Mária Wittner is also featured in Rod Dreher's new book about the lurking left-wing PC dictatorship, in which she outlines how to live without lies in the soft totalitarianism of political correctness based on the accounts of Central European personalities who resisted communism.
A communist dictatorship in America? Come on! That is impossible! Yet Live Not By Lies – A Manual for Christian Dissidents warns of the danger of something like this
Of course, Dreher is not afraid of the establishment of a classic dictatorship, nor is he afraid of classic communism. But from the soft, invisible, politically correct dictatorship of the extreme left, whose builders are champions of social justice, and whose ideology is SJW ideology, woke-ism, and critical theories. This kind of dictatorship of opinion is weaving its web more and more densely in public life, in public discourse and in the entire American society.
Rod Dreher was told by a Czech medical acquaintance back in 2015 that his mother, who defected from communist Czechoslovakia, complains that she is increasingly experiencing things in America that are like the harbingers of communism.
As an example, he mentioned a pizzeria in Indiana, whose Protestant Christian owner refuses to deliver food to same-sex couples. The pizzeria received several threats because of this, and someone on Twitter called for the place to be set on fire. The family that runs the pizzeria has moved.
Rod Dreher then visited many Central European émigrés and resistance fighters both in America and in their homeland. Hungarians among them - Mária Wittner is one of them.
“Do they also think that American life is moving toward some kind of soft totalitarianism? They all said yes—often emphatically,” Dreher writes.
What is it all about? "Utopian progressives constantly change the accepted rules of thought, speech, and behavior." And the retaliation for deviating from this, breaking new taboos, "can be extreme, including losing your livelihood and ruining your reputation forever." People will be "forever pariahs for voicing politically incorrect opinions." Under the guise of diversity, inclusion, and equality and other egalitarian slogans , "the left creates powerful mechanisms to control consciousness, discourse, and marginalize dissenters as evil."
Mária Wittner, who was sentenced to death after 1956 and many of her fellow inmates were executed, tells Rod Dreher that she told the jailer she was lying. The judge asked him: why does he say that the jailer is lying? Mária Wittner answered: "Because it is important to speak clearly." The conclusion of the Hungarian hero is: "Ultimately, those who are afraid fare worse than the brave."
The entire article can be read at: mandiner.hu
