Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Kapuscinski redux
Over at the Netscape blog, now rechristened NewsQuake!, I've posted a slightly longer consideration of Ryszard Kapuscinski's case. The piece includes a brief conversation with Stephen Koch, the author of Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West and a longtime student of the ethical pitfalls that await any writer living in a police state. Here's a sample of our exchange:
Netscape: Are you surprised by the allegations? Or did the research and writing of Double Lives destroy that capacity for surprise?You can read the rest here.
Koch: I am not surprised; not even especially shocked. We in the West do not know what it means truly to lack freedom. One test of a totalitarian society comes when the exercise of the ordinary decencies, or when the mere living of something resembling a free life, calls for nothing short of heroism. When the principle of social cohesion becomes betrayal. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, Kapuscinski was a Polish journalist who traveled abroad. That alone was enough for the regime to extract its paranoiac quid pro quo. The regime took something from everyone's freedom. No exceptions. None.
