In an earlier appearance in the pages of the Daily Sceptic, I suggested that Britain and much of Western Europe were adopting the pathologies of late-stage East European communism: systems drained of ideological vitality and surviving chiefly through performative pieties, bureaucratic coercion and the policing of thought. Not the brutalities of Stalinism, but a post-totalitarian order in which censorship is outsourced to HR departments and social exclusion takes the place of secret police. Somewhat uncharitably, I even suggested European leaders – Keir Starmer in Britain, Friedrich Merz in Germany – were beginning to acquire the physiognomy of those grey party functionaries once photographed beside malfunctioning hydroelectric dams.
The only reason I reached for the East European analogy was that dissent as an act of mental resistance has long been an intellectual preoccupation of mine. It drew me to the work of those like the Czech playwright Václav Havel whose essay The Power of the Powerless (1978) presented a remarkable evocation of a society exhausted by its own untruths, which struck me as increasingly resonant with our own times. Without that prior interest, the parallel would never have occurred to me.
