SUBSCRIBE LOGIN PC CULTURE Pavlik Morozov Is the Patron Saint of Cancel Culture

National Review ^ | July 2, 2019 | Michael Brendan Dougherty

[NorseViking]

Kids are turning in their elders for thoughtcrime. Isn’t that cute? With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother — it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which “The Times” did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak — “child hero” was the phrase generally used — had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.

— 1984, by George Orwell

Seventy years on from the publication of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, what strikes me most about it is the children who are valorized for denouncing their parents. This was not just a lurid invention of Orwell’s imagination. A child like this had a name, Pavlik Morozov. He may have been apocryphal, but his cult as the child martyr of the Soviet Union was real enough, and statues of him endured until at least 1991. Pavlik was said to be a peasant child who denounced

[GOPJ]

Pavlik Morozov. He may have been apocryphal, but his cult as the child martyr of the Soviet Union was real enough, and statues of him endured until at least 1991. Pavlik was said to be a peasant child who denounced his father for hiding grain from the NKVD. This at a time when the penalty for such an offense could be death by execution, or almost certain death in the gulag. Pavlik was killed by his grandfather. The cult around him was raised to destroy and weaken the bonds of family. Totalitarian regimes erode the bonds of family through the double infliction of misery and reward.

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And the cult is extended in a cutesy way during the holiday season, when authors at news sites instruct ungrateful adult children how to make family dinners more unpleasant by directly confronting their reactionary relations, rather than learning to deflect or excuse themselves from unwelcome conversation.

Slowly people are waking up to what's going down on the left - pure totalitarian horror. It's late seeing it - but better late than never...