Angel Studios is putting out a new four-part documentary series Live Not by Lies (April 1, 2025). While it deal with religious dissidents against Soviet totalitarianism, its message, the producers say, is mostly for the contemporary Western world: the totalitarianism emerging in our society.

The film is based on Rod Dreher’s book Live Not by Lies (Sentinel 2020):

For years, émigrés from the former Soviet bloc have been telling Rod Dreher they see telltale signs of “soft” totalitarianism cropping up in America–something more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Identity politics are beginning to encroach on every aspect of life. Civil liberties are increasingly seen as a threat to “safety”…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said that one of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming totalitarianism can’t happen in their country .– Publisher

The film’s and book’s title is borrowed from the title of an essay that Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) released on the day he was arrested in 1974 and exiled to the West. From the essay:

If we are too frightened, then we should stop complaining that someone is suffocating us. We ourselves are doing it. Let us then bow down even more, let us wail, and our brothers the biologists will help bring nearer the day when they are able to read our thoughts and that they are worthless and hopeless.

Evidence?

Some events taking place today should give us pause for thought. In Canada, for example, the claims about hundreds of unmarked graves of children at former residential schools are collapsing for lack of evidence. But politicians have not given up on the idea of resolving the problem that presents by making “denialism” a crime.

Canadian journalist Drea Humphrey comments “The fact that there is a political push to criminalize questioning why there are so many false unmarked grave claims should tell you that doing so is merely scratching the surface of the real issue.”

Perhaps the real issue here is a drift toward totalitarianism which means that lies convenient to government become the truth. Readers may wish to reflect on how far down that path their own societies are drifting.