The Long Winter of the Oppressed

Dictators have fallen on hard times. Their ceaseless efforts to stifle human creativity are like old man winter's fruitless bid to suppress the arrival of spring. Tyrants hate the vitality inherent in artistic expression. As Erica Jong has said, "If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all."

In some societies, the church drives censorship...in others, the political class takes the initiative. But in the most heinous cases of artistic persecution, all public institutions coalesce to silence creative discourse. Nazi Germany had very efficient methods for eliminating those who chronicled its atrocities. Among the many artists who were exterminated by Hitler, Irene Nemirovsky stands out as a remarkably talented writer whose stories of Nazi occupation have all the emotional grandeur of a Tolstoy novel.

Nemirovsky did not survive her imprisonment in Auschwitz. But her work still stands as a testament to the strength of her creative spirit. She wrote, "My God! what is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life. And the other countries? What are they to me? Empires are dying. Nothing matters. Whether you look at it from a mystical or a personal point of view, it's just the same. Let us keep a cool head. Let us harden our heart. Let us wait."

As we watch the fall of distant empires, consider the range of truths still unspoken against oppressors large and small. Do not relinquish your pen. It's a powerful weapon in the hands of a committed writer.