剛剛去林口買虱目魚粥和生餛飩途中我說起Victor
Serge
Looking back on his life, Serge said:
I give myself credit for having seen clearly in a number of important
situations. In itself, this is not so difficult to achieve, and yet it is
rather unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd intelligence,
than of good sense, goodwill and a certain sort of courage to enable one to
rise above the pressures of one’s environment and the natural inclination to
close one’s eyes to facts, a temptation that arises from our immediate
interests and from the fear which problems inspire in us.
Among the countless things he had seen
clearly: that the creation of the Cheka (the secret police) in 1917 was one of
the Bolsheviks’ ‘gravest and most impermissible errors’; that the Bolshevik
leadership had lied about the nature of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921; that
the Communists would turn on the independent revolutionary left in Spain; that
Stalin would eliminate the entire 1917 revolutionary generation in order to
safeguard his power; that Russia had become a vast prison camp. (It was Serge
who first described the state as totalitarian.)
And yet he never lost hope, that
ordinary people would act for themselves and take control of their own lives.
Gordon, Paul. Vagabond Witness: Victor
Serge and the Politics of Hope (Kindle location 117-127). John Hunt Publishing.
Kindle edition.
