In Washington this week, Vice President JD Vance introduced the documentary series based on my 2020 bestseller Live Not By Lies, which is about the lessons anti-communist dissidents of the Soviet bloc have for us today. In the book (which has been translated into most European languages), I talk about the “soft totalitarianism” of wokeness and left-wing illiberalism, and feature interviews with former dissidents who warn that we are facing a new form of oppression in the West—one with striking similarities to what they endured under the Soviets.
Some of these people—Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, and others—appear in the four-part documentary, telling their stories and warning contemporary people to wake up while there is still time.
In his speech, Vance praised the book and the documentary, telling the Washington audience that it contains an important lesson for us today.
The way to deal with being attacked by the ruling elites of a given society is to speak the truth is to live not by lies. The incentives, the financial rewards, the social benefits of living by lies are often great. But Rod’s lesson is important: you are going to sacrifice your soul, you are going to sacrifice your civilization, you are going to sacrifice your family, you are going to sacrifice your country, if you give in to the easy pathway.
The vice president said that we are not going to save our civilization “unless we have the courage to speak the truth, unless we have the courage to live the truth.”
We cannot surrender to despair in the face of the overwhelming challenges we face, he said. President Trump’s 2024 victory, against all the forces of the governing elites and the media, is a sign that “the American people, and Western peoples, are a hell of a lot more resilient than our elites give them credit for.”
“This is not going to be easy, but if we speak the truth, and we refuse to live by lies, we can re-deliver on the promise of Western civilization,” Vance continued.
He spoke of “bad things in Europe”—people arrested for praying, people having their jobs destroyed, or even thrown in prison for saying the things that the ruling elites in their societies demand. At the same time, he went on, we are seeing people speaking out—on migration, on religious freedom—in ways that we haven’t seen in decades, if ever.
The core virtue is found in the Christian faith, the Catholic politician said, and trusting that God will have the last word. If we stay brave and faithful, then we will see “great things happen in the United States of America, and great things happening throughout the West.”
JD Vance was speaking to Americans, but also to Europeans. The day before the vice president’s address, a French court carried out a de facto political assassination of Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally, France’s most popular political party, and the leading candidate to win the presidency in 2027. In a ruling widely viewed on the right as political rather than legal, Le Pen was convicted on corruption charges and effectively banned from politics through the next election.
This follows the ruling elites’ scuttling of last year’s Romanian election results, and the arrogant boasting of former EU commissioner Thierry Breton that Brussels helped annul the Romanian vote, and would do the same in Germany if the German people voted the wrong way (that is, for the right-wing Alternative For Germany party).
In Italy last month, the country’s top appeals court ruled that the Meloni government must pay damages to a group of migrants whom the state delayed by a few days from making their illegal landing on Italian soil. Over and over again, the left-wing judiciary in Italy prevents democratically elected governments from imposing restrictions on mass migration—resulting in Italian cities being overrun by migrants, some of them violent.
Commenting on the ruling, an Italian friend told me that these judges are destroying the people’s faith in liberal democracy. If liberal democracy means surrendering the sovereignty of one’s country, then people will abandon liberal democracy, he warned.
After the Le Pen ruling, a prominent French journalist texted me to say that “JD Vance’s Munich speech is vindicated.”
The journalist referred to the blockbuster address the U.S. vice president delivered earlier this year at the Munich Security Conference, in which he told Europeans that their greatest security problems include their refusal to deal effectively with mass migration, and the ruling elites’ determination to crack down on free speech—including European citizens who complain about the ways they are governed.
European elites were outraged, but the speech landed with many ordinary Europeans, who suffer under the woke yoke of the ruling classes in Brussels and in their particular countries.
Vance’s Munich address made him into the leading hate figure among European bien-pensants. Even leading Catholic voices condemn Vance, a fellow Catholic, for saying, contrary to Pope Francis, that countries have a right to limit migration for the sake of the common good (incidentally, the Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees with Vance).
A Catholic priest told me in France that his religious community will pray daily for the Catholic vice president, saying that his success has a lot to do with whether or not France will have a future. I believe that is true as well. We must not surrender to despair or a sense of futility. Yes, we are ruled by lies and liars, but we have a duty to refuse falsehoods and to refuse fear of punishment for speaking and living the truth.
The title of my book, and the documentary series, comes from the final communiqué sent by Nobel Prize-winning dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn to his Russian followers in 1974, on the eve of his forced exile. When people say they can do nothing in the face of state power based on lies, they are wrong, said Solzhenitsyn.
We have internalized well the lessons drummed into us by the state; we are forever content and comfortable with its premise: we cannot escape the environment, the social conditions; they shape us, “being determines consciousness.” What have we to do with this? We can do nothing.
But we can do—everything!—even if we comfort and lie to ourselves that this is not so. It is not “they” who are guilty of everything, but we ourselves, only we!
The message of Solzhenitsyn is the same as the message of the book Live Not By Lies, and the same as the message of JD Vance this week in Washington: We do not have to live this way!
Solzhenitsyn, one of the greatest heroes of freedom ever to draw breath, told his followers that there is strength in numbers:
The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands—they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands—we will not recognize our country!
Europe’s liberation from its decline will not be given to it from on high. It will be seized from below, by plain Europeans who are no longer intimidated by leftist judges and Brussels bureaucrats. It will come through the efforts of ordinary people who are willing to sacrifice their comfort and safety for what Solzhenitsyn, in his 1970 Nobel lecture, called “one word of truth.” The great Russian novelist thundered against “the spirit of Munich,” by which he meant Neville Chamberlain’s disgraceful “peace in our time” capitulation to Adolf Hitler in 1938:
The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people—and there are many in today’s world—elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today—and tomorrow, you’ll see, it will all be all right.
But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.
Faced with the civilizational challenges of the present moment, will Europeans have the courage to reject the Spirit of Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich and embrace the Spirit of Vance’s 2025 Munich? Will Europeans be timid cattle, or brave men? That is a decision that rests neither in Washington, nor Brussels, nor in the chambers of politicians and judges, but rather in the hearts and minds of every European.
Live Not By Lies airs throughout the month of April on the Angel.com platform, available worldwide.
