Why People Are Getting Dumber

Izabella Tabarovksy, Aero: What My Soviet Life Has Taught Me About Censorship and Why It Makes Us Dumb 

A few years into my American life, I took a class on western thought. The only philosopher on the syllabus familiar to me was Karl Marx, and he wasn’t why I’d signed up: I’d had enough of him in the USSR. Over the next two semesters, I read Adam Smith and Frederick Douglass, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and Arthur Koestler. I read American feminists whom the Soviet propaganda had mocked mercilessly, and black writers whom it had ignored completely. One day, as I walked out of class in possession of yet another eye-opening piece of knowledge, I caught myself thinking: how dare they have hidden all this from me! If I’d encountered these ideas earlier in life, I would have been a different person. 

They, of course, were the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its armies of censors, brainwashers and propagandists—at work in the media, in schools, in publishing houses—who simultaneously vaunted Soviet education and left us Soviet citizens devastatingly ignorant. I spent my first years as an American catching up on everything that generations of faceless bureaucrats had purged from our lives, deeming it harmful to the Soviet people’s communist consciousness (and to the Party’s hold on power). 

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WNU Editor: As a former Soviet citizen and now a Canadian citizen .... I can so relate to the above article.