I think this is the second time I’ve recommended an article by NRI fellow Douglas Murray this month, but he’s operating at something of a peak lately. Over at Unherd, he notes with some fear that our cancel culture seems to have the seedlings of behavior that take root in totalitarian societies, namely: passivity. We can’t let people lose their livelihoods and reputations over a single, unsubstantiated accusation of thought crime. It’s not just that this makes society ugly, it makes society impossible. He writes:

I’ve been thinking a lot about totalitarianism recently. It’s unsettling, for as I do so, I notice its seedlings in every day life. And these are the same seedlings which, in the past, grew into horrible, magnified obscenities in totalitarian societies.

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?