Tuesday, April 27, 2010
They Don't Have to Silence Us, If We Silence Ourselves First
Posted by Daniel Greenfield

What is a free country? Is it a country that is free of being ruled by any other country, or is it a country of free people who are not afraid. The truth is that no country can be free, unless its people are free. Not freedom as embodied in legal documents or stirring anthems, which nearly every country has, but free in their minds. Unafraid to believe, to speak and to live.



Tyranny isn't a man holding a gun to your head and telling you what to do. Tyranny is when you do what you're told, because you're holding the gun to your own head. And then you have become a collaborator in your own oppression. It is possible to be enslaved without ever becoming a slave. And it is sadly possible for people to act like slaves without any chains being anywhere in sight.

No regime, no ideology and no power can maintain absolute physical control of all the people, all of the time. To rule, they need to control not their bodies, but their minds and their souls. Tyranny wants loyalty, but it will settle for fear. And fear once internalized, destroys moral courage and replaces it with moral cowardice, eroding the strength of beliefs and ideas with the poisonous liquid of dread. The individual becomes an agent for the forces of tyranny, warning himself against any action that could get him into trouble. And then he is finally a slave.
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Fear is a reflex. Tyranny thrives on it, imbues it and feeds it. It kills randomly in order to spread that terror further. To create populations who never know when their day will come. When the suicide bomber, the black van, the sword and the secret police will come for them. Men will fight and die for freedom on the battlefield, but the struggle to remain defiant in a society where everyone is afraid all the time is a much harder fight. Yet overcoming that reflex to find safety by surrendering and collaborating, by learning to love Big Brother and embracing his ideals, is what it takes to be a free citizen of a free nation.

Pavlov, the formulator of the Pavlov Reflex, knew quite a lot about conditioning. His own experiments showed that fear could be conditioned by the ringing of a bell. Perhaps those insights were what enabled Pavlov to go on defying the Soviet Union for decades. At a time when most scientists and researchers were terrified out of their minds at a slip, a wrong word that might send them to a long death in the basements of the Lubyanka or an even longer death in the Gulags-- Pavlov would ride buses and lecture the passengers on the fascism of the Soviet regime. And while those scientists eventually ended up in the Gulags themselves, Pavlov died a natural death.

Where so many Russians had become conditioned to hear the ringing of the bell everywhere, and to search for it when they didn't, to be afraid all the time, and to love the thing they feared in order to have some measure of security-- Pavlov understood the reflex and rejected it. He chose to be a free man instead. And freedom comes from standing up to evil. From confronting it and defying it. Not from submitting to it and collaborating with it. From silencing yourself in the hope that you will no longer be afraid when the bell rings.
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http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2010/04/...e-us-if-we.html