“J.K. Rowling Compares Transgender Wokism to Soviet Union, Quotes Anti-Communist Hero,” by Kurt Zindulka, Breitbart, April 21, 2022:

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has compared the current climate of fear surrounding the discussion of transgender issues to the Soviet Union, quoting an anti-communist hero and leader of the Velvet Revolution.

“A spectre is haunting Eastern Europe: the spectre of what in the West is called dissent.”

These words were penned by playwright and Czechoslovakian President Václav Havel in his 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless to describe the brutal drive for conformity in all things enforced by the communist Soviet Union in his homeland, and elsewhere across the Soviet bloc.

Now, it seems, Havel’s words are being once again used by dissenters, but this time against the modern woke push for conformity in the ostensibly liberal West.

In a Twitter thread responding to a post declaring that the statement “trans women are women” is being used to force biological women into bowing before the woke mob, author J.K. Rowling shared Havel’s parable of a greengrocer who hung up the Marxist creed “Workers of the World Unite” in his shop window in order to passively conform with the groupthink of the Soviet Union.

Quoting from The Power of the Powerless, Rowling went on to post: “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them… it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves.

“Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it.”