Mar 25Liked by Salomé Sibonex, Alta Ifland, Joseph (Jake) Klein
This is the best piece I've read from you so far. I didn't just read it, I've lived it through your words. Stay angry, my friend, this world is going crazy and only clear minds like yours can save it.
Mar 25·edited Mar 26Liked by Salomé Sibonex, Alta Ifland, Joseph (Jake) Klein
Alta -- What a fantastic read. I would love to hear more of your perspective on how it is people fall into this hyper-dogmatic mania, as if at gunpoint -- particularly since the pressure in the U.S. hasn't been applied by overt force but by >social< pressure. But I'm curious as to >when< you started to see American echoes of what you'd lived through.
Social pressure has always been very strong in America. Soon after becoming a student I remember thinking, "God forbid of an authoritarian system here; most people are so conformist it would be worse than Communist Romania."
Mar 25·edited Mar 26Liked by Alta Ifland, Joseph (Jake) Klein
Yeah, it's almost like the collective alter-ego to the rugged-individualist streak that's >also< embedded in American culture. I don't have anything else to compare it to, but one thing I've noticed is that Americans, by and large, love iconoclasts and tend to celebrate them -- BUT it's >almost< as if those rule breakers exist just to prop-up everyone else into being dutiful rule followers. It's very strange. The people we celebrate in art and as celebrities are people whose non-conformist energy most Americans couldn't tolerate one-one hundredth of up close. It's a strange dissonance -- at least that's my take.
That is a great insight! You are right. But it may be that many cultures celebrate in literature the very people they couldn't otherwise tolerate. They idealize in fiction what they can't have in reality.
Mar 26·edited Mar 26Liked by Alta Ifland, Joseph (Jake) Klein
You wrote about intellectuals in both Romania and the U.S. That was really resonant for me as an American reader because it shows two phases of this repeating cycle -- and illustrates what direction in that cycle the West is headed in.
I think it's easy for those of us who didn't grow up in despotic regimes to just assume that despots hate intellectuals and artists because despots have this hunger to extinguish ideas that threaten their grip on power. I've sensed for a long time that's not entirely right, and now i can REALLY see it.
I think the ugly truth -- which you hint at -- is that despots actually have a point: elite intellectual classes do tend to kind of stew in their own myopia until they get completely detached from the society that supports their ideas with an oxygen supply. Eventually, the masses start to intuit the disconnect.
I work in a lane of media (music journalism) that is almost completely captured by the ruling intellectual orthodoxy of the moment. The mindlessness and rote repetition of prescribed language -- of reducing the world into a simplistic outlook that even a child would find inadequate -- is staggering.
It's like people have somehow come to hypnotize themselves into repeating not just irrational things but ANTI-rational edicts as inalienable truths. These sacramental ideas, when examined, all collapse under the irresolvable paradoxes in their own logic.
And yet people defend them with the kind of raging intensity that only people who've invested in lies can muster. They're too invested to turn back, so the only choice is to double-down.
What's so breathtaking about this is that it wasn't brute force that brought this on -- not initially, anyway. It was something far more insidious. It wasn't like we had an East German Stasi operating here and yet people gladly turned >themselves< into precisely that. And they did it gleefully.
As you point out, this came from the academy -- from the "chattering classes" who were somehow able to export their learned helplessness and terminal malaise to people who otherwise would never have been prone to those pathologies.
They did it by selling helplessness as empowerment. And by tempting so-called marginalized people with >deference< in everyday interactions -- people hopping on one knee in repentance for their "privilege" and making a concerted effort to "center marginalized voices" and all of that narcissistic twaddle.
But the price for that deference is 1) to allow oneself to be patronized and pitied and 2) to allow oneself to be infected by this mind virus that trains the mind to see grievance under every rock. So the ultimate price for deference is to send one's actual self-esteem on a downward spiral.
You're right that immigrants inherently do >not< see themselves as victims. I grew up in a lower-income neighborhood, and the language filtering down from indulgent, navel-gazing outlets like The New York Times is anathema to how the people I grew up around see themselves.
But this campaign of the upper class to project their own lack of agency onto those below them has actually worked, to a large degree. My point, though, is that right now in the States one can sense the anger that's built up against these people. And yet they have such extreme tunnel vision they simply can't fathom why.
So now I understand how it is that the bloodthirst and hatred towards these people comes to develop -- there's almost this innate sense that intellectuals naturally corrode the integrity of the social order. There's a point at which, with them at the helm getting high off the fumes of their own ideas, they'll shipwreck the whole program.
Dictators are people who step into the breach and exploit that anger and ride it into power, where they then have room to become monstrous and, in their own way, indulgent and non-sensical, gaslighting the public with similarly bald-faced lies that fly in the face of what is plainly visible to the naked eye.
All of this makes me wonder what's next for us, and whether there's any way out of this cycle. Would love to get your thoughts!
Once again, I agree with everything. Brilliantly put. On the one hand, there is something insular about intellectuals in general--they feel called to save the little people and start developing all kinds of fictions that they end up believing in; on the other, there is something particularly worrisome about American intellectuals in particular who have created a dictatorship of their own making with no help from any dictator (I am not entirely sure, but I think this may be a first in world history). And, indeed, there is an anger now in America coming from the working classes, which will be expressed in the forthcoming vote. And we know exactly who will capitalize on this, we know his name, and after he wins the elections, things are going to get even more insane. And the intellectual elite will have had a major role in the ensuing catastrophe. But you are right, at this point they can no longer go back, they have to defend the insane ideas they have been defending. The sad thing, when I interact with people like you, is that there are, clearly, in this country, lucid, intelligent people with common sense, yet somehow all the key positions in the media and the cultural institutions have been taken by the opportunists and the idiots.
First, having more and more conversations with people such as yourself, and knowing that people are building channels for us to find ideas like yours -- that, to me, speaks volumes.
Moreover, I feel hopeful that we can train younger people in a whole new paradigm of journalism and media/idea-consumption.
I wouldn't call it "critical-thinking" skills but "integrative" or "synthesis" thinking -- showing young people how to engage with >multiple< perspectives, how to see issues as multi-layered and multi-dimensional, and even to hold contradictory views at once.
Basically, the world is direly in need of archetypal Geminian energy, LOL, a concept that has salience regardless of one's literal view on astrology because it applies on a metaphorical level.
The phrase "talking out of both sides of your mouth" has negative connotations, but it should be re-framed as a virtue. All it takes is reaching the next generation with a handful of ideas and watching them become memetic.
I'm hopeful because I have two close friends in my town who are very active in media and both interested in co-counding a co-op media outlet that's kind of micro-local but global in focus. One of these friends has always been quite far on the woke end, but even >he< agrees with me that all speech should be platformed.
That tells me something -- that the ingredients are there. Yes, the U.S. has descended into madness, but I see more sensible conversations in comment sections than I'd ever dreamed were possible 20 years ago.
Another positive indicator: people now challenge the thinkers they follow. They have robust debates among fellow fans of the Substackers and YouTubers they like. This, to me, looks extremely healthy. You can see a kind of anti-choir effect happening. People are not only craving depth and variance of perspective but they're becoming individual vectors for it.
So I'm more excited than discouraged. Of course, it takes a certain measure of self-importance to think one can spit into a hurricane and make a difference, but I'm a-okay with that because, at the end of the day, I do not think it's the destiny of the human species to live as hive-minded insects.
It has always been difficult for us as a collective organism to balance between being reliant on group approval and self-actualization. That's never been easy, so why should it be easy now? If something's always been hard, then it's like "Okay, well let's roll our sleeves up and get to it, then."
I personally feel that humanity is slowly waking up to an awareness of our inter-dependence. I think a lot of what we're seeing now is kind of spasms of resistance to that awareness.
That resistance takes form in horrifying catastrophic ways, but once more and more people tune-in to the idea that we >can< function together as a kind of single brain, that will ironically leave room for more individual perspective. There will be >less< need to confirm.
This may sound airy-fairy, but I look at it more like physics -- or as a form of macro-neurology. I'm not a scientist, but those frameworks help. As does the noosphere concept.
And we can look at this at a kind of pre-school/toddler level, which is: there is no "other." Anyone who behaves horribly has the same needs as you so in essence >is< you and vice-versa.
Sounds new-agey, but I don't think so. I'm convinced by what I'm seeing that human beings are >more< empathetic than ever -- we're just not having an easy time coping with our increased awareness.
So we're having a kind of collective bipolar episode, which is indeed dangerous and ugly and threatens the entire planet but can >also< be offset by how these tribulations are helping us evolve.
Mar 27Liked by Salomé Sibonex, Joseph (Jake) Klein
Your comments about Ceaușescu's destruction of rural villages and churches immediately made me think of the current regime's campaign against rural America - personified in the newly released "White Rural Rage" book - for some of the same reasons: the rural lifestyle allows some small measure of independence from The All Encompassing Message brought to you 24/7 by your moral and intellectual urban betters.
Mar 27Liked by Salomé Sibonex, Joseph (Jake) Klein
It's a great post, so important for our times. I just added a notes tab to my page too, so people can see my notes from the homepage. I haven't used the notes feature much yet, but may start using it more now.
I really appreciate that Michael! And I'm glad you see the importance of this story. My hope is to keep pushing this story and others like it til narratives denying the danger in authoritarian ideologies become absurd in contrast.
Thank you. Well, I just finished writing a book of essays ("American Insanity") but it's only partly a memoir. It's also analysis. I am looking for a publisher, of course.
Good luck. My feeling, and hope, is that the tide is turning. There are now one or two sane American colleges, like the University of Austin. I'm hoping dissident publishers will arise. I need one too!
Thank you for reading Jane, I'm glad this essay accurately spoke to your experience under communism as well! I agree, for anyone who realizes the signs of authoritarianism, the changes we've seen in the US are disturbing!
Mar 27Liked by Salomé Sibonex, Alta Ifland, Joseph (Jake) Klein
Such a thought provoking piece, Alta. What a rich life you have already lived! I love the way your essay unfolds at the intersection of the personal and political. You show how external influences may help shape us but that they do not need to define us or take away our agency. We make that choice ourselves. Sad that in Western countries where a wealth of choice is on offer, many chose the path of disempowerment.
Mar 26Liked by Salomé Sibonex, Joseph (Jake) Klein
A friend of mine heads a Chemistry department. They were doing a search for a new faculty member. I asked if they were free to choose the best candidate. He said they were.
And he pointed out that a member from the DEI office had to be present for all discussions on candidate selection -- but they explicitly had no vote in the decision.
Academia, corporations and people in general in the US are deeply in denial.
Disturbing story. I agree that people are in denial; they hear an anecdote like this and think "well they don't have a vote!" but fail to question why a DEI rep would be present at all for hiring if it's based on merit.
Mar 28Liked by Salomé Sibonex, Alta Ifland, Joseph (Jake) Klein
'Only in a world of privilege can victimhood acquire a desirable status.' What an excellent line that encapsulates the topsy turvy world we now live in. Success is frowned upon and poverty ever so subtly eulogised, particularly by those whom have never experienced it.
Mar 28Liked by Salomé Sibonex, Alta Ifland, Joseph (Jake) Klein
This was a great read. I happen to have spent a night and a full day in Bucharest in 1987.
Whilst walking the streets of a market where the stall holders had barely any vegetables to sell (and tons of apples), I met a kind man in his thirties who spoke perfect French. I was surprised. He was selling some sort of handmade lucky charms. We corresponded for a while, notably during the revolution. Then, sadly, it stopped.
I remember the wide avenues almost empty, except for red and grey buses and green military trucks. I also remember the queues outside the stores which had almost nothing on their shelves. We were in April. The roads was icy. Some school kids, were breaking the ice with a shovel, and more kids were sweeping the broken bits of ice on the side of the road. An impossible task to which they were submitted, perhaps to teach them something.
I was on transit to Thailand. Talk about a change of scenery !
Mar 27Liked by Salomé Sibonex, Alta Ifland, Joseph (Jake) Klein
This is a beautifully written and important essay, which I am sending to my 16-yr old granddaughter right now to read and keep close. Thank you. Your experience is deeply valued.
I had a good friend who grew up in Communist Poland in the 70s and 80s; she told me of being taken away from her family to be “deprogrammed” when she wrote an essay that apparently exhibited wrongthink. She was 13 years old at the time.
It is chilling to see things that she told me about from her childhood in a totalitarian country starting to happen here.
That's such a disturbing story. Agreed, hearing from people who've lived through totalitarianism say they see similarities in the west is such a red flag. It speaks to how naive our culture is that more people don't take them seriously!
Je peux vous dire que les mots écrits par Alta peuvent venir de ma tête aussi !! Je suis en complicité totale avec elle ,ayant vécu presque les mêmes événements...merci Alta pour ce merveilleux témoignage ! Raluca
This is the best piece I've read from you so far. I didn't just read it, I've lived it through your words. Stay angry, my friend, this world is going crazy and only clear minds like yours can save it.
So glad you liked it!
Alta -- What a fantastic read. I would love to hear more of your perspective on how it is people fall into this hyper-dogmatic mania, as if at gunpoint -- particularly since the pressure in the U.S. hasn't been applied by overt force but by >social< pressure. But I'm curious as to >when< you started to see American echoes of what you'd lived through.
Social pressure has always been very strong in America. Soon after becoming a student I remember thinking, "God forbid of an authoritarian system here; most people are so conformist it would be worse than Communist Romania."
Yeah, it's almost like the collective alter-ego to the rugged-individualist streak that's >also< embedded in American culture. I don't have anything else to compare it to, but one thing I've noticed is that Americans, by and large, love iconoclasts and tend to celebrate them -- BUT it's >almost< as if those rule breakers exist just to prop-up everyone else into being dutiful rule followers. It's very strange. The people we celebrate in art and as celebrities are people whose non-conformist energy most Americans couldn't tolerate one-one hundredth of up close. It's a strange dissonance -- at least that's my take.
That is a great insight! You are right. But it may be that many cultures celebrate in literature the very people they couldn't otherwise tolerate. They idealize in fiction what they can't have in reality.
You wrote about intellectuals in both Romania and the U.S. That was really resonant for me as an American reader because it shows two phases of this repeating cycle -- and illustrates what direction in that cycle the West is headed in.
I think it's easy for those of us who didn't grow up in despotic regimes to just assume that despots hate intellectuals and artists because despots have this hunger to extinguish ideas that threaten their grip on power. I've sensed for a long time that's not entirely right, and now i can REALLY see it.
I think the ugly truth -- which you hint at -- is that despots actually have a point: elite intellectual classes do tend to kind of stew in their own myopia until they get completely detached from the society that supports their ideas with an oxygen supply. Eventually, the masses start to intuit the disconnect.
I work in a lane of media (music journalism) that is almost completely captured by the ruling intellectual orthodoxy of the moment. The mindlessness and rote repetition of prescribed language -- of reducing the world into a simplistic outlook that even a child would find inadequate -- is staggering.
It's like people have somehow come to hypnotize themselves into repeating not just irrational things but ANTI-rational edicts as inalienable truths. These sacramental ideas, when examined, all collapse under the irresolvable paradoxes in their own logic.
And yet people defend them with the kind of raging intensity that only people who've invested in lies can muster. They're too invested to turn back, so the only choice is to double-down.
What's so breathtaking about this is that it wasn't brute force that brought this on -- not initially, anyway. It was something far more insidious. It wasn't like we had an East German Stasi operating here and yet people gladly turned >themselves< into precisely that. And they did it gleefully.
As you point out, this came from the academy -- from the "chattering classes" who were somehow able to export their learned helplessness and terminal malaise to people who otherwise would never have been prone to those pathologies.
They did it by selling helplessness as empowerment. And by tempting so-called marginalized people with >deference< in everyday interactions -- people hopping on one knee in repentance for their "privilege" and making a concerted effort to "center marginalized voices" and all of that narcissistic twaddle.
But the price for that deference is 1) to allow oneself to be patronized and pitied and 2) to allow oneself to be infected by this mind virus that trains the mind to see grievance under every rock. So the ultimate price for deference is to send one's actual self-esteem on a downward spiral.
You're right that immigrants inherently do >not< see themselves as victims. I grew up in a lower-income neighborhood, and the language filtering down from indulgent, navel-gazing outlets like The New York Times is anathema to how the people I grew up around see themselves.
But this campaign of the upper class to project their own lack of agency onto those below them has actually worked, to a large degree. My point, though, is that right now in the States one can sense the anger that's built up against these people. And yet they have such extreme tunnel vision they simply can't fathom why.
So now I understand how it is that the bloodthirst and hatred towards these people comes to develop -- there's almost this innate sense that intellectuals naturally corrode the integrity of the social order. There's a point at which, with them at the helm getting high off the fumes of their own ideas, they'll shipwreck the whole program.
Dictators are people who step into the breach and exploit that anger and ride it into power, where they then have room to become monstrous and, in their own way, indulgent and non-sensical, gaslighting the public with similarly bald-faced lies that fly in the face of what is plainly visible to the naked eye.
All of this makes me wonder what's next for us, and whether there's any way out of this cycle. Would love to get your thoughts!
Once again, I agree with everything. Brilliantly put. On the one hand, there is something insular about intellectuals in general--they feel called to save the little people and start developing all kinds of fictions that they end up believing in; on the other, there is something particularly worrisome about American intellectuals in particular who have created a dictatorship of their own making with no help from any dictator (I am not entirely sure, but I think this may be a first in world history). And, indeed, there is an anger now in America coming from the working classes, which will be expressed in the forthcoming vote. And we know exactly who will capitalize on this, we know his name, and after he wins the elections, things are going to get even more insane. And the intellectual elite will have had a major role in the ensuing catastrophe. But you are right, at this point they can no longer go back, they have to defend the insane ideas they have been defending. The sad thing, when I interact with people like you, is that there are, clearly, in this country, lucid, intelligent people with common sense, yet somehow all the key positions in the media and the cultural institutions have been taken by the opportunists and the idiots.
I actually don't feel sad!
First, having more and more conversations with people such as yourself, and knowing that people are building channels for us to find ideas like yours -- that, to me, speaks volumes.
Moreover, I feel hopeful that we can train younger people in a whole new paradigm of journalism and media/idea-consumption.
I wouldn't call it "critical-thinking" skills but "integrative" or "synthesis" thinking -- showing young people how to engage with >multiple< perspectives, how to see issues as multi-layered and multi-dimensional, and even to hold contradictory views at once.
Basically, the world is direly in need of archetypal Geminian energy, LOL, a concept that has salience regardless of one's literal view on astrology because it applies on a metaphorical level.
The phrase "talking out of both sides of your mouth" has negative connotations, but it should be re-framed as a virtue. All it takes is reaching the next generation with a handful of ideas and watching them become memetic.
I'm hopeful because I have two close friends in my town who are very active in media and both interested in co-counding a co-op media outlet that's kind of micro-local but global in focus. One of these friends has always been quite far on the woke end, but even >he< agrees with me that all speech should be platformed.
That tells me something -- that the ingredients are there. Yes, the U.S. has descended into madness, but I see more sensible conversations in comment sections than I'd ever dreamed were possible 20 years ago.
Another positive indicator: people now challenge the thinkers they follow. They have robust debates among fellow fans of the Substackers and YouTubers they like. This, to me, looks extremely healthy. You can see a kind of anti-choir effect happening. People are not only craving depth and variance of perspective but they're becoming individual vectors for it.
So I'm more excited than discouraged. Of course, it takes a certain measure of self-importance to think one can spit into a hurricane and make a difference, but I'm a-okay with that because, at the end of the day, I do not think it's the destiny of the human species to live as hive-minded insects.
It has always been difficult for us as a collective organism to balance between being reliant on group approval and self-actualization. That's never been easy, so why should it be easy now? If something's always been hard, then it's like "Okay, well let's roll our sleeves up and get to it, then."
I personally feel that humanity is slowly waking up to an awareness of our inter-dependence. I think a lot of what we're seeing now is kind of spasms of resistance to that awareness.
That resistance takes form in horrifying catastrophic ways, but once more and more people tune-in to the idea that we >can< function together as a kind of single brain, that will ironically leave room for more individual perspective. There will be >less< need to confirm.
This may sound airy-fairy, but I look at it more like physics -- or as a form of macro-neurology. I'm not a scientist, but those frameworks help. As does the noosphere concept.
And we can look at this at a kind of pre-school/toddler level, which is: there is no "other." Anyone who behaves horribly has the same needs as you so in essence >is< you and vice-versa.
Sounds new-agey, but I don't think so. I'm convinced by what I'm seeing that human beings are >more< empathetic than ever -- we're just not having an easy time coping with our increased awareness.
So we're having a kind of collective bipolar episode, which is indeed dangerous and ugly and threatens the entire planet but can >also< be offset by how these tribulations are helping us evolve.
This was supposed to be a brief answer!
Your comments about Ceaușescu's destruction of rural villages and churches immediately made me think of the current regime's campaign against rural America - personified in the newly released "White Rural Rage" book - for some of the same reasons: the rural lifestyle allows some small measure of independence from The All Encompassing Message brought to you 24/7 by your moral and intellectual urban betters.
Thanks for sharing this point, it's an important observation.
It's a great post, so important for our times. I just added a notes tab to my page too, so people can see my notes from the homepage. I haven't used the notes feature much yet, but may start using it more now.
I really appreciate that Michael! And I'm glad you see the importance of this story. My hope is to keep pushing this story and others like it til narratives denying the danger in authoritarian ideologies become absurd in contrast.
This is the wisdom we need.
Thank you for reading!
Absolutely brilliant, moving and thought-provoking. I hope you are writing a full-length memoir.
Thank you. Well, I just finished writing a book of essays ("American Insanity") but it's only partly a memoir. It's also analysis. I am looking for a publisher, of course.
Good luck. My feeling, and hope, is that the tide is turning. There are now one or two sane American colleges, like the University of Austin. I'm hoping dissident publishers will arise. I need one too!
Yes! I have this hope too. The Black Sheep is dedicated to pushing for this cultural change. I wouldn't have started it if I didn't have hope!
Good luck to you too. I've always been a black sheep, or perhaps a wolf, so I understand.
Wolf definitely resonates 🙏
I'll look out for you at the next full moon!
excellent post....I grew up in Communist Moldova and have same childhood experience.....It's gut wrenching whats going on in the States at the moment
Thank you for reading Jane, I'm glad this essay accurately spoke to your experience under communism as well! I agree, for anyone who realizes the signs of authoritarianism, the changes we've seen in the US are disturbing!
Such a thought provoking piece, Alta. What a rich life you have already lived! I love the way your essay unfolds at the intersection of the personal and political. You show how external influences may help shape us but that they do not need to define us or take away our agency. We make that choice ourselves. Sad that in Western countries where a wealth of choice is on offer, many chose the path of disempowerment.
Indeed, it is sad. Even sadder is that it's the intellectual elite that has convinced people that they are disempowered.
Thank you for reading Michele! Love your observations about this piece, totally agree.
A friend of mine heads a Chemistry department. They were doing a search for a new faculty member. I asked if they were free to choose the best candidate. He said they were.
And he pointed out that a member from the DEI office had to be present for all discussions on candidate selection -- but they explicitly had no vote in the decision.
Academia, corporations and people in general in the US are deeply in denial.
Disturbing story. I agree that people are in denial; they hear an anecdote like this and think "well they don't have a vote!" but fail to question why a DEI rep would be present at all for hiring if it's based on merit.
That office member present is a Commissar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissar
Excellent point.
'Only in a world of privilege can victimhood acquire a desirable status.' What an excellent line that encapsulates the topsy turvy world we now live in. Success is frowned upon and poverty ever so subtly eulogised, particularly by those whom have never experienced it.
Exactly. Glad you enjoyed that line! It's such an important aspect of what's causing our cultural chaos.
This was a great read. I happen to have spent a night and a full day in Bucharest in 1987.
Whilst walking the streets of a market where the stall holders had barely any vegetables to sell (and tons of apples), I met a kind man in his thirties who spoke perfect French. I was surprised. He was selling some sort of handmade lucky charms. We corresponded for a while, notably during the revolution. Then, sadly, it stopped.
I remember the wide avenues almost empty, except for red and grey buses and green military trucks. I also remember the queues outside the stores which had almost nothing on their shelves. We were in April. The roads was icy. Some school kids, were breaking the ice with a shovel, and more kids were sweeping the broken bits of ice on the side of the road. An impossible task to which they were submitted, perhaps to teach them something.
I was on transit to Thailand. Talk about a change of scenery !
1987--You went there during the worst years of Communism. Those were the years of cold and famine. But at least people like you can bear witness.
This is a beautifully written and important essay, which I am sending to my 16-yr old granddaughter right now to read and keep close. Thank you. Your experience is deeply valued.
I'm so glad to hear that! I hope she'll enjoy it. I wish I had learned more about the history of communism at that age!
Thank you for reading.
Excellent.
I had a good friend who grew up in Communist Poland in the 70s and 80s; she told me of being taken away from her family to be “deprogrammed” when she wrote an essay that apparently exhibited wrongthink. She was 13 years old at the time.
It is chilling to see things that she told me about from her childhood in a totalitarian country starting to happen here.
That's such a disturbing story. Agreed, hearing from people who've lived through totalitarianism say they see similarities in the west is such a red flag. It speaks to how naive our culture is that more people don't take them seriously!
Je peux vous dire que les mots écrits par Alta peuvent venir de ma tête aussi !! Je suis en complicité totale avec elle ,ayant vécu presque les mêmes événements...merci Alta pour ce merveilleux témoignage ! Raluca
Merci, je suis heureux que vous ayez aimé cet essai. Alta a magnifiquement écrit!
Great read, thank you
Thank you for reading! Happy you enjoyed it Paul.
Very insightful piece.
Thanks for reading!