Trudeau, Putin, and the Free Speech Archipelago

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Over the past few years right wing YouTubers and Substackers have sometimes tried to make their output clickable by overstating the degree to which liberal civilisation resembles totalitarian regimes of the past. The fact that they can still denounce it on YouTube undermines such comparisons, although Justin Trudeau’s invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act this month calls for a reassessment of how far we’ve travelled in that direction. With this in mind, I picked up Solzhenitsyn’s memoir, The Oak and the Calf, where he describes life as a dissident writer in the Soviet Union. He laboriously memorised his poems and stories until such time as it was safe to write them down; learned to make microfilms and secreted them in the covers of a book he sent to a friend in America; and pretended to have no interest in literature to everyone but his wife.