Read something last night by Theodore Dalrymple, in "Our Culture, What's Left Of It".

Dalrymple is talking about the capacity of the Russian people - according to a visitor, one M. Custine - to embrace the double think that would be necessary to survive Stalinist tyranny...

...while still living under the Czar, in the 1839. It was, eg, demanded that one deny his mortality.

"The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called ‘the two greatest gifts of God—the soul and the speech which communicates it....

"People became hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel, and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls...

Moreover, the upkeep of systematic untruth requires a network of spies: indeed, it requires that everyone become a spy and potential informer. And ‘the spy,’ wrote Custine, ‘believes only in espionage, and if you escape his snares he believes that he is about to fall into yours.’

The damage to personal relations was incalculable. If Custine were among us now, he would recognise the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question...

The damage to personal relations was incalculable. If Custine were among us now, he would recognise the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question...

Custine would demonstrate to us that, without an external despot to explain our pusillanimity, we have willingly adopted the mental habits of people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship."

Posted, as the saying goes, without comment.