild way, of life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Therefore I hope this book will serve not only as an historical record, but as something of a warning.

 

Theodore Dalrymple, 2012