First imprisoned, then internally exiled from 1945 to 1956, and finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Solzhenitsyn seemed a living testament to the injustices he exposed. But while Western intellectuals and politicians acclaimed this aspect of his message, they largely ignored another side of it. Solzhenitsyn warned that a Russia free of Communism would not become Western. Russia would continue to oppose liberalism, and pursue geopolitical ambitions that would bring it into conflict with other powers.

In his famous 1978 commencement address at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn warned that Westerners, with a combination of naïveté and arrogance, assumed that the world was moving towards a standard set by its capitalist liberal democracies. They could not understand that Russia, although currently “in Communist captivity”, was the heir to an “autonomous world” that would never be assimilated to the West. Indeed, the problem with Communism was that it, too, was a cosmopolitan ideology with ambitions for remaking the world, destroying Russia’s autonomous cultural traditions in the process.

Solzhenitsyn’s speech is fondly remembered by conservatives in the West as a stinging critique of cultural liberalism. With his call for a return to traditional values, he appeals to the contemporary Western Right as a useful figure in our own culture wars. But his conjoining of liberalism and Communism as two aspects of a common assault on traditional non-Western cultures goes much further than a repudiation of ‘political correctness’. Asserting that the world is divided into distinct cultural zones, and opposing any ideology that on whatever premises puts our common humanity before their preservation, Solzhenitsyn implied that liberals would have little to look forward to from a post-Communist Russia.

Most Western observers at the time were too taken with Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the Soviet system to pay adequate attention to his views on the Russian past and warnings about the Russian future. However, some of his fellow dissidents and Western critics observed saw that Solzhenitsyn — and the Russian nationalism that he represented — represented a dark cloud on the horizon.

In 1974 the dissident Russian scientist Andrei Sakharov noted that Solzhenitsyn argued against Communism less out of a desire for freedom at home and peace with the West. He believed that the author wanted more than to promote supposedly traditional values; Solzhenitsyn wanted to focus Russian energies on the military threat (which he took to be existential) posed by China, entering a new Cold War with its neighbour. The future Russian regime, for Solzhenitsyn, could not be a liberal democratic one imported from the West, but one shaped by an understanding of Russia’s dangerous geopolitical situation and particular history. The latter, Sakharov bitterly summarised, seemed to have taught Solzhenitsyn that “when accompanied by respect for law and by Orthodoxy the authoritarian system was not all that bad.”

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It was on this heading that, in a 1980 issue of Foreign Affairs, a group of American scholars criticised Solzhenitsyn for his rosy image of pre-revolutionary Russia — a vision that elided, or falsified, many historical facts. Where he had argued that the Tsars tolerated dissident intellectuals and religious minorities (including Jews), historians observed that this was a fantasy.

The Russian empire under the Tsars organised massive surveillance programmes, and routinely imprisoned and executed suspects without trial. Far from tolerating minorities, it subjected Jews to humiliating restrictions and implicitly sanctioned pogroms. In the year 1905 alone, there were 690 documented pogroms (with over 3,000 reported murders) during the two weeks following the declaration of the October Manifesto. Nicholas II, according to one historian, regarded this violence as a form of “justified revenge” against subjects he considered to be politically suspect. The Russian revolution, although intended to overturn the old regime, perpetuated many of its signature domestic policies, from secret policing to anti-Semitism.

Solzhenitsyn was also criticised for exaggerating the differences between Tsarist and Soviet foreign policy. Eugen Loebl argued that he downplayed the continuities between the imperialist policy of the Tsars and that of the Soviet leadership, which both sought, under the pretext of Christianity or Communism, to extend Russian power over subject nations. Loebl had a personal stake in this critique. He had been a member of Czechoslovak Communist government in the Sixties, an era of liberalising reform — cut short when the Soviets invaded the country to restore Communist orthodoxy and obedience to Moscow. From Loebl’s perspective, this invasion was continuous with Russia’s nineteenth-century expansion into Eastern Europe and violent suppression of nationalist and democratic movements throughout the region. The Tsars and Communists justified their policies in terms of apparently opposite ideologies, but their common aim was Russian power.

Countering Loebl, Solzhenitsyn argued that Communism was an “international or even metaphysical entity”. To understand it as something akin to Nazism — an ideology of national self-aggrandisement — would lead to disaster. In the West, opponents of Communism, especially on the centre and Right, often linked the Soviet regime and the Third Reich as examples of ‘totalitarianism’, a concept popularised by Hannah Arendt. Solzhenitsyn, however, stressed that there were important differences between the Nazis and the Communists.

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After the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, many in the Soviet Union had believed German rule might be preferable to Communism — particularly to the murderous purges, famines, and population transfers that characterised Stalin’s reign in the Thirties. Soldiers deserted the Red Army in huge numbers during the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa. It was not only oppressed peoples, such as Balts and Ukrainians, who did so, but Russians as well.

In spite of sympathy from Russians and non-Russians alike, Nazi policy towards the region was openly genocidal, founded on a project of eliminating local populations to make room for future German colonisation. Hitler, Solzhenitsyn argued, “had declared war on the Russian people as such, leaving them no way out”. Russians thus rallied to the Soviet regime not out of any loyalty to Communism, or sense that it represented their ‘national’ interests, but because they had no other choice.

There was an important lesson for the West in Germany’s defeat, Solzhenitsyn argued. The Nazis had conflated Russia and the Soviet Union, and thus forced Russians who would have accepted German rule to rally around Stalin. Advised by figures such as Loebl, the West risked making the same mistake of seeing “the threat now looming over the world as Russian rather than as Communist”. This would have a “devastating outcome”. While Russians despised their Communist government and yearned for liberation, they would oppose any power that threatened their existence as a people.

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Solzhenitsyn was warning the West that if it hoped for friendly relations with a future, post-Communist Russia, it would have to accept Russian nationalism — and attendant demands for ‘security,’ often understood in expansionist terms by successive Russian governments. Loebl, meanwhile, warned that Russian nationalism, whether it disguised itself as Communist or anti-Communist, would inevitably mean Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe. Both warnings, perhaps, were true.

Already in 1980 Western leaders reading the exchange between Solzhenitsyn and Loebl might have foreseen that there was a dangerous tension at the heart of their hopes for the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. If Russian anti-Communists like Solzhenitsyn sympathised with their ideological opposition to the Soviet regime, they did not agree with Eastern European dissidents such as Loebl that Russian power was an inherent danger to peace. A common hostility to Communism, however, could conceal for a time fundamentally different geopolitical visions — which have been brought into terrible clarity in recent weeks, as Russia began its assault on Ukraine.

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The West’s enthusiasm for Solzhenitsyn, celebrating his anti-Communist resistance while ignoring his rehabilitation of Tsarist illiberalism and imperialism, is of a piece with two signal failures of our collective political understanding during the last decades of the twentieth century. First, the United States supported Islamic terror networks to oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the Eighties, only to find itself their target after the collapse of the USSR. Still more to its detriment, the West pursued in those years, and since, a strategy of economic engagement with China, in the hope that integration in the global capitalist economy would lead to political reform in Beijing.

As with Solzhenitsyn, Western leaders failed to perceive that sharing temporary tactical goals with non-Western intellectuals, militants, and regimes was only a short-lived suspension of the always-present possibility of renewed enmity, based on enduring, and perhaps irreconcilable, visions of the world. Liberal democracy, based as it is on a cosmopolitan understanding of human rights, often misperceives a world which does not share its assumptions about those rights. For the duration of the present crisis in Ukraine, at least, such misperceptions will be impossible to sustain — and their resumption will make a disastrous situation even worse.

Such a description no doubt evokes memories of the worst years of the 20^th century, an era of totalitarian horror that is fast fading from living memory. It is certainly not an image that one would immediately associate with anywhere on the modern European continent. But the truth is that, thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such places continue to exist in Russia — as Alexander Navalny, Putin’s most prominent political enemy, is currently finding out.

Last week, the opposition politician was transferred to Penal Colony Number 2 in the small provincial town of Pokrov, roughly two hours’s drive east of Moscow. It will be his home, if you can call it that, for the next two and a half years after he was found guilty of breaking a parole violation from a previous charge of embezzlement in 2014 — although the European Court of Human Rights has described the allegations as “arbitrary and unfair”.

Unlike in Germany, where the death and concentration camps of the Nazi regime have become monuments to the sins of fascism, the spirit of Stalinist oppression so vividly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn has survived in modern Russia, with penal colonies constituting an integral part of the country’s correctional system. In fact, these “corrective labour colonies” are the most common type of prison in the Russian Federation.

Some of the modern labour camps — including the notorious Penal Colony Number 14 in Mordovia — exist on the sites of their Gulag forerunners. Indeed, in many cases all that has changed is their name: from falling under the auspices of the Gulag, a Russian acronym for “Main Camp Directorate”, to today’s Federal Penitentiary Service. Little else has changed, with many of the buildings and facilities in the penal colonies dating back to the time of the USSR.

The offences that lead to incarceration also bear some resemblance to those of the past. Just as the Gulag system imprisoned enemies of the Communist regime, the penal colonies of today are home to dissidents who have dared to criticise the rule of President Putin.

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Similarly, the ways in which anti-establishment figures are treated have also stood the tests of time. Navalny hinted at this in a message posted on his Instagram account last week: “I had no idea that it was possible to arrange a real concentration camp 100km from Moscow,” it said. “I think someone upstairs read Orwell’s 1984 and said: ‘Yeah, cool. Let’s do this.’” Navalny went on to clarify that, so far, he has “not seen any violence”, but can still “easily believe the numerous stories that, not long ago, people here were beaten to within an inch of their lives with wooden hammers”.

Such stories are, of course, indeed “numerous”. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the activist group Pussy Riot, was sentenced to two years in the Mordovia camp in 2012 for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”, after her group staged an illegal performance in a cathedral in Moscow. Tolokonnikova later recalled how, on her arrival, the camp administrator assured her that they would “break” her will.

Whether Tolokonnikova’s forced labour of stitching police uniforms was intended to humiliate her — she is also an anti-police activist — remains unclear. But that almost seems irrelevant when you consider she was fed rotten potatoes, worked seventeen-hour days, lived in freezing conditions and often had her “privileges” — which included the “privilege” to wash or visit the toilet — removed.

In many ways, even more cruel was the Catch-22 built into her forced labour: fill your work quotas and the quotas themselves will be increased; yet fail to meet them and you’ll be punished. Tolokonnikova learned this the hard way when, disgusted by the appalling conditions facing her work brigade, she demanded that their working hours be reduced to twelve hours per day. The commandant agreed, knowing that this would mean Tolokonnikova’s would not be able to meet its work quota, and subsequently be further punished. As a result, Tolokonnikova twice went on hunger strike over the course of her incarceration. She was ultimately hospitalised due to severe headaches, and given an early release of several months.

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Yet Tolokonnikova, perhaps due to her significant public profile, was arguably more lucky than most; hospitalisation for illness is not the norm for Russian penal colonies. Less fortunate was Ildar Dadin, another anti-Putin activist and supporter of Navalny. After publicly protesting the Putin regime, Dadin was arrested and jailed. Although his original sentence was only for two weeks, Article 212.1 of the Criminal Code dictates that three violations of Russia’s protest laws can result in a prison sentence of up to five years: Dadin was sentenced to three.

On one occasion during his time in a prison camp in Segezha in the far north of Russia — an area which was home to some of the earliest Soviet Gulags, with winter temperatures as low as -15 degrees — Dadin was hung by his handcuffed wrists for over half an hour. On another, he was beaten and kicked by no fewer than twelve prison guards. Like Tolokonnikova, Dadin responded with a hunger strike. But in response, the guards merely stripped him to his lower garments and assured him that another inmate would rape him if did not resume eating.

Dadin doubtless knew that this was no idle threat. Instances of guard-instigated rape in Russian prisons are hardly rare: in 2011, seven prison staff in St. Petersburg were themselves imprisoned for torturing prisoners and forcing other inmates to rape them.

The Russian authorities predictably denied Dadin’s allegations. But his experiences are in keeping with a number of investigations carried out by Novaya Gazeta, an anti-Putin newspaper which has seen at least six of its journalists murdered, including Yuri Shchekochkin (poisoned with radiation for investigating government corruption) and Anna Politkovskaya (shot in an elevator after years of criticising the President).

Novaya Gazeta‘s research uncovered approximately 4,500 of systemic torture in 2018, with the worst instances reserved for political opponents like Navalny. Dmitry Pchelintsev, a member of an anti-Putin Left-wing group dubbed a “terrorist network” by the authorities, last year described how he was repeatedly electrocuted by members of the FSB (the Russian state’s successor organisation to the KGB): “They [electrocuted] me maybe five times without questions – probably to suppress my will. Then they said: [in case] you don’t understand, you’re in the hands of the FSB. We will not play, you have to answer the questions now.” The electrical cables had originally been attached to his feet, but Pchelintsev said that he ultimately gave a false confession when they threatened to relocate the wires to his genitals.

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Does such a fate await Navalny? I am not so sure. Navalny is arguably too prominent to be subject to the worst of the human rights abuses that Russia’s prisons have to offer; international attention on his case is significant enough that even the Putin regime might refrain from murder or torture. Moreover, an increasingly combative Joe Biden seems to have taken a personal interest in the case.

And so, as was the case with Tolokonnikova, it is likely that it will be the people around Navalny who will suffer; she related how her fellow prisoners were discouraged from befriending her for fear of being singled out for punishment.

Yet though Tolokonnikova was undoubtedly a troublesome activist for the Kremlin, Navalny is arguably in a different league. He is, after all, a serious political challenger and a direct threat to the regime, and so it is reasonable to conclude that his treatment could be worse. The guards themselves may refrain from harming Navalny directly, but the system’s prior form suggests that they might encourage other inmates to assault him, perhaps even at the promise of a reward; this would give the Russian authorities the best case of plausible deniability.

In 2010, President Putin declared that The Gulag Archipelago should be essential reading for Russian students. Whether he intended Solzhenitsyn’s work to be read as a lesson in Soviet history or a warning to would-be dissidents has long been a matter of speculation. But which reading is true? Navalny, I fear, could be about to find out.

Still, study of the French Revolution is endlessly instructive, for the radical temptation in politics exhibits consistent patterns, and the French Revolution displays them in crystalline form. Here are a few historical works on the period that are beautifully written, and may prove helpful for understanding the present.

François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (1978) and The Passing of an Illusion (1995)

François Furet rescued the academic study of the French Revolution from an entanglement with Marxism that had grown debilitating in the decades after World War II. French historiographers of that period tended to project backwards onto Robespierre all the romance of 1917, and likewise to view the Soviet Union as the successor state chosen by History to advance the cause. What made this no longer tenable was the publication, in 1973, of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The very parallels insisted upon by Marxist historians were now damning to their enthusiasms. Just as Solzhenitsyn showed that the gulag was no mere accessory to the revolutionary state, but rather its central manifestation and meaning, so it now became necessary to ask whether the Terror was not just a regrettable episode to be excused by extenuating circumstances, but the most revealing expression of revolution as a political culture.

This question had implications for how one was to understand the revolutionary passions of the youth movement of the 1960s, and Furet did not shy from drawing the relevant lessons. A member of the French Communist party in his youth, he came to see things in rather a different light. The opening essay in Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution  offers many riches. For example, he explains the paranoid style of revolutionary politics, and its tendency to exercise power through contrived moral emergencies.

Furet’s final book, The Passing of an Illusion , traced the revolutionary passion in its career through 20^th-century intellectual life in the West. Writing in the early Nineties, when Communism had just collapsed, the choice of title must have seemed apt to book buyers. But Furet knew that “the revolution” is infinitely elastic, so boundless is its promise and so limitless is its “capacity to survive experience”. It has a birth date (1789) but no end; it provides “the matrix of universal history”. That history is understood as a struggle of human emancipation, its polestar a vision of equality. Whatever stands in its way appears not as mere obstacle, but as hateful enemy.

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By John-Lewis Stempel

Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)

In the 1780s, the highest reaches of French society, as well as the broader reading public, was infatuated with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Far more influential than his works of political philosophy were his works of sentimental education, Emile and the Nouvelle Héloïse. As Simon Schama wrote, “Rousseau’s works dealing with personal virtue and the morality of social relations sharpened distaste for the status quo and defined a new allegiance. He created, in fact, a community of young believers.” Rousseau gave no roadmap to revolution, but he did invent “the idiom in which its discontents would be voiced and its goals articulated.”

What distinguished the moral elect was possession of un coeur sensible, a feeling heart. Visible expression of inner sentiments became acceptable, and indeed to be overcome with passion was a sign of noble character. Weeping was a sign, not of weakness, but of sincerity. Schama writes that tears “were cherished precisely because (it was assumed) they were unstoppable: the soul directly irrigating the countenance. Tears were the enemy of cosmetics and the saboteur of polite disguise. Most important, a good fit of crying indicated that the child had been miraculously preserved within the man or woman.” Note the role of self-exposure in creating a moral typology of citizens. Soon, sincerity would become the virtue claimed by axe-wielding sans-culottes.

Reading Schama’s account of weeping French men and women before the Revolution, one cannot help but think of today’s emotivism, in which feeling replaces intellectual coherence as the index of truth. That is, of one’s own truth, which others must acknowledge and acquiesce to – or else wound one deeply. On Twitter, of course, tears are not visible. “I’m literally shaking” is a verbal embellishment that seems to serve the same purpose. It conveys intensity of feeling, hence the moral credibility of one’s response.

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Mona Ozouf, “Revolutionary Religion”, in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989)

In 2020, shrines to George Floyd sprang up in cities across America, with candles set before garlanded pictures of the man (as in a Hindu temple). An enormous holographic effigy of Floyd went on tour through the southern states. We have all seen the videos of white people washing the feet of black people, in emulation of Christ’s servanthood, and prostrating themselves in various postures of abasement while chanting self-denunciations.

In Robespierre’s Festival of the Supreme Being, explicitly religious props, recitations and images were used to imbue revolutionary ideology with sacred feeling in a deliberate caricature of Catholic ceremonies. “Here there were not spectators but celebrants, not an audience but a people,” as the historian Mona Ozouf wrote. The Festival was preceded by the destruction of France’s statues by “iconoclastic commandos from the revolutionary army”. The heart of Marat (one of the bloodier Jacobins, himself stabbed to death in his bathtub by a provincial woman) was placed in a vessel and hung from the roof of the Cordeliers as the crowd was encouraged to recite new psalms (“O cor Marat, O cor Jesus”). The Festival coincided with a busy period for the guillotine, as intended by Robespierre.

Was the revolutionary cult a strategic ruse, then, meant to reconcile the Revolution with Catholic habits through a superficial continuity? Perhaps it was an effort to bring the Revolution to a conclusion by establishing a state religion, in the hope that this would help to secure social cohesion? Historians disagree on these questions, and Ozouf guides us through the controversies.

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The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Contemporary America is about as far from Catholic France as it is possible to get. Religious longings, apparently a permanent part of our human makeup, have long been frustrated in our secularised society. But for just that reason, revolutionary piety may hold special appeal. This bears on a question that has long hovered over the phenomenon of “political correctness”: how sincere is it? And is the quotient of sincerity changing?

Writing in The Atlantic in 2018, which now seems a long time ago, Reihan Salam parsed the utility of “white bashing” as part of the verbal repertoire of success in elite institutions. In this setting it was generally ironic, even while doing important work to signal that one is competent in the codes of the ruling class. “The people I’ve heard archly denounce whites have for the most part been upwardly-mobile people who’ve proven pretty adept at navigating elite, predominantly white spaces.” Salam, a child of Bangladeshi Muslims and Harvard student, came to view white-bashing as a form of “intra-white status jockeying,” a device by which the demarcation between “upper whites” and “lower whites” is made clear.

It would be hard to fix a date, but at some point this parlor game slipped the bounds of its intended audience. In the hands of the vulgar, it became literal-minded rather than playful, moralistic rather than urbane, a way of mobilising resentments and putting them to use. Again, one thinks of the trickle-down radicalism in France of the 1780s, as depicted by Simon Schama. The elite’s fashions of sentiment, its internecine dramas that seemed to be playing out in a safely “cultural” register, would become the seed of something more ominous. Something unintended and uncontrollable.

In particular, I’ve been considering two haunting observations made by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the outset of The Gulag Archipelago. The first is the question of why people did not resist more when they were taken away in the night. Why did they not scream, tear up the earth, scratch the eyes of the men who had come to take them? And — if they had to leave their home – why didn’t they make sure that the people who had come into their home bore the scars of having done so for the rest of their days? Why did the captured even tip-toe down the stairs, as they were asked to do by their captors, in order not to disturb their neighbours?

The answer to this lies in a question. As Solzhenitsyn puts it: “At what exact point, then, should one resist? When one’s belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner?” In part, the reason nobody resists is the same one we learned from Communism’s evil twin: if people have no conception of what is about to happen to them, then they will do whatever they think is needed to keep themselves alive to the next stage.

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When people were rounded up, they still hoped that this was the beginning of a process which would be resolved or righted at some point: that the misunderstanding would cleared up, or that the indignities could not get any worse. Until the whole world knew about what could happen, almost nobody imagined the end they would endure.

Solzhenitsyn relates the tale of one woman in the Twenties, early in the reign of communism in Russia, who was supposed to have been seized in a Moscow street. But she started screaming and fighting, and such was the commotion in the middle of a crowd, that the men assigned to take her away abandoned their task. But even her imagination of what was possible turned out to be limited. For she returned home that evening — which allowed the men to take her away privately, in the middle of the night, and send her to Lubyanka.

Solzhenitsyn’s second question-observation is even more haunting: why did people not intervene more to stop their friends, family or simply fellow-citizens from being taken away? In some ways, this is the more disturbing observation. We may grant that people have the best perspective on their own fate and will know best what might save themselves. But when people see women being plucked off the pavement by agents of the state, why do they continue walking?

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Solzhenitsyn approaches this question through a bitter counterfactual. “How we burned in the camps later”, he says, thinking how different things might have been if the security operative who went out in the night to make arrests hadn’t known he would ever return to his family again. What if he hadn’t known whether he would return alive. What if, during the mass arrests in Leningrad, when one quarter of the city was arrested, people had lain in wait and attacked the people who had come to arrest them and their neighbours? What if they had waited on the staircase with “axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand”?

You might say that not everybody is given to physical violence or physical courage.  Why, then – and in some ways this is the worse question – weren’t the tires of all those Black Maria sitting with a solitary driver (waiting for the human cargo to be brought out of the building, into the vehicle and from there away) spiked? How is it that a whole public with such a cause (their relatives and friends being taken away in front of their eyes) couldn’t do what hoodlums easily manage with no motivation whatsoever?

It was, says Solzhenitsyn,  because the people “didn’t love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation.”

It may seem strange, and even slightly obscene, to make a leap from the worst days of the 20th century to the seemingly incomparable situation in developed democracies today. But the behaviour of people under totalitarianism is, I think, recognisable today in the normal behaviour of normal people in our supposedly normal times.

In a culture which is often described as a ‘cancel culture’ — one in which people are liable to be rendered at least unemployable at any given moment — these behaviours manifest themselves still. Anyone who doubts this should read this piece by Mike Tunison on Medium. As Tunison says, he was one of the men whose name was — wholly wrongly — put on a list published online in October 2017 purporting to list around 70 men in the media described by the author as ‘Shitty Media Men’. The document was an anonymous list of unvetted, unchecked claims about dozens of men in the media in America whom the author or authors claimed to have a reputation for being sinister or violent towards women.

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The list did the feverish rounds of the internet in the same way that similar lists did in the UK and elsewhere. The media was high on the octane of exposes. Having been silent about cases of real abuse, nobody had time or interest in questioning documents like the list that Tunison was on. And so, with no apparent justification, other than the misfortune of his having crossed the path of someone with a grudge, Tunison’s life was turned upside down. He was made unemployable in the career to which he had chosen to dedicate his life. Jobs he did apply to could see the claims made against him online and step silently away. Finally, last year, he landed a job as a janitor. Is no one interested in this or the injustice it screams?

A similar scenario will doubtless emerge in the UK, with the dismissal of the broadcaster Alastair Stewart after decades of work for ITV. On the basis of a quotation from Shakespeare, which one person online claimed was clear, cloaked racism, a career of decades is over.

Some of Stewart’s friends will fight for him, perhaps. Others will look away, sufficiently worried about the implications of even being ‘adjacent’ to someone accused of racism. But is nobody interested in the means by which this was done?  Consider the implications of the phrase I wrote above. A case of clear, cloaked racism.  So clear as to deserve the end of somebody’s career. Yet done ‘with the cover’ of a quotation. Meaning that the crime which is so clear, so blazing and so self-evident is also only in the eye of the beholder, only discernible to a particular eye. In other words, not remotely clear.

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The people who suffer these injustices tend not to come out fighting, screaming and scratching their way back to safety. They tend — like Tunison – to submit to the madness which has washed over them, partly in the hope that they will some day claw their way back. It’s hard to grasp, at the time, that this is it and that they need to fight for everything. Who would believe that a life could be destroyed, every personal relationship shaken or ended, because of an anonymous list published online?

In the same way, when a nationally famous figure is accused of the great crime of the age, they rarely believe that the people for whom they have worked for for decades — the people they gave up their weekends for, their spare evenings, the times they could have been with their family for — would drop them in a matter of hours for a crime which cannot be explained and whose nature is wholly subjective. For that would mean everybody in the world would be able to take out anybody else, if they had sufficient desire to do so. And surely that world would be unworkable.

Well it would be, and it is. But it is possible not only because the victims do not quell and shake and scream enough but because we – the public – allow them to disappear one by one. We do not slash the virtual tires of those who take them away. We do not pick up whatever cudgels we have to hand to beat back their accusers. We just sit, as the anonymous lists and the unprovable complaints pile up and up, simply hoping all the time that the dishonest players and anonymous accusers will never come for us.

If people want to understand why totalitarianism works, the seedlings are all around us.