Dilemma

The American technocracy and its mass media’s total control over free speech is so much stronger and more insidious than the control the Communist Party exercised over the former socialist republics in Eastern Europe.

These soviet satellite socialist republics in Eastern Europe did not have the most advanced online technology to censor free speech, their algorithms, a compliant mass media totally devoted to socialism, nor many Marxist universities like we have today around the U.S.A. and in the world.

The former soviet style republics had to rely on an army of letter openers, informants, tapping phones, listeners to recorded phone and in-home conversations, teacher interrogations of innocent and naïve children in schools about their parents, and the snitching of neighbors, friends, and relatives in exchange for a monthly trip to the Communist Party’s grocery stores. Starving and standing in lines daily for a bit of food was not very desirable and people did what they thought saved their lives – turning in total strangers, neighbors, and relatives to the security police as enemies of the state.

Knowing that any message was intercepted by this army of informants, it was smart to find a “trusted” person who, for one reason or another, was going to travel abroad on business or for an international competition, and give them a missive, a journal, a recorded cassette, a card, or the manuscript of an inconvenient book or article that would tell the world what living in a communist-controlled country/prison was like. Such a person would have a personal watcher but, there were ways and opportunities to escape their prying eyes and make contact with the west.

On such a business trip, someone was approached by a high school friend to carry a cassette tape to her fiancé residing in France at the time. The person agreed, not knowing what it contained, and taking a huge risk that he might be discovered, the tape confiscated, listened to, and then he might be arrested before he even left the country.

Such last-minute arrests were not uncommon. My own cousin was not allowed to go abroad to work in the Middle East in the mid-eighties. He was pulled out of the line to board the plane at the airport. The reason given was that he had a cousin in the capitalist U.S., and it was such an undesirable connection for a proletarian.

As fate had decided, the businessman made it out of the country without an incident and flew to Paris. Having run his handbag through several x-ray machines at the airport, the businessman became concerned that the tape had been erased. Upon reaching his destination in Paris, he decided to find a cassette player and to listen to the beginning of the tape to make sure that it had not been erased. After a few requests and a nice tip, a maid brought him a cassette player.

The tape was fine, it did not contain anything politically damaging to his socialist country. To his surprise and shock, the high school friend described HIM in the most unflattering, infuriating, and damaging ways which offended him greatly, given the risks he had taken. He pondered whether he should inconvenience himself further by contacting her fiancé by phone, pay for a taxi to meet him somewhere, or take the metro from his arrondissement hotel to where this person was residing. The tape had to be disposed of or delivered.

What would you have done?