The pretext for all this, of course, was the necessity of “containing” Communism, which, they unblushingly informed me, was a threat to the “free” world. I did not say to what extent this free world menaced me, and millions like me. But I wondered how the justification of blatant and mindless tyranny, on any level, could operate in the interests of liberty, and I wondered what interior, unspoken urgencies of these people made necessary so thoroughly unattractive a delusion.
