Thursday, December 30, 2021

#300: Permeated With Hypocrisy and Lies

“…life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies…Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics.”

“The best resistance to totalitarianism is simply to drive it out of our own souls, our own circumstances, our own land, to drive it out of contemporary humankind.”


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From Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless as quoted in https://academyofideas.com/2021/09/the-big-lie-how-to-enslave-the-world/

Václav Havel (... 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, playwright, and former dissident,[1][2] who served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and then as the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs. ... / His political activities brought him under the surveillance of the StB secret police, and he spent multiple periods as a political prisoner,[3] the longest of his imprisoned terms being nearly four