Alber wrote:
A nation spends a year holding its breath.
By Daniel Greenfield
September 9, 2020
A Soviet citizen goes to the dentist. He lies back in the chair. The dentist tells him to open wide.
“But I’m afraid to open my mouth,” he replies.
The old joke has a new resonance in the age of lockdowns and masked pedestrians, cancel culture and self-criticism sessions when Americans are the ones fearful of opening their mouths. Fear is the common denominator. A nation has spent the year holding its breath. And waiting.
Americans used to laugh at Soviet anecdotes without really understanding them. Now Americans are too afraid to laugh because they are coming to understand them all too well.
Mobs stalk the streets of American cities loudly bellowing, “We can’t breathe!” Sometimes they shoot or stab someone who then actually can’t breathe. Or they set a building on fire and anyone breathing in the smoke quickly discovers what it’s like to really be unable to breathe.
When you actually can’t breathe, you can’t shout and you can’t tell anyone. The people who actually can’t breathe or speak are the victims of the ones shouting that they can’t breathe.
There are two reasons why people can’t open their mouths or breathe, as in the joke with the Soviet dentist, literal and figurative. In a year when mouths are being shut with masks and censorship, the literal and the figurative things that people are afraid of have come together.
2020 is one long Soviet anecdote in which the only people allowed to disregard social distancing by gathering to protest in the thousands and tens of thousands do so to complain about their oppression. It’s a mock dystopia in which corporate CEOs berate their employees about their privilege and fire anyone who won’t confess their privilege, and government officials and agencies lecture the people they rule at length about the terrible evils of systemic racism.
Speech is violence and violence is speech. Throwing firebombs is in the First Amendment, but saying All Lives Matter is literally killing people. The only people who don’t have privilege are the ones who have special privileges. Criminals have a right to be safe from the police, but people don’t have a right to be safe from criminals. Public safety is now about keeping criminals safe from the police by defunding the police so that no one except the criminals can be safe.
Everyone has to wear masks, except the government officials telling them to do it. The only people who don’t have to worry about being able to breathe are the ones mandating the masks. Democrat governors like Cuomo and Murphy who killed tens of thousands are the heroes of the pandemic, while the villains are the Republican governors whose red states have few deaths.
The Communists called the newspaper in which they printed all their lies, Pravda or Truth. Soviet anecdotes hinged on the central irony that everything was a lie, everyone knew it, and no one could say it. The joke wasn’t in what was said, but in the mutual recognition of the unsaid.
Or, “I’m afraid to open my mouth.”
We live in the world of the unsaid, of the human shadow lands where people who go around with their mouths closed and faces covered, and in that world we know what is said is meaningless.
That which can be said is, by definition, a lie, and that which can’t be said, becomes the truth.
The real news is what’s read between the lines of the lies. What people say is the opposite of the truth. At struggle sessions, academics and executives confess that they’re racist to prove that they’re not racist. The only people who can safely claim not to have privilege, have that privilege. No one at work will admit to voting for President Trump, but someone must have.
The more speech is banned, the more worthless is the speech that is still allowed.
Polls become useless when people are too afraid to tell partisan pollsters the truth. Democrats and their media demand censorship of social media to protect the integrity of democracy from the speech of the demos, and then are caught by surprise when they suddenly lose elections.
Censorship creates a culture of lies. The more restrictive the censorship, the worse the lies. In a totalitarian system, no one believes anything, and no one trusts anything that they hear. And that culture of mistrust leads to a deep rot that corrupts everything and everyone it touches.
People retreat behind masks, literal and figurative, to protect themselves against a masked system which lies to them and spies on them. And the system thinks that it’s in control because it hears its own lies repeated back to it, not realizing that it’s the one now being lied to.
The irony of the Soviet anecdote was that it was a joke that could only be told by not telling it.
To breathe, to open your mouth and fill your lungs with air, requires a sense of freedom. American tourists visiting the USSR noticed the tension, the invisible weight, the closed faces of the people they met. To the Russians, Americans seemed an open and free people. Freedom was not just a legal condition, a matter of elections and constitutions which on paper the Russians had. Being truly free meant not even being able to imagine the loss of freedom.
Now it’s Americans who walk the streets, when they dare, their faces closed off, invisible weights bowing them down, wary that anything they say might end their careers and lives. Hundreds of millions of people have been cut off from their families and thrust into a national conversation mediated by giant monopolies set up to enable the informants of cancel culture.
The perfect panopticon (Disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate but the inmates can't see into the tower. Prisoners will never know whether or not they are being watched) that the KGB could have only dreamed of is here and we’re living in it. There is no telling when someone might be watching you, taping you, provoking a confrontation that will be posted on social media, made to go viral, and lead to permanent unemployment.
Not to mention possible arrest and prosecution, or even violent assault and murder.
It’s safer for millions to put on their masks and not say things. And if there seem to be few Biden yard signs and little enthusiasm for the political program of the ruling class, that’s also unsaid.
And it is in the realms of the unsaid where the movements that really matter take place.
Everyone, from top athletes to corporate executives, knows that they have to kneel and mouth the words. And the little people holding down jobs at some Fortune 500 company that assigns Robin DeAngelo as mandatory reading know it better than anyone else. They wear their masks.
Free people breathe. Unfree people hold their breaths. They put on masks and close their mouths. They push the fear and the anger behind their eyes. They repeat the lies until the entire world around them seems made of lies that they believe and don’t believe at the same time.
A nation has put on its masks. And it’s waiting for November to find out if it can take a breath.
Daniel Greenfield, Investigative journalist at the Freedom Center
A nation spends a year holding its breath. br br ... (
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For starters, this article is very well written. BLM and Antifa are Marxist organizations that must be declared terrorists. I have seen many videos on you tube where many white young people participate in all these demonstrations, without understanding that they go against their own interests. In general, this situation will go against all the people of this country, regardless of skin color; but when you see those young white men and women in demonstrations against racism, you can see the contradiction in all of this. There is no fight against racism, since the joint participation of black and white youth indicates that it is not about racism, but about politics. For eight years this country had a mulatto president, more black than white. If there was racism, he would never have been elected. Racism is being used as a political weapon by Marxists.
As I said before, the article I have read is very well written; but it remains a fiction, even with current problems. In this country, the reality of how people live in North Korea, China or Cuba is unknown. They do not know what totalitarianism is, which governs every step of life, from birth to death the person is controlled by a registry. Within totalitarian countries not all people are equal before the law. Only those who have the necessary political merits or are children of the members of the nomenclature can go to university. Health care, nurseries, schools, compulsory military service, occupying a job, rationing food and all consumer goods, as well as obtaining any benefit is subject to political meritocracy.
In the USA, vigilance committees have not been established, there are no repudiation rallies, and mobs are not created to attack dissidents; terror accompanied by hunger and the needs of the population have not yet infiltrated American minds. There is no fear of going to prison for saying something inconvenient, whoever protests about something is not afraid of being shot and much more. Here one can have a weapon to defend oneself and die killing if necessary, but in those countries where the extreme left prevails, the people are totally defenseless.
I hope that the ordinary American has gained awareness with the terror actions that BLM and Antifa have unleashed with the support of the “so-called democrats” and that in all those places dominated by them, in which they have unleashed the terror, a punishment vote is cast in the next elections in opposition to that monster with the name of Marxism (progenitor of communism and Nazi-fascism) that they intend to impose, posing as liberals, when it is a reality that Marxists hate liberals to death , even more than the conservatives. They say they are progressives, pretending to indicate that they are for progress, when in reality they want to bring human beings to a state of misery, as has been proven in each of the places where they have imposed their rule.
In "The Black Book of Communism" and in "Death by Government", this Marxist system is imputed, until the fall of the USSR, 100 million deaths; but the correct thing would be to publish The Black Book of Marxism and include the dead of the other Marxist system: Nazi-Fascism; having the European Union, by a resolution, equated communism with Nazi-fascism; and if we add the deaths caused by Marxism after the disappearance of the USSR, we would have a figure of more than 200 million deaths, since the Marxist regimes (China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela ...) have continued their career of genocide so far, without being able to foresee when this situation will stop.
China, which has gone from "communism" to "fascism", making cosmetic changes in its economic system, continues its genocidal career; and also North Korea, where ordinary people die of hunger, want and disease.
I sincerely hope to see the reaction of the Americans against the Democratic Party, because although they have done a work of indoctrination in schools and through most of the media that they have placed under their control, I think with Abraham Lincoln that: "You can fool some people all the time, and all the people sometimes, but you can't fool all the people all the time."