Live Not by Lies A Manual for Christian Dissidents

I think that partly explains why so many businesses and institutions have been trying to get rid of everything Russian as if any connection to Russia makes them impure.

I really do believe that in the end, what's being done to Russia today is going to be done to dissidents in this country some point tomorrow.

This is the kind of thing I talk about in my book, Live Not by Lies. The soft totalitarianism coming in when you have all the companies and all the institutions playing off the same ideological playbook, they can bring a world of hurt to people they consider to be dissidents.

The Title comes from an essay that Alexander Solzhenitsyn sent out to his followers just before the Soviets expelled him in 1974 and in the essay he told the people who followed him that look we can't go out on red square and say exactly what we think.

we can't go out on red square and say exactly what we think. We don't have that option in totalitarian Russia but what we can do is refuse to say what we do not think this is the power we have to refuse to speak lies or to refuse to assent to lies where they are spoken around us.

I think that that is a very valuable lesson for us today living under very different conditions in the 2020s but we are living in a time of a different kind of totalitarianism.

Solzhenitsyn's advice was while you start by not lying that's the first thing you do let me read out some of his rules for responsible conduct it's like a bill of responsibilities we can think of it that way instead of bill of rights I will not say right affirm or distribute anything that distorts the truth I will not go to a demonstration or participate in a collective action unless I truly believe in the cause I will not take part in a meeting in which the discussion is forced and no one can speak the truth I will not vote for a candidate or proposal I consider to be dubious or unworthy I will walk out of an event as soon as I hear the speaker utter a lie ideological drivel or shameless propaganda well that would produce a lot of abandonment to a lot of meetings right now it would and it will not support just journalism that distorts or hides the underlying facts.

his his his diagnosis was that it was the willingness to knowingly deceive yourself and other people that generated and supported the totalitarian catastrophe and that your primarily primary obligation was to cease participating in that.

And he's like, the smallest thing we can do, which is actually huge, is to not go along with the lies, not agree with it.

I first came to Budapest around 2018 on a book tour, but also I came a year later to do research for my book, Live Not by Lies, which is about the message that people who survived communism in Europe, Soviet communism, the message they have for us in the West today about the new, softer totalitarianism that they see emerging.

Total transparency, I have not read it yet, but we do have it here.