The novelist and historian of Stalinist repression, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, refers in his Nobel prize speech to a Russian proverb: "One word of truth outweighs the world." Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1972), p. 34.
Those who have survived repressive regimes tell of incredibly elaborate efforts of such regimes not just to control actions but to coerce thought, to brainwash, to cause people to think something other than what they know to be truth. Too often the effort has succeeded—at least temporarily. People have acted as though black were white, white were black, evil were good, and good were evil. They have given up the truth that belonged to them.
Oppressors generally seem more aware than before that it is this inward acquiescence which they need. But when the acquiescence in falsehood is lost, even supposedly superior force begins to melt like ice under the warm wind of a spring day.
