The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

by Michael Malice

One Russian correspondent described the mindset of his colleagues, pointing out that every nation has its contingent of professional interpreters of Russia who have made it their life’s career to maintain appearances for the U.S.S.R. as Utopia-in-construction. With few exceptions they are a high-minded crew, coloring and concealing things with the noblest motives. Devotees of the theory of multiple truths, they speak more candidly than they write, and they think more candidly than they speak. They would as soon give the undiluted truth to their politically backward countrymen, whether readers of The Nation or the comic strips, as they would administer poison to children. Theirs is the logic of old-fashioned mothers who lie about sex to pubescent daughters—the American public, in their view, is simply too young, politically speaking, for the facts of Russian life. A few of them, I know, have inner qualms; the rest, on the contrary, feel positively heroic, strong in their ability to dispense with petty bourgeois prejudices about truth and mass brutality.