Political Quotes

“``Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows''--so wrote novelist George Orwell. In the late 1980s, I traveled to the former Soviet Union as part of a youth soccer program. Now, decades have passed since that trip, of course, but the memories to me are still vivid. The shelves were barren. Citizens drank from communal water fountains. The items most in demand and hardest to find were American items: blue jeans--Levi Strauss--and bubble gum. Of course, those weren't the only things common in Indiana that were contraband behind the Iron Curtain. For decades, news, literature, art, or entertainment that was not broadcast or approved by the state was scarce and available only by bootleg. The monuments towering over Russia were built to honor those who controlled it, the same men who regularly erased parts of Russia's history to suit their own political purposes, not to serve others. This was a society where ideas and dialogue existed only underground, where watching American movies was a jailable offense, where free thinkers weren't found in newspapers or airwaves but locked away in labor camps, where information protected the State instead of empowering the individuals, where history was constantly purged and revised. By the time I visited, though, Soviet leadership, in self- preservation mode, had gradually allowed citizens access to information and media as new technologies emerged.…”