JD Vance Speaks at Rod Dreher’s ‘Live Not by Lies’ Screening in DC
“The ruling elite of the societies have become actively hostile to some of the very ideas that those countries were founded on in the first place,” Vance said before an audience of about 100 people at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. In addition to Vance’s speech, the by-invitation-only event featured a screening and discussion of the first episode of the film series Live Not by Lies released April 1, by Angel Studios.
The vice president praised the 2020 book the film is based upon, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, written by Rod Dreher, who he said is a “dear friend.”
The book’s title comes from a 1974 essay Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in which he urged his countrymen to stand up for truth and resist the Communist regime’s pervasive ideology. It features the accounts of survivors of Soviet persecution and argues that life in the West today is a sort of “soft totalitarianism” that bears a resemblance to life behind the Iron Curtain.
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“You see, in Europe, people arrested for praying, and you have the police asking them, ‘Well, what are you praying about?’ — as if it was any of the police’s business. Yes, you see people who are thrown in prison or have their jobs destroyed because they don’t believe the right things or they don’t say the right things, according to the liberal intelligentsia that rules some of these societies, Vance said.
The vice president credited President Donald Trump for “making progress” toward a return to these faith-based values, as evidenced by the administration’s protection of free speech.
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Dreher referred to the work of philosopher Hannah Arendt whose 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, pointed to certain conditions that made Germans and Russians incapable of resisting the state’s “lies,” even to the point of turning against their fellow citizens and reporting their transgressions to authorities.
Related:
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The CIA also provided funds to the New Leader, Sol Levitas’s one-time socialist magazine that became an important outlet for the anti-Communist Left (publishing Khruschev’s secret speech in 1956 and introducing American readers to the work of Josef Brodsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn).
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Public Intellectuals: Hannah Arendt (archived)
It is, perhaps, notable that as a young student Hannah Arendt was the Nazi-sympathising philosopher Martin Hedeigger’s lover. His little Jewess trophy, perhaps redolent in his mind of Weimar Republic decadency. Surprisingly, she never really developed a hated for him, intellectually at least, despite his stunning failure in selling his soul to the Nazis.
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Arendt’s fame rests especially on the proverbial shitstorm caused by her coverage of the former SS officer Alfred Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She coined the immortal phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe how under Nazism ambitious functionaries and bean counters – such as Eichmann – climbed career ladders without regard for the supreme brutality of their regime.
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As Arendt describes Eichmann:
Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported.
Perhaps no one besides Adolf Hitler was as obsessed with killing Europe’s Jews as SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann. Years after the war, while in hiding in Argentina, Eichmann told a former Dutch Nazi: “To be frank with you, had we killed all of them, the ten point three million [European Jews], I would be happy and say, ‘All right, we managed to destroy an enemy.’ ” In trying to accomplish this goal he had never shown any sign of remorse. When asked to describe his boss, one of Eichmann’s aides said: “He gave no indication of any human feeling toward these people. He was not immoral: he was amoral and completely ice-cold in his attitude. ”
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