0/0

.

In her letters she appears very anxious to explain how, having arrived in the West “blind with admiration for the Free World”, she had come to believe that the US and the USSR were morally equivalent. She had been convinced that “in the Free World people are superhuman, wise, enlightened…What a terrible blow it is to find out that… there are just the same idiots, incompetent fools, frightened bureaucrats, confused bosses, paranoid fears of deception and surveillance… this loss of idealism is what happens to defectors only too often, because we all relied too much on propaganda.”

In the beginning, you are in a kind of ecstasy and euphoria. Later on, you learn what the reality is, and it is in many ways a disappointment. I would say to all potential defectors, always remember that on the other shore there are the same humans - and that includes people who are imperfect, dull, incompetent, treacherous, idiotic, just like those you are leaving behind. It is human nature that rules the world, not governments and regimes. I had and will have had bad experiences everywhere. This is my lot, and luckily I know that . . . I will never have a pretty house like yours in London, but home I have inside me. I take it with me like a snail wherever I go.

The following are interviews and letters from Stalin's Daughter

The following are interviews and letters from Stalin's Daughter

Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva defected to the US in 1967. She became a US citizen and started a new life there; she got married, wrote books, gave lectures and had a daughter before moving back to Russia in 1986.

“In the beginning, you are in a kind of ecstasy and euphoria. Later on, you learn what the reality is, and it is in many ways a disappointment. I would say to all potential defectors, always remember that on the other shore there are the same humans - and that includes people who are imperfect, dull, incompetent, treacherous, idiotic, just like those you are leaving behind. It is human nature that rules the world, not governments and regimes.”

Letters from Stalin's daughter (Svetlana Alliluyeva)

Self-control. — Those moralists who command man first and above all to gain control of himself thereby afflict him with a peculiar disease, namely, a constant irritability at all natural stirrings and inclinations and as it were a kind of itch. Whatever may henceforth push, pull, beckon, impel him from within or without will always strike this irritable one as endangering his self-control: no longer may he entrust himself to any instinct or free wing-beat; instead he stands there rigidly with a defensive posture, armed against himself, with sharp and suspicious eyes, the eternal guardian of his fortress, since he has turned himself into a fortress. Indeed, he can become great this way! But how insufferable he has become to others; how impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful fortuities of the soul! And indeed from all further instruction! For one must be able at times to lose oneself if one wants to learn something from things that we ourselves are not.

Heraclitus viewed the world in a state of constant flux; you never step into the same river twice, for the river changes, and you change too. Everything is always becoming but never being. He expressed this in sayings like “everything flows” (Greek: πάντα ρει, panta rhei).

— On The Abolition of All Political Parties, by Simone Weil

Nearly everywhere – often even when dealing with purely technical problems – instead of thinking, one merely takes sides: for or against. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind. This is an intellectual leprosy; it originated in the political world and then spread through the land, contaminating all forms of thinking. This leprosy is killing us.

يَرى البَخيلُ سبيلَ المالِ واحدةً إنّ الجَوادَ يَرى في مالِه سُبُلا — حاتم الطائي

«وإنّي امرؤٌ لا تَستَقِرُّ دراهِمي على الكَفّ إلّا عابِراتُ سَبيلِ.» ‏ -ابن الرومي. يجعل الشّاعر من الدراهم كأنّها كيانات حيّة، تمرّ عبر كفّه مستعجلة، لا تعرف القرار فيها، وهذا تصوير لسخاء لا يخالطه التردد، وزهدًا يرتقي فوق ماديّة الحياة، حيث المال عنده وسيلة عابرة لا غاية مستقرة.

Weil proposes that the very characteristics of the very concept of a political party is exactly what makes it anti-democratic: First, a political party generates collective passion. This passion clouds the clear, reasonable judgement that's essential for the democratic process. It makes voters biased. Second, it insidiously establishes conformity and steers the public opinion in accordance to its agenda, not in accordance to truth, justice, and public interest. Third, it's a totalitarian system since it seeks its own infinite growth.

In fact – and with very few exceptions – when a man joins a party, he submissively adopts a mental attitude which he will express later on with words such as, ‘As a monarchist, as a Socialist, I think that . . .’ It is so comfortable! It amounts to having no thoughts at all. Nothing is more comfortable than not having to think.

When someone joins a party, it is usually because he has perceived, in the activities and propaganda of this party, a number of things that appeared to him just and good. Still, he has probably never studied the position of the party on all the problems of public life. When joining the party, he therefore also endorses a number of positions which he does not know. In fact, he submits his thinking to the authority of the party. As, later on, little by little, he begins to learn these positions, he will accept them without further examination.