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I can manage that. It’s been a big influence on my thinking since I began the first volume again a few weeks ago. If you’ve spotted my term “Denunciation Culture”, this has been a consistent observation of mine of late, the many behavioral parallels between the everyday life of the Soviet citizenry during the 1930s, and today in the US and elsewhere.
It has also helped me decode this Google fiasco, and not take the man I’ve dubbed “Comrade Engineer” very seriously as having any genuine concern over whether or not his (former….) employer is treating its employees fairly. His “manifesto” is an exercise in copy-paste, of what anyone could have come up with in a routine scan of some men’s rights rhetoric, some Breitbart, some Christina Hoff-Somers, etc, in order to pose as if he had undergone some sudden revelation that, gosh, maybe this “diversity” thing isn’t working out as planned….
Give me a break. A man of his experience and education could have made that “duh” of an observation on walking in the door on Day One. What I believe is happening, is he read some writing on some wall, and recognized that he was about to be “denounced” himself over God knows what, and sought to get out in front of it. Nothing generates a smokescreen to obfuscate and cast doubt on allegations made against oneself, like a media firestorm of allegations against someone else. Wait a few days, and we’ll start to see the accusations emerge, from the routine characters who suddenly “come forward”: was he harassing women, was he embezzling, was he a member of some “rape culture” fraternity in college? Whatever. I count it as a matter of time, before the counter-denunciations begin to arise against him.
Today’s Denunciation Culture is pure Stalinism: not necessarily official policy, and also not a shred of it genuine. It runs as if on auto-pilot, each new denunciation more histrionic than the last, and consistently, delivered both by and against those who come from the inside of an ideologically-driven establishment. If a professor says something which violates the Party Line, everyone has to line up and be seen denouncing him, lest they be next for not denouncing him. If a celebrity makes an off-message remark, all the other celebrities have to ritually burn him at the stake, lest they be next for not being among the torch-bearers.
The very title of the second volume, “Fear” indicates that fear itself has become the principal character in the narratives. Like all good Russian fiction there are dozens of subplots going on one after another, and in “Fear”, every story line is about how people are going on about their daily lives with the fear of being denounced, or the backlash of someone they know having been denounced, hanging in the air so heavily that even routine conversation is all but impossible.
And the only ones who are safe, or think they are, are the people who never joined The Party to begin with.
There is a tale of two sisters, Nina and Varya, who share an apartment and are part of a small group of friends who hang around and make merry together at the beginning of volume one. By the second book, their favorite pal Sasha has been sent to Siberia over a politically-incorrect conversation he heard and didn’t report, another friend has joined the NKVD and is now a professional torturer for the state, yet another has become one of his blackmailed informants, etc, etc.
Nina the elder, is a schoolteacher, a Party member, and a true believer in the revolution, while Varya, in her late teens, is the rebel and the loudmouth who sees this whole “communism” thing as a bunch of bullying nonsense and wants nothing to do with the Party, hardly ever hesitating to say so. It is Nina who goes to school one day and is called to a special faculty meeting, where a seventeen-year-old girl from the “Komsomol” or Young Communists, just folds her arms and sits back and laughs, as the room full of her ideological enemies set to denouncing each other, all set in motion by herself over some slight weeks before where she had not got her way. Within days, most of the school personnel have been arrested, even the janitor.
In one of the most vivid scenes of fiction I ever read, Nina comes home from the meeting to find Varya lying on her bed reading. Varya can see that her sister is upset, but they have been fighting over personal matters of late, and she greets Nina with classic teenage-girl “whatever”-ness. As Nina recounts the meeting to her, Varya suddenly gets up and stands on a chair to reach a high shelf and bring down Nina’s suitcase, and begins packing her sister’s things. Nina is all: “what are you doing? I have to go to work tomorrow…”
Varya calmly orders her elder sister to wake up and look around: if she goes back to work she’ll be next in line for a ride to the Butyrki (NKVD prison), and she’ll never see her again. No, Nina is to get down to that train station and take the next train to Vladivostok where her boyfriend in the army is stationed, find him, marry him and change her name, and thus be safe from the terror in Moscow. She practically shoves her sister out the door, who still has not caught on that her beloved revolution is devouring itself from within and has already targeted her for denunciation, because she is a Communist.
Varya herself is at no real risk and she knows it, because she had never joined the Party. But she has to watch as everyone she loves who had, is destroyed.
The same process is going on today, only with different nomenclature, and with public disgrace and high-profile lawsuits and firings as the “Siberia” held over everyone’s head. And those in the MOST danger, are the PC Faithful themselves, the precise profile of which describes our Comrade Google Engineer perfectly.
Rule Number One in Denunciation Culture, is “do it to them before they do it to you.” This “manifesto” nonsense is so on-script it’s boring, and comical. Someone was about to do the same to Comrade Engineer.
