Ukrainians, of all people, should be skeptical of omnipresent media speaking with one voice, telling them that a heterodox perspective is not just wrong, but evil. Thankfully, the Ukrainians in Ukraine are skeptical — one of the few blessings of having lived under communism. The diaspora, not so much.

30 Methods and Characteristics of Communism: http://romaninukraine.com/30-methods-and-characteristics-of-communism/

Thanks for the original email, Lyubomyr.

All these people clutching their pearls and calling you hateful names are not bad people. They’re just weak. They’re like one lady described in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. She was a true believer, and when the secret police finally came to arrest her she could not handle the cognitive dissonance between her belief in the infallibility of the communist authorities, and the fact that they were arresting her. So, according to his account, she made up a story about her own guilt and confessed it to her children as they dragged her out the door.

As Solzhynitsyn said: “Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

Not through me either, goddammit.