Petra Nemcova: “When I was growing up there was communism, so I had no influence from Western countries. We didn’t know about models or anything.”
Reminds me of a passage from Ayn Rand’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947:
John McDowell R-PA: Doesn’t anybody smile in Russia any more?Rand: Well, if you ask me literally, pretty much no.
McDowell: They don’t smile?
Rand: Not quite that way; no. If they do, it is privately and accidentally. Certainly, it is not social. They don’t smile in approval of their system….
McDowell: That is a great change from te Russians I have always known, and I have known a lot of them. Don’t they do things at all like Americans? Don’t they walk across town to visit their mother-in-law or somebody?
Rand: Look, it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free. It is in a way good that you can’t even conceive of what it is like. Certainly they have friends and mothers-in-law. They try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, when you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don’t know who is going to do what to you because you have friends who spy on you, and there is no law or rights of any kind.
Journals of Ayn Rand 380-81 (D. Harriman, ed. 1997).
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