【推文】Krzysztof Szczawinski - Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie

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• 原推文1 - x.com/kristof_poland...

原文及個人翻譯

推文

What the West Still Doesn’t Get It:

Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie

Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.

This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.

Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.

西方仍然沒有理解：

共產主義的真正核心：系統性的謊言

大多數西方人認為他們了解共產主義。他們腦海中浮現的是麵包排隊、勞改營、失敗的五年計劃以及崩潰的蘇聯。他們將其視為一種被證偽的經濟理論——一種證明取消私有財產行不通的實驗。事情就這樣結束了，歷史向前發展。

這種誤解可能是我們時代最危險的智力失誤。

共產主義從未主要是一種經濟體系。經濟只是表面。在其之下隱藏著更為陰險的東西：一種完全、系統性、制度化的對謊言的承諾。不是偶爾的不誠實。不是普通的炒作或宣傳。而是更深層次的東西——一場針對真相本身的文明戰爭，通過每個機構、每個教室、每份報紙、每一次談話來發動，直到現實本身變得可以商議，而謊言成為人們呼吸的空氣。

The Words We’re Missing

The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:

Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.

These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.

And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.

我們錯失的詞語

波蘭語，是在這種體制下生活數十年形成的語言，創造了一些描述這種現象的詞彙，而英語根本無法匹敵：

Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] - 一種完全、普遍、融入社會的虛假狀態，一種整個社會被謊言徹底滲透的狀態，以至於真相幾乎難以接近。
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] - 一種深刻的、表演式的虛偽，宣稱與實際行為之間的差距，戴著的面具已經戴了太久，以至於開始感覺像一張臉。

這些不是用來形容個別說謊者。它們描述的是一種體系——一種建立在有組織的欺騙之上的社會組織模式，在這個體系中，謊言並非例外，而是基礎。英語沒有任何單詞可以完全表達這兩個概念，而且這種語言差距並非巧合。它反映了一種經驗上的差距。那些未曾生活在共產主義下的文化缺乏這些詞彙，因為他們缺乏這種創傷。

由於他們缺乏這些詞彙，他們很難認識到當這種現象以新的形式再次出現時。

The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism

What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.

That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.

This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.

The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.

延續：共產主義、左翼主義、覺醒主義

我們今天所說的「覺醒主義」，或者更廣泛的激進左派，並不是一種新的現象。它是在更新後的硬體上運行的相同的操作系統。具體細節已經改變——不再是無產階級，而是邊緣化的身份群體；不再是資產階級的敵人，而是種族主義者和恐跨性別者；不再是社會主義現實主義，而是多元、公平與包容 (DEI) 聲明。但深層結構是一樣的。

這種深層結構是：真相不是被發現的，而是被賦予的。現實並非要誠實地理解，而是要策略性地敘述。語言不是溝通的工具，而是權力的武器。而且，任何反對既定敘事的行為，不僅僅是錯誤——他們是危險的，必須被沉默、羞辱或摧毀。

這就是 zakłamanie 的現代形式。這就是 obłuda 佩戴著人權徽章。

這個堅持男性可以變成女性的運動，將以同樣熱情地主張，質疑這一點是一種暴力行為。那些聲稱要捍衛自由探究的機構，系統性地壓制異議。那些以寬容為最高價值的群體，是公共生活中最不寬容的力量之一。這種矛盾並非偶然——它是結構性的。這是這個體系按照設計運作的方式。

Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It

People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.

The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.

為什麼西方仍然沒有理解

那些在自由環境中長大的人，往往在某種程度上認為，邪惡勢力知道自己是在說謊。他們認為，在意識形態的表演背後，一定有一個玩世不恭的操作者，私下裡承認現實。這種假設是錯誤的，這也是為什麼西方人始終低估了他們所面對的東西。

極權主義的謊言，在其成熟階段，並非險詐。它是被相信的。或者說，它創造了一種條件，在這個條件下，信仰和表演之間的區別完全崩潰。人們學會流暢地、並且持續很長時間地說一些他們不相信的話，以至於他們失去了對自己真正想法的感知。

This system does not just produce liars – it produces people who can no longer clearly distinguish truth from the narrative they have been trained to emit.

This environment also produces a kind of cognitive adaptation often described as doublethink – the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, and to accept both as true when required. It is not merely lying to others, but a learned internal tolerance toward contradiction itself, where inconsistencies are tolerated because survival depends on it.
Literally twisting the minds.

Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and others who lived through this recognize the pattern immediately when they see it in Western institutions today. The show trials of Twitter mobs. The compelled speech. The ideological litmus tests for employment. The memory-holing of inconvenient facts. The ritualistic confessions of privilege. To a post-communist eye, it is unmistakable.

To eyes that have only known freedom, it looks like a passionate, if misguided, social movement.

That gap in perception – between those who have vocabulary for zakłamanie and those who do not – may be one of the most consequential fault lines in the Western world today. Because you cannot fight a disease you cannot name. And you cannot name what your language was never built to describe.

The first task, then, is translation – not just of words, but of the lived understanding those words carry. The lie is not a bug in this system. It is the system. Until that is understood, the West will keep arriving, perpetually surprised, to find that the institutions it trusted have been quietly hollowed out from within.

這個體系不僅僅產生說謊者，它還產生了那些再也無法清楚地區分真相和他們被訓練發出的敘述的人。

這種環境也會產生一種認知適應，通常被描述為「雙重思維」——同時持有兩種相互矛盾的信念的能力，並且在需要時接受這兩種信念都是真實的。這不僅僅是欺騙他人，而是一種學會的、對自身矛盾的內部容忍度，因為生存取決於容忍不一致性。 字面意義上扭曲思想。

波蘭人、捷克人、匈牙利人和那些經歷過這個體系的人，當他們在今天的西方機構中看到這種模式時，會立即認識到它。Twitter 暴民的公開審判。強制性的言論。就業的意識形態測試。對不便的事實進行「記憶清除」。儀式性的特權告白。對於那些經歷過共產主義的人來說，這毫無疑問。

對於那些只知道自由的人來說，它看起來像一個充滿熱情，但可能有些誤導的社會運動。

這種感知上的差距——在那些擁有 zakłamanie 的詞彙的人和那些沒有的人之間——可能是當今西方世界最重要的斷裂點之一。因為你無法對抗你無法命名的疾病。而且你無法用你的語言去描述它。

因此，第一項任務是翻譯——不僅僅是翻譯文字，而是翻譯這些文字所承載的實際理解。謊言並不是這個體系中的一個錯誤。它是這個體系本身。在沒有理解這一點之前，西方將不斷地、永遠地感到驚訝，發現他們信任的機構已經被悄悄地從內部掏空。