Each of your essays is commendably clear, thought-out, researched, and organized -- a lot of scholarly labor! Rather refreshing in the fragmented, incoherent land of the interwebz. And your opening story is powerful! This article resonates with my own disappointment in the community of writers to which I once felt attached... whose minds are now captive. I suppose they always were, and maybe mine was as well. But with constant, earnest vigilance, observing the world and questioning every detail of my reaction to it, somehow I escaped. I am grateful.
I've been wanting to tell that opening story since it happened all those years ago and as I was reading "The Captive Mind" that story somehow surfaced from the depths of my memory. It seemed to fit with the whole idea of being held captive, both physically and mentally.
So much empathy, so much pain, and yet so much in your essay for anyone who wishes to pause and reflect to awaken within to so much of goodness that lies within each one of us and the each one of us have the God-given resource to make the world around us through words and acts truly a heaven for ourselves and those with whom we live. I am reminded of William Blake's verse, "To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour." I read Milosz's "The Captive Mind" almost 50 years ago about the same time I was reading Solzhenitsyn. I survived and escaped from a genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 as a teenager, and circumstances (providence) brought me to North America. I am now retired from the academia as professor emeritus in Canada, but have lived in America. When I came in the early 1970s the Vietnam War was raging, Nixon was the president, but like you, the author of this essay, I was ecstatic that I was in the land of the free and the brave, and the future was open to me as a gift that I might not be deserving. I worked at odd jobs, never complaining, became a cab driver as I went through university and earned a doctorate and became a resident of the ivory tower. I travelled through much of the Global South, sharing and learning and reading what I could bring back to my students. When the Cold War ended I took the risk in 1993 with another friend to head for a land journey across China and Russia on the Silk Road which we did and saw behind the Iron Curtain how the people had suffered and survived, and that they had got the chance to repair their past and make a better future. This journey my friend and I made, and escaped as you did without getting arrested and thrown into some unknown dungeon, was that of two individuals who were young and foolhardy and ready to take risk into going into the unknown that the inner lands of the Soviet Union and China had been to outsiders. I came back richer and more thankful of being gifted a life to live in North America and make here home for myself and the family I raised.
For the gift of becoming a North American at a personal level I remain ever grateful to my Lord, though I now see even more clearly how great has been the inversion here of turning this continent into its opposite, its own version of a totalitarian entity against which the United States built its self-image by copious propaganda of the Cold War decades. In researching the genocide from which I escaped the role of the U.S. emerges in terrifying details, of the strategic support given to the Pakistan army and the military regime of General Yahya Khan by Nixon-Kissinger duo to do the mass killings, as the U.S. did in the open carnage of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, East Timor through the sixties into the eighties. America has not been held to any accountability for the destruction of lives and countries during those decades, while Americans prospered at home through these never-ending wars abroad. And so once the eyes of anyone with a scintilla of humanity opens, as were those of Milosz, there is no shutting of those eyes as the perspective in terms of global history widens and the reality sinks in that America is no less faultless in doing ill to others as were those countries such as Nazi Germany and Communist Russia against whom most Americans measure themselves for being good against evil.
Few Americans know, or seem to want to know, about others and what in their name their leaders have done to those others simply because they were in their way in pursuit of America's global ambition to be the overlord in the world. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport", so wrote Shakespeare in King Lear. Yes, this is how the powers to be in Washington, in Moscow, in London, in Paris, in Berlin, in Tokyo and elsewhere have conducted themselves, while some powers are limited within their own confined circles and others, such as America, rages far beyond its oceans and continents, to bring death and destruction to others whose lives meant for Americans to be as worthless as summer flies are in their own fields which Americans lay claim and proceed to empty it for themselves.
I am not a Christian, but then I am someone who reveres Jesus and his other Mary, as the Quran, the scared book of Muslims, reveals to me being a Muslim that they were God's most special creations. Most American Christians who are a majority among Americans are sadly ignorant of this simple fact about Muslim faith and their reverence for Jesus. For me the most important message of Jesus's ministry is about love, sacredness of life, the golden rule, and all of it wrapped together in those simple words "take the beam out of your eye" and "blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children of God." If only American Christians simply, truly, honestly, adhered to these words of Jesus in living with others, they would make the difference between war and peace, and there would be peace as Jesus called for among us around the world and we could settle our differences or live despite those differences in peace without becoming "captive minds" of our totalitarian masters.
I tend to equate communism with Satanism. Satanist are adept at constructive frauds while pretending to be "Protectionist" who are in reality aggressionist. As in my case, my family was effectively annihilated by the "State of Utah" with the poisonous "Child Abuse" excuse to forced my family and I into indefinite coercive detention to the accusers, who sadistically mock laws that have been on the books and betray their fiduciary obligation to not create Bills of Attainder and impair the obligation of contracts. A totalitarian act and action where the accusers are granted carte blanche "authority" to unlawfully search, seize and virtue signal each other while forcing whole natural families into a condition of genocide. Forced dependence not only erases autonomy, but also any prior history of those families in question. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity will cite "Qualified Immunity"(with impunity) and attack God-given, natural rights advancing their own industries of racketeering and trafficking in humans "in the best interest of the child" or whatever other specious excuses they choose to rationalize. Today, I may not be censored, but the Powers that should not be, have no problems with murdering whole families who catch their unwanted and unsolicited opinion. The military mind is simply to lie, deceive, ambush, followed up with lawfare. There are too many minds captured with the "go along to get along" mantra. This was an excellent expose of what those captured minds are capable of.
Beautiful writing. Wonderful, if not sad, stories. Histories. Thank you.
At the opening of your piece here, I was reminded of Ayn Rand's "We, the Living." At the end, the heroine attempts her escape. While I have forgotten exactly where she is, this opening got me to wondering if it was the same forest, the same snow-covered expanse where this tragedy ends?
Thank you for your kind words. I am not familiar with Ayn Rand's "We, the Living" but now I want to check it out. I'm glad I got a good, long look behind the "iron curtain" before it all came down. It was really something to see those barbed wire fences entrapping an entire country in totalitarian misery. My experiences in China and in the U.S.S.R. made me a keen observer of the workings of tyranny, which is perhaps one of the reasons why I saw through the entire covid scam nearly from the get-go. What shocked and saddened me is that so many of my friends and colleagues did not. Nor would they heed my warnings. They rather swallowed the bait hook, line, and sinker.
Each of your essays is commendably clear, thought-out, researched, and organized -- a lot of scholarly labor! Rather refreshing in the fragmented, incoherent land of the interwebz. And your opening story is powerful! This article resonates with my own disappointment in the community of writers to which I once felt attached... whose minds are now captive. I suppose they always were, and maybe mine was as well. But with constant, earnest vigilance, observing the world and questioning every detail of my reaction to it, somehow I escaped. I am grateful.
I've been wanting to tell that opening story since it happened all those years ago and as I was reading "The Captive Mind" that story somehow surfaced from the depths of my memory. It seemed to fit with the whole idea of being held captive, both physically and mentally.
So much empathy, so much pain, and yet so much in your essay for anyone who wishes to pause and reflect to awaken within to so much of goodness that lies within each one of us and the each one of us have the God-given resource to make the world around us through words and acts truly a heaven for ourselves and those with whom we live. I am reminded of William Blake's verse, "To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour." I read Milosz's "The Captive Mind" almost 50 years ago about the same time I was reading Solzhenitsyn. I survived and escaped from a genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 as a teenager, and circumstances (providence) brought me to North America. I am now retired from the academia as professor emeritus in Canada, but have lived in America. When I came in the early 1970s the Vietnam War was raging, Nixon was the president, but like you, the author of this essay, I was ecstatic that I was in the land of the free and the brave, and the future was open to me as a gift that I might not be deserving. I worked at odd jobs, never complaining, became a cab driver as I went through university and earned a doctorate and became a resident of the ivory tower. I travelled through much of the Global South, sharing and learning and reading what I could bring back to my students. When the Cold War ended I took the risk in 1993 with another friend to head for a land journey across China and Russia on the Silk Road which we did and saw behind the Iron Curtain how the people had suffered and survived, and that they had got the chance to repair their past and make a better future. This journey my friend and I made, and escaped as you did without getting arrested and thrown into some unknown dungeon, was that of two individuals who were young and foolhardy and ready to take risk into going into the unknown that the inner lands of the Soviet Union and China had been to outsiders. I came back richer and more thankful of being gifted a life to live in North America and make here home for myself and the family I raised.
For the gift of becoming a North American at a personal level I remain ever grateful to my Lord, though I now see even more clearly how great has been the inversion here of turning this continent into its opposite, its own version of a totalitarian entity against which the United States built its self-image by copious propaganda of the Cold War decades. In researching the genocide from which I escaped the role of the U.S. emerges in terrifying details, of the strategic support given to the Pakistan army and the military regime of General Yahya Khan by Nixon-Kissinger duo to do the mass killings, as the U.S. did in the open carnage of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, East Timor through the sixties into the eighties. America has not been held to any accountability for the destruction of lives and countries during those decades, while Americans prospered at home through these never-ending wars abroad. And so once the eyes of anyone with a scintilla of humanity opens, as were those of Milosz, there is no shutting of those eyes as the perspective in terms of global history widens and the reality sinks in that America is no less faultless in doing ill to others as were those countries such as Nazi Germany and Communist Russia against whom most Americans measure themselves for being good against evil.
Few Americans know, or seem to want to know, about others and what in their name their leaders have done to those others simply because they were in their way in pursuit of America's global ambition to be the overlord in the world. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport", so wrote Shakespeare in King Lear. Yes, this is how the powers to be in Washington, in Moscow, in London, in Paris, in Berlin, in Tokyo and elsewhere have conducted themselves, while some powers are limited within their own confined circles and others, such as America, rages far beyond its oceans and continents, to bring death and destruction to others whose lives meant for Americans to be as worthless as summer flies are in their own fields which Americans lay claim and proceed to empty it for themselves.
I am not a Christian, but then I am someone who reveres Jesus and his other Mary, as the Quran, the scared book of Muslims, reveals to me being a Muslim that they were God's most special creations. Most American Christians who are a majority among Americans are sadly ignorant of this simple fact about Muslim faith and their reverence for Jesus. For me the most important message of Jesus's ministry is about love, sacredness of life, the golden rule, and all of it wrapped together in those simple words "take the beam out of your eye" and "blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children of God." If only American Christians simply, truly, honestly, adhered to these words of Jesus in living with others, they would make the difference between war and peace, and there would be peace as Jesus called for among us around the world and we could settle our differences or live despite those differences in peace without becoming "captive minds" of our totalitarian masters.
God bless.
I tend to equate communism with Satanism. Satanist are adept at constructive frauds while pretending to be "Protectionist" who are in reality aggressionist. As in my case, my family was effectively annihilated by the "State of Utah" with the poisonous "Child Abuse" excuse to forced my family and I into indefinite coercive detention to the accusers, who sadistically mock laws that have been on the books and betray their fiduciary obligation to not create Bills of Attainder and impair the obligation of contracts. A totalitarian act and action where the accusers are granted carte blanche "authority" to unlawfully search, seize and virtue signal each other while forcing whole natural families into a condition of genocide. Forced dependence not only erases autonomy, but also any prior history of those families in question. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity will cite "Qualified Immunity"(with impunity) and attack God-given, natural rights advancing their own industries of racketeering and trafficking in humans "in the best interest of the child" or whatever other specious excuses they choose to rationalize. Today, I may not be censored, but the Powers that should not be, have no problems with murdering whole families who catch their unwanted and unsolicited opinion. The military mind is simply to lie, deceive, ambush, followed up with lawfare. There are too many minds captured with the "go along to get along" mantra. This was an excellent expose of what those captured minds are capable of.
Beautiful writing. Wonderful, if not sad, stories. Histories. Thank you.
At the opening of your piece here, I was reminded of Ayn Rand's "We, the Living." At the end, the heroine attempts her escape. While I have forgotten exactly where she is, this opening got me to wondering if it was the same forest, the same snow-covered expanse where this tragedy ends?
Thanks again for this.
Thank you for your kind words. I am not familiar with Ayn Rand's "We, the Living" but now I want to check it out. I'm glad I got a good, long look behind the "iron curtain" before it all came down. It was really something to see those barbed wire fences entrapping an entire country in totalitarian misery. My experiences in China and in the U.S.S.R. made me a keen observer of the workings of tyranny, which is perhaps one of the reasons why I saw through the entire covid scam nearly from the get-go. What shocked and saddened me is that so many of my friends and colleagues did not. Nor would they heed my warnings. They rather swallowed the bait hook, line, and sinker.