Quotation of the Day
10th August 2024
“This is what life was like under the communists. After the initial terror, the system fell into an institutional ban on speaking freely. Everyone had to worry about who might be listening, even in their private quarters. You can never be sure if the person next to you was a government informant or could not easily become one. The result is everyone had to be guarded all the time about what they said and did.
“The other side of this, the part that is easily missed, is it made everyone political as a matter of self-preservation. You might not want to be political, but the people who could hold your fate in their hands were political or could be made to be political, so you had to be political all the time too. The result was the sort of coded language that is now common in the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
— ZMan