By Ryszard Legutko
Ryszard Legutko lived and suffered less than communism for decades—and he fought with the Polish ant-communist circulation to abolish it. Having lived for 2 a long time lower than a liberal democracy, even if, he has found that those political structures have much more in universal than one may possibly imagine. They either stem from an identical ancient roots in early modernity, and settle for comparable presuppositions approximately background, society, faith, politics, tradition, and human nature.
In The Demon in Democracy, Legutko explores the shared pursuits among those political platforms, and explains how liberal democracy has over the years lurched in the direction of a similar objectives as communism, albeit with out Soviet type brutality.
Both platforms, says Legutko, decrease human nature to that of the typical guy, who's ended in think himself liberated from the duties of the earlier. either the communist guy and the liberal democratic guy refuse to confess that there exists something of worth outdoor the political platforms to which they pledged their loyalty. And either structures refuse to adopt any severe exam in their ideological prejudices.
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Additional info for The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies
Sample text
Those who were fighting the regime were also fighting for memory against forgetting, knowing very well that the loss of memory strengthened the communist system by making people defenseless and malleable. There are no better illustrations of how politically imposed amnesia helps in the molding of the new man than the twentieth-century anti-utopias 1984 and Brave New World. The lessons of Orwell and Huxley were, unfortunately, quickly forgotten. In my country at the very moment when communism fell and the liberal-democratic order was emerging, memory again became one of the main enemies.
From the perspective of historicism any opposition to this process was extremely harmful to humanity and inconceivably stupid. What the enemy of progress defended was by definition hopelessly parochial, limited to one class, decadent, anachronistic, historically outdated, and degenerate; sooner or later it had to give way to something that was universal, necessary, and inclusive of the whole of humanity. It was obvious to any open mind that history had to grant victory to communists and that all they had to do was to wait patiently for the signs of impending victory.
At the beginning of the Nineties I discovered something that was not particularly difficult to discover at the time: namely, that the nascent liberal democracy significantly narrowed the area of what was permissible. Incredible as it may seem, the final year of the decline of communism had more of the spirit of freedom than the period after the establishment of the new order, which immediately put a stop to something that many felt strongly at that time and that, despite its elusiveness, is known to everybody who has an experience of freedom—a sense of having many doors open and many possibilities to pursue.