alexpgp | On self-respect...

I recently picked up Natan Sharansky's Fear No Evil at the local library's sale of discards. Like most books in the genre, it tells a tale that is both compelling and depressing at once.

Sharansky had already had his first run-in with the authorities by the time of my first trip to the Soviet Union in 1975, and he would be arrested on trumped-up charges of treason (which resulted in a Gulag sentence) less than three months after I married Galina. I never met the man. I'm certain he's not the self-proclaimed "dissident" who accosted me in the spring of 1976, in the lobby of the Intourist hotel, and tried really insistently to get me to fraudulently claim he was a relative of mine so that he could get out of the country. (Whoever that dude was had to have been either KGB or certifiably nuts, to do something like that there, but I digress...)

The following caught my eye, from early in the book:

I decided it was best to treat my captors like the weather. A storm can cause you problems, and sometimes those problems can be humiliating. But the storm itself doesn't humiliate you.

Once I understood this, I realized that nothing they did could humiliate me. I could only humiliate myself—by doing something I might later be ashamed of. During my first few days in Lefortovo I repeated this principle over and over until it was part of me. Nothing they can do can humiliate me. I alone can humiliate myself. Once I had absorbed that idea, nothing...could deprive me of my self-respect.

Like I said, compelling and depressing, at the same time.

Cheers...