In “The Magic Lantern”, Timothy Garton Ash’s eyewitness account of the 1989 revolutions, there’s a passage which, to a reader today, just leaps off the page. It’s about conformism, lies and ideology.
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Garton Ash, who observed at first hand the changes behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, asks: How much was 1989 an *ideological* revolution? Surely, given that official ideology was scarcely believed even by Party leaders, there was nothing to overthrow?
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But that bankrupt ideology, he writes, performed a crucial role in shoring up the Party’s authority. What kept Communist governments in power was that people were leading “a double life”, paying lip service to what they knew was incoherent nonsense.
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Thus the system was built up even by those who loathed it. “By demanding from the citizen seemingly innocuous semantic signs of outward conformity, the system managed somehow to implicate them in it.”
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Václav Havel, who had often written about this as a dissident, remarked in his 1990 New Year’s address as President of Czechoslovakia on the “devastated moral environment. We are all morally sick, because we all got used to saying one thing and thinking another.”
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The crowds that filled the streets in 1989, Garton Ash observes, “were not merely healing divisions in their society; they were healing divisions in themselves.” And the regimes which collapsed “lived by the word and perished by the word.”
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