Between civic duty and snitching

If you found out that someone you know is hatching up a terrorist plot, would you inform the police? Of course you would. Any decent person would consider it his civic duty to do so.

Yet in late 1880 Dostoyevsky asked his publisher Suvorin the same question, only to receive a different reply. Both men were conservative monarchists, and that was the height of People’s Will terrorism.

An open season on government officials had been declared; many had been murdered. The ‘Liberator’ tsar Alexander II had been targeted for several assassination attempts. In a couple of months the last one would succeed.

Nevertheless, two conservative Christians, one of whom had nailed just such criminals to the wall in his prophetic novel The Possessed, said they’d be unable to denounce the evildoers. For one thing, they agreed that the liberal intelligentsia, which was to say intelligentsia, would unleash such a storm of abuse that they wouldn’t be able even to stay in Russia, never mind in their professions.

And then they both felt that denouncing people to the police for any reason was morally wrong. Somehow… Yes, they knew that feeling was irrational, but still… informing wasn’t quite the done thing.

The writing was on the wall. If even people like Dostoyevsky and Suvorin were for all intents and purposes ready to act as passive accomplices to crazed bomb-throwers, society in Russia was thoroughly corrupt and irreversibly doomed. Civic virtues had disintegrated, and society no longer lived according to any traditional morality. Leftie hatred had ousted Christian love.

Some 40 years later the Russians, including the intelligentsia, no longer had any compunctions against denouncing tens of millions of people to the CheKa for any reason or none. It took the Bolsheviks just a couple of years to corrupt society into extinction, and the Russians were busily snitching on one another.

Telling a political joke, not standing up when Stalin’s name was mentioned, praising anything Western – any such indiscretion painted a target on the perpetrator’s back. And even regular everyday squabbles were resolved in a similar fashion.

Comrade Ivanov would find out that his wife was sleeping with Comrade Petrov. Out would come pen and paper, and Comrade Ivanov would write: “As a loyal communist, I consider it my duty to report that Comrade Petrov has said…” Two days after the letter was posted, Comrade Petrov would disappear, never to be seen again. Job done.

This newly found appetite for denunciations was never sated. The other day I saw an interview with a former KGB officer who was asked how he and his colleagues recruited informers.

“Recruited? Are you joking?” He was genuinely surprised. “We’d recruit the few people who regularly travelled abroad. Other than that, people came to us. We didn’t have enough manpower to wade through the millions of voluntary denunciations inundating Lubyanka. Why on earth would we have to recruit?”

He was slightly disingenuous – they did recruit –  but you get the general point. Millions of Soviet citizens were murdering one another with pen and paper.

There we have it: two extremes in the same country half a century apart. At one end is a society with warped morality; at the other, a society with no morality at all.

First, there were good people who wouldn’t denounce even terrorists. Then, they were replaced by scum who would denounce their own families (google Pavlik Morozov when you get the chance).

Now, using Russia as a trampoline, let’s vault into Britain, circa 2021. We’ve already agreed that we’d have no problem reporting potential terrorists, the kind of chaps who blow up buses, shoot up public gatherings or drive SUVs through crowds. In that sense, our society is more morally robust than Russia, circa 1880.

However, it’s my conviction that we are being pushed towards another extreme, with the ‘liberal establishment’, which is to say the powers that be, pushing our society towards the abyss of mass denunciations.

People are encouraged, tacitly or explicitly, to snitch not only on drug dealers, but also on lockdown breakers (in 2020 the police received 195,000 such denunciations), tax evaders (or even avoiders), mask objectors, global warming deniers, anyone uttering what’s coyly called ‘the n-word’ or some such – and so on, ad nauseam.

Students report on their professors, pupils on their teachers, employees on employers, neighbours on neighbours, and they all feel self-righteously vindictive. They pat themselves on the back like contortionists for responding to the clarion call of zeitgeist, so loud that it drowns out all moral sense.

So far the harm done to those denounced isn’t comparable to Russia’s Gulag and mass executions. At worst the victims lose their jobs, not their lives. A judge may give them a stern warning, but not a tenner in prison. But the moral harm done to society is frighteningly similar.

Any good society encourages the good side of human nature; any bad one, the rotten side. And when the rot reaches a certain critical mass, society explodes into a mass of anomic, deracinated individuals whose moral compass has gone haywire.

Take this from someone who has experienced such a society: you won’t like it. But at least I had somewhere to escape to. If the West turns into a Soviet Union, no haven will exist. It’ll be like Lord of the Flies: savage children run the roost, a pig’s head on a totem pole, and there are no moral rules.

Now comes the quintessential British question: What are we going to do about it? In this case, there are things we can do — or die trying.

We must fight modern perversions every step of the way. There are no small things, for many small things can come together to create a huge disaster. For a start, we should all refuse to submit to perverse diktats of modernity, starting with those on woke vocabulary and grammar.

We must join forces to resist any new morality because there is no such thing. New morality is old evil, to be rejected out of hand. And real morality is as unequivocal on denouncing terrorists as on refusing to denounce someone who insists that only two sexes exist.

Active resistance is a must: we should respond to PC hectoring with strong words and even threats of violence. And we should never report, say, a chap trying to keep more of his money out of the state’s sticky palms. Now, reporting a terrorist is a whole different story.