“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
― Ronald Reagan
I posted a thread on X (formerly Twitter) this morning and I wanted to share it. I’m jumping ahead of my promised sort of book report, here, though. I am not done reading the novel I mentioned in a recent blog post. The dystopian novel that affected American history is, The Journal of David Q. Little, which was President Ronald Reagan’s favorite dystopian novel. Reagan gave Margaret Thatcher a copy of this novel. I read about this in Stella Morabito’s book, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer. Her book is very interesting and has expanded my knowledge on totalitarianism a great deal.
Once I started googling a bit, I found this 2016 article, by Stella Morabito, President Reagan’s Favorite Dystopian Novel Has A Message For Us. Morabito is always ahead of the curve and I have learned so much reading her articles and her book. Her book is filled to the brim with footnotes, which I’m using as a guide for further reading on totalitarianism. During my Cold War era reading days, I read a lot of books on various aspects of the Cold War, but my main interests were military strategy and foreign policy, plus a lot of spy drama stuff. Here’s a bit from her 2016 article:
“For most of the story, David chooses to live as a middle-of-the-road, unexceptional mid-level manager hoping for advancement, but always trying to get by and not make waves. His wife is especially anxious to keep their semblance of the American dream alive—nice house, three kids, good employment. But they soon learn that the price of keeping their own heads above water is to obey a system that demands they betray their colleagues and surveil their neighbors. They try hard to ignore all the telltale signs that the system’s collapse is not just inevitable, but has already happened.”
https://thefederalist.com/2016/09/16/president-reagans-favorite-dystopian-novel-message-us/“The Littles maintain a façade of normalcy for a little while, thanks to the privileges of the cronyism a nomenklatura system—that is part and parcel of socialist societies. But it all quickly wears away as the fundamental transformation of America unmasks itself as a program of crony-orchestrated desolation. As every sector of life becomes internationalized, human relationships devolve into various forms of prostitution and pimpery.”
Here’s my X thread:
Sorry for the repeated NATO post, but I can’t figure out how to copy the entire thread and post it, so I tried copying the links individually and ended up with this. Anyway, repeating the NATO founding timeline, which followed the Soviet Union takeover of Eastern Europe bears repeating.
libertybelle diaries 