not the ussr but the uccr
THE UNION OF COVID
COLLECTIVIST REPUBLICS
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012.His latest
book is Notes
from a Derelict Culture. A CD of his original
songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
This is a familiar scene, so familiar that it has now become
the New Normal. You are in a supermarket searching diligently
for toilet paper to hoard for the long haul, but although the
cardboard sign reads “1 package per family,” the
shelves are as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard,
and have been for weeks. The same with kitchen towels, whose
once plentiful supply we never learned to appreciate. Produce
is still available, as is dairy and meat, but the freezers are
beginning to thin out. A few bars of unsalted butter can still
be found, though even at one per family, the future augurs a
breakfast of dry toast, assuming the loaves haven’t gone
the way of all dough. A couple of bags of unpopular frozen veggies
slump forlornly in the cooler, the same ones you saw yesterday,
but they too will be casualties of tomorrow. To add insult to
injury, it is often the lesser brands and inferior products
that remain on hand.
My
neighbors are practically all lefties, Liberal, NDP and Green
supporters, for Vancouver is devoted socialist country. They
are, for the most part, believers in “Social Justice,”
indigenous rights, identity politics, feminist leadership, “climate
change,” wind farms, solar panels, and redistribution
of private wealth. They are against—give or take—free-market
business practices, corporations, oil companies, fossil fuels,
hydraulic fracking, pipelines, the profit motive, competition,
individual autonomy or self-reliance, industry, big bank accounts,
SUVs, Alberta and—of course—Donald Trump, the grasping
incarnation of evil who, as acclaimed lefty poet and Princeton
magus Paul Muldoon writes, rather lamely, builds the “Tower
of Wrong…from the promises on which he’ll shortly
renege.”
Nonetheless,
these are the same people who drive across the border to the
U.S. to fill up their vehicles since a gallon of gas in capitalist
America costs the equivalent of a litre—one-quarter of
a gallon—in socialist Canada. Indeed, shopping expeditions
to Blaine or Bellingham in northern Washington State in order
to take advantage of greater choice, better goods and lower
prices were once weekly events for them. The contradiction never
seemed to dawn, as it never does upon the conscience of a good
socialist.
After
all, good socialists are an impenitent breed, as their beliefs
and behavior make amply clear. Cuba, where people work for a
pittance and live in fear of a repressive regime, is regarded
as the victim of a Yankee embargo. China, the world’s
largest polluter (in every sense of the term), is by their lights
a well-governed nation slandered by conservatives. Venezuela,
probably the planet’s most fetid hellhole, has obviously
been brought low by the rapacious policies of colonialist America—indeed,
a sure sign of American perfidy is its refusal to send enough
protective anti-viral masks to Canada. That the U.S. may not
have sufficient to serve its own needs is irrelevant. Still,
once the borders are open, we will be flocking through the Peace
Arch Historical State Park to load up on non-carbon taxed supplies
and inexpensive merchandise, returning to a progressivist country
of which we are inordinately proud.
Meanwhile,
the travesty and tragedy proceed. A more recent development
has emerged to trouble public convenience. Lines have begun
to form, carefully surveilled, at the entrance of stores and
shops across the city, and no doubt in other parts of the country
as well. At a small, out-of-the-way BuyLow where my wife and
I briefly stopped hoping to avoid a crowd, people waited outside
to be admitted one by one. At a large, hypermodern SaveOn, outdoor
monitors herded the line like bouncers at a nightclub. Once
inside, customers would be met by an air of desolation, rows
of empty shelves, and a straggle of distracted and disappointed
shoppers. No one is happy. Everyone is worried. Even the times
allowed us to partially replenish our dwindling reserves are
being rationed as new lockdown orders are promulgated. True,
we are not—or not yet—being tracked by drones or
trammeled by a slate of punitively excessive restrictions, as
is the case in the U.K., but we should not be surprised if or
when new enforcement measures are prolonged, perhaps indefinitely.
Where
have we seen this before? I have pointed out to some of my anti-American
neighbors and leftist acquaintances that such were, mutatis
mutandis, the conditions that prevailed in the heyday of
the socialist utopia of the USSR: long sidewalk queues at grocery
stores and dry goods outlets, uniformed surveillance, bare shelves,
prohibitive costs for basic necessities, stringent regulations
coming down from on high, an atmosphere of depression and misery,
and no intimation of when the nightmare would be over. But,
to be fair, the picture was not entirely grim. The vodka was
plentiful. Similarly, our liquor commissions are open. I have
enough wine and Scotch to keep me going for months.
There
are many well-known books recounting life in the Soviet Union,
but among these I would recommend two lesser-known works, the
very readable novel Forever Flowing by Vasily Grossman and the
dauntingly massive but indispensable treatise The Soviet System:
The Political Economy of Communism by Janos Kornai. Also, it
helps if one knows Russian and Eastern Bloc immigrants whose
memories of daily life in the USSR and its satellites are intact.
Their stories are uniformly dismal reports of market scarcity,
strict policing, limited freedom, the practice of evasion and
poorly rewarded patience.
The
assault on individual integrity was also demoralizing. Being
forced to parrot and internalize state-fed lies demolishes one’s
personal sense of dignity. As Theodore Dalrymple observes in
Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and
the Masses, “When people are forced to remain silent
when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse
when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose
once and for all their sense of probity… A society of
emasculated liars is easy to control.”
The
moral debacle grows even more critical when such lies become
second-nature, part of one’s unexamined belief system,
as appears to be the case in the progressivist West. As Orwell
noted, lies becomes truths. A good friend who emigrated to Canada
from Romania and felt blessed to live in a free and prosperous
country is now appalled by the socialist mantras and political
degradation he meets everywhere, reminding him increasingly
of his former country. “People don’t seem to know
anything,” he remarks, “they don’t know what
they are losing.”
My
friend is right. The people I have spoken to are rigorously
innocent of history, as are the many leftist journalists, politicians,
talking heads and writers who swarm the public forum, along
with the indoctrinated millennials, the brain-dead celebrities,
our K-12 elf piñatas and red pantaloon academics who
should know better—and the shoppers at our market mausoleums.
The pandemic has brought home to us what it might have been
like living in the USSR—or at any rate it should have—and
what it may well be like living in a post-COVID managerial and
regulatory state after our leaders have sampled the joys of
centralist authority and the nation’s citizens have been
cowed into a condition of docility, resignation and submission.
This, regrettably, is not beyond the realm of possibility.
In
the absence of a reasonably educated electorate and patriotic
and indefatigable leaders like Donald Trump, I suspect the worst.
Writing in American Thinker, Sally Zelikovsky believes
that we can adopt prudent measures to combat the disease “while
going back…to normal.” Perhaps we can find a middle
ground between the draconian and the domestic, but we cannot
take common sense and enlightened thinking for granted. If we
are not vigilant we may soon enough find ourselves inhabiting
the UCCR, that is, the Union of COVID Collectivist Republics,
with no end in sight. That is a political pandemic from which
there is little chance of a full recovery.
