AJ LawrenceENLS 245 – Final EssayProfessor Siewers 12 December 2022 Dissenting Against the Permanent Lie Surrounded by blaring lights and a roaring crowd, Bernard gloomily sits in the gigantic arena, bored by the never-ending wrestling bouts as entertainment provided by the totalitarian state in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Lenina sits by his side, attempting to…

In Part 2 Chapter 1 of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, the priest is traveling, hoping to escape the government. He first makes it to a tiny village, where the mother of his child and his child, Maria and Brigitta, live and he stays long enough to check in with both of them,…

In chapter 8 of Igor Shafarevich’s The Socialist Phenomenon, he discusses the interrelations between and individual roles of each element of socialism’s evolution. One element he focuses on is family, specifically how a family unit can be considered as a threat to socialism and a group’s control over a society. The existence of a strong…

In chapter 8 of Live Not By Lies, Dreher discusses how religion often creates a base for a dissident’s desire and motivation to stand against a totalitarian power. Interviewing several dissidents who found themselves to be religious leaders in times of totalitarian rule, whether intentionally or unintentionally, Dreher found that they all attributed their success…

In Live Not by Lives, author Rod Dreher presents how the western world is heading towards being controlled by a “soft totalitarianism,” as first presented by Solzhenitsyn in a talk of the same name. In expressing how it is necessary for people to fight back against totalitarianism, soft or hard, Dreher highlights the importance of…

In the first chapter of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s memoir The Gulag Archipelago, the author described the terror and uncertainty that were the result of the government’s seemingly random but constant arrests. Solzhenitsyn explains that most often, citizens would just hear a knock on their door in the middle of the night, and it was the police…

The Banality of Evil: When Doing What is Right Means Committing Evil Acts Broken furniture, shattered glass, and ruined books litter the floor around Ji Xianlin. Helplessly, frozen in shock, he watched as the Red Guard invaded and destroyed his home. After recognizing some of the students raiding his home, Ji Xianlin, in his memoir…

In “Part II” of Dostoevsky’s Demons, Verkhovensky (Pyotr Stepanovich) attempts on several occasions to entice Stavrogin (Nikolai Vsevolodovich) into becoming the leader of the revolutionary group, promising him power and that it will be an easy task because Stavrogin’s high class standing makes him more reputable, so people will be more likely to follow and…

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons, the character Nikolai Vsevolodovich, also referred to as Starvrogin, is characterized as an obnoxious and quick to anger man. He is also capable, smart, and fearless, qualities that could make him a decent leader of a revolution, but because of the political situation of the time, he prefers to focus his…

In Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, the “Totalitarianism in Power” chapter focuses on what totalitarian regimes did to stay in power once they had established themselves. One of the tactics the author mentions is how the leaders will “[hold] out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of…