Posted on 07/15/2023 5:18:06 AM PDT by Twotone
Milan Kundera died in Paris this week at the grand old age of ninety-four. He was, as he insisted, a French writer, but better known to the world as a "Czech writer. In recent years, his 1967 novel The Joke was never far from Mark's side, and indeed seems to have been adopted by the Wokestapo as an instruction manual. This essay is from The [Un]documented Mark Steyn:
I read The Joke, Milan Kundera's first novel, when I was a schoolboy. Bit above my level, but, even as a teenager, I liked the premise. Ludvik is a young man in post-war, newly Communist Czechoslovakia. He's a smart, witty guy, a loyal Party member with a great future ahead of him. His girlfriend, though, is a bit serious. So when she writes to him from her two-week Party training course enthusing about the early-morning calisthenics and the "healthy atmosphere," he scribbles off a droll postcard:
Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.
A few weeks later, he's called before a committee of the District Party Secretariat. He tries to explain he was making a joke. Immediately they remove him from his position at the Students Union; then they expel him from the Party, and the university; and shortly thereafter he's sent to work in the mines. As a waggish adolescent, I liked the absurdity of the situation in which Ludvik finds himself.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Rest In Peace, Milan.
One thing I learned from the COVID lockdowns - we’re surrounded by millions of humorless scolds.
Brilliant. I hope everyone understands that Mark Steyn has no education beyond high school. Which means he learned how to learn in high school - which just happened to be the same school that JRR Tolkein also attended.
“...just happened to be the same school that JRR Tolkein also attended.”
And Rush Limbaugh. Only one semester of college before he jumped ship.
We need to be more aggressive in humorously mocking them!
Kundera described cancel culture decades before it has manifested itself worldwide.
Thanks for posting this. I forgot what a prolific writer he was. Time for some re-reading of:
The Joke
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Immortality
...to name just a few! :)
And the effects of a “politically incorrect” statement will follow you for a lifetime, forever branded and ostracized from the wider society, isolated and friendless.
Milan Kundera has provided a truly deep insight here, a side of human nature that has always stood in the shadows. Authoritarian minds simply cannot stand ridicule or mocking in any way, shape, form, manner, or fashion. Laughter at their expense is intolerable, and will be met with the most severe of consequences.
Authoritarian minds simply cannot stand ridicule or mocking in any way, shape, form, manner, or fashion. Laughter at their expense is intolerable, and will be met with the most severe of consequences.
**********
Why the ridiculous curse from Harry Potter works so well.
tyranny goes by many names
bfl
Ludvic forgot the /s...
“Authoritarian minds simply cannot stand ridicule or mocking in any way, shape, form, manner, or fashion.”
During the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) hearings, that identified hundreds of communists who had infiltrated the US government, investigators learned a very useful fact about fanatical communists, or really, any form of fanatic.
They have such a small, sealed mindset that they cannot take a joke. And this is deadly serious.
In a normal person, a jo+ke creates a state of imbalance that, as a defense, elicits laughter as a protective mechanism. However, a fanatic’s mindset only accepts thoughts within his belief system. Other ideas are discarded as irrational.
Importantly, this closed mindset is both brittle and fragile. So such people, when forced to take in a new idea, may experience a collapse of their mindset, which can propel them into schizophrenia.
In any event, the HUAC investigators would tell the suspected communist a joke. If they were ignored, while not conclusive, it was a good indicator that the suspect was a fanatic.
And this still applies today. The left is filled with any number of fanatics, and if you hit one of their trigger issues, they launch into an attack against you. And it lacks any proportionality, because the issue doesn’t really matter. You have “attacked” their entire worldview. Any all such attacks they treat with deadly seriousness.
And if you shatter their worldview, what remains to them is madness.
Never apologize. It only makes matters worse. The Left never forgives.
“No one spoke on my behalf, and finally everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my teachers and my closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion.”
They didn’t want end up in the same place.
A couple of morals from this story...
1. Terrorism works
2. There are very few heroes in this world
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