by Gavin Ashenden
Confronting abusive power and control with the demand for accountability and the truth.
We are fighting to save our civilization, our Christian culture. We’re fighting for freedom of speech and for truth.
Today on the streets of London, as I write, there’s a large demonstration of people who want to protest against the way in which the government is taking away our freedoms.
How I First Came to See It
I first became aware of the danger of authoritarian government when I was a first-year law student, and I came across a little book called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and it talked about the imprisonment of a prisoner of conscience who had in fact done nothing wrong apart from criticising the state, sent to a Siberian labour camp.
Later on he wrote his three-volume work The Gulag Archipelago, which I devoured. I was astonished at the reality of authoritarian totalitarian leftism as he described it.
He was thrown out of the Soviet Union, and when he came to the West he gave a commencement speech at Harvard, and he warned that what was happening in the Soviet Union was likely to come to the West.
We could argue about the way in which it came and what it constitutes. Personally, I think it is in fact a demonic spirit of utopian temptation, which inhabits a whole culture. But be that as it may, whether you describe this as a metaphysical movement, or a political one to do with the corruption of human virtue, or the lust for power, or the idiotic utopianism which is determined to force people to behave in a way that appears to deal with the presence of evil but never does, it’s something that has indeed entered and one might say inhabited, our society and is threatening and taking away our freedoms.
Live Not by Lies
Solzhenitsyn’s great work, published on the day he was arrested in 1974, was entitled Live Not by Lies. And what he said was that the best way of dealing with the deception of an authoritarian government was to absolutely refuse the lies that they propagated in order to keep their hold on power.
They would always use language and twist it to deceive us and keep us in bondage. And therefore, all we could do was simply refuse them whenever we came across them — not repeat them, not believe them, not allow them to control the discourse in our society — and do everything we could to disassociate ourselves from them.
That has to be the strategy that we use in our country today, faced with the authoritarian deceit that is being imposed upon us at the moment.