Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind

Who can gaze indifferently at the suffering of people whose only sin was that they blocked the path of historical processes? To lull his conscience he resorts to the thesis that a reactionary cannot be a good man.

Who is the reactionary? Everyone who opposes the inevitable historical processes, i.e. the Politburo police.

The thesis of the “sin of the reactionary” is argued very cleverly: every perception is “oriented,” i.e. at the very moment of perceiving we introduce our ideas into the material of our observations; only he sees reality truly who evaluates it in terms of the interests of the class that is the lever of the future, i.e. the proletariat.

Whoever sees reality otherwise than as the proletariat sees it sees it falsely; in other words, his picture of reality is deformed by the pressure of the interests of classes that are backward and so destined to disappear.

This line of reasoning has at least one flaw: it ignores the facts. The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their actions. When people are divided into “loyalists” and “criminals,” a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling; whereas among the “criminals” one finds a singularly high percentage of people who are direct, sincere, and true to themselves.

–Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind