Rod Dreher: The book was published in September 2020, seven months into the Covid pandemic, and after the George Floyd summer, and the woke overreaction that corporations and other institutions undertook in its aftermath. Ordinary people knew that something deeply wrong was going on, something that they had never seen. Live Not By Lies gave them a framework for understanding it. Though the book was completely ignored by the mainstream media, it sold like crazy. When a documentary filmmaking team approached me about doing the series, I was eager to get that project going, because the people who most need to hear these warnings from those who lived under communism — young people — are not likely to pick up the book. But they will watch a film.

JWK: The series highlights the stories of religious dissidents under Soviet totalitarianism. What parallels do you see between what happened then and what’s going on in the contemporary West today?

RD: It’s hard for us to see totalitarianism in wokeness and other aspects of contemporary American life. We think of totalitarianism according to the Soviet model: a police state that tortured and imprisoned its dissenters. We don’t have that, obviously. But what the people who came to America from communist countries understood is that it is possible to have a form of totalitarianism that is softer — but still totalitarian. The point of totalitarianism is to insist on a single ideological way of thinking about politics — and to turn every aspect of life political. We can see that with DEI programs, for example, and how until very recently, criticizing DEI was a sure way to get yourself called a bigot, and ruin your career. We saw that with the way the transgender agenda was imposed on Americans through lies, coercion, and bullying. Totalitarianism seeks to force an entire society to conform to its ideological program — and that is what the left did, or tried to do, especially because it captured nearly all major institutions of American life.

Some of that is ending now with the Trump administration, but we shouldn’t think that it’s over. For one, the woke ideologues are not going to give up easily. For another, the conditions in broader society that allowed these soft-totalitarian policies to arise are still present. And that could also lead to a right-wing form of soft totalitarianism. Any time you have a large number of people, or at least a large number of institutional elites, who hate their perceived enemies more than they love liberty, you are in danger of accepting totalitarianism as a way to compel them to obey.

RD: The “hard totalitarianism” of the Soviet Union was like George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four: imposed by fear, pain, and violence. Our soft form is more like the model in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. In that book, the masses accept totalitarianism and the loss of their humanity as the price for having total comfort, pleasure, and constant entertainment. For them, the ultimate goal is to avoid pain and suffering — even suffering as mild as anxiety. In Huxley’s novel, the totalitarian governor of Europe questions the lone dissident about why he doesn’t want to join their hedonistic society, saying to the man, “It sounds like you’re fighting for your right to be unhappy.” He is! The core message I heard over and over from the Christian dissidents in the former communist countries was this: if you are not prepared to suffer for your faith, then you are not going to make it. Holding on to our faith, and holding on the the plain truth, requires a willingness and a capacity to endure suffering.

RD: It’s a way of achieving totalitarian goals in a much more pleasant way — in part by convincing people to voluntarily submit to their own captivity. And when they don’t, it’s a form of punishing them without resorting to harsh methods like imprisonment. There is also a therapeutic element to soft totalitarianism. For example, the soft totalitarians take away one’s free speech rights out of concern for not hurting the feelings of sacred victim groups. This kind of totalitarianism is confusing, because it is often built on things we as Christians value, like fighting racism. A Slovak Catholic priest said, “In some ways, this is harder to resist than communism was. Under communism, the light of the Gospel shone clearly through the darkness. With this, it hits only fog.”

RD:  Those old enough to remember communism understand well what this is all about. But their children and grandchildren are just as confused as their own generations are in the West. They get a lot of the same media and pop culture that Westerners do. And they want to be free to be hedonists, just like people in the West. Plus, with the exception of Poland, and to some extent Romania, religion is very weak in Eastern Europe, so that bulwark against soft totalitarianism barely exists. And even Poland and Romania are rapidly secularizing among the young, post-communist generations.

JWK: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who of course, wrote The Gulag Archipelago once warned the West that Ideology “gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination”…On the surface,communism and socialism and sound noble but their unforgiving of pursuit of perfection ends up justifying massive evil. Is that what we’re dealing with now in the form of wokism, the weaponization of cultural guilt, repackaging censorship as “misinformation,” control of the language,  cultural division through group identity and government and corporations uniting around globalism?

RD:  Well … yes! These are all ways that the totalitarian spirit is at work in our world.

JWK: In your series, Douglas Murray reassuringly says that “There will always be people who will say what they see in spite of being told not to.” Do you believe that’s so – and, if so, will there be enough to make a difference?

RD: Yes, this is true. But will there be enough to make a difference? It’s hard to say. Vaclav Havel, the leader of the Czech dissidents, once wrote that bringing down a system built on lies required a critical mass of people who refused to live by lies, and who were willing to suffer for their convictions. Havel believed that there was enough goodness inside most people to be moved by the moral sacrifice of those willing to suffer for truth — and eventually, they would join the cause. But there are no guarantees. That said, not a single one of the dissidents I interviewed thought they would live to see communism fall. Not one. They stood up because it was the right thing to do, period.

JWK: What’s next for you?