After realizing that I had already spent 30 pounds for the ticket, 35 pounds for transportation and 15 pounds for extra lunch money to watch this drama, I secretly prayed in my heart: Don’t let people down. , The £80 could have been used to buy 30 boxes of eggs or two hot pot meals or a dress.
"Burnt by the Sun" did not disappoint.
Halfway through, I was a little disappointed. When Mitya ridiculed Sergei sternly, I saw the familiar black and white of "the righteous condemning the fallen" again. But the second part of the play dramatized a U-turn, and the whole story suddenly became three-dimensional.
The story takes place in the Soviet Union in 1936. Sergei is a Soviet general, Marousia is his young wife, and Nadia is their lovely daughter. Their family, as well as many relatives and friends of Marousia, went to the lake for vacation. The happy holiday is interrupted by a sudden visitor: Mitya, Marousia's old lover, visits suddenly after disappearing for 12 years. He accused Marousia of betraying their love and betraying their lives to seek glory and take refuge in the general. Marousia accused him of leaving without saying goodbye. An ugly fact gradually emerged: Sergei secretly ordered Mitya to leave without saying goodbye: In order to get her, Sergei secretly sent him to Paris as an intelligence officer. Mitya accepted the task for "the opportunity to return to his hometown", but went away 12 year. But does Mitya really "have to" be a spy? Sergei asked him: What have you done all these years? You betray your friends and work as a secret police, with blood on your hands. It's not for "the opportunity to return to your hometown" at all. You are the executioner who sells your life for glory. Then an even uglier fact emerged: Mitya arrested Sergei as a secret police during this trip-in 1936, it was the eve of the purge within Stalin's party.
If there is a central idea in the play, it can be summed up with this brief dialogue between Mitya and Sergei:
Mitya: You know better than anyone that I was forced!
Sergei: There is no so-called forced, everyone has the opportunity to choose, as long as you are willing to pay for it!
"Everyone has the opportunity to choose." In other words, it is not, or not only, Stalin’s evil, not, or not only, the KKB’s lewd prestige, not, or not only, the terror of the Gulag Islands, which created the terror of the suppression of counter-cleansing. It is the choice made by everyone—every ordinary person—at the time. Despotism can succeed. It cannot rely on one person's tricks. It must be the result of thousands of people working together: their "assistance", or at least their silence, paved the way for the autocrats.
In other words, although Mitya had no choice but to act as a spy at the beginning, he was not innocent, because 12 years of infestation has made him the system itself; although the accusation of Sergei as a "German spy" is completely slander, he is not innocent, because before the purge He is one of the biggest vested interests of that system. Even Marousia and her family are not innocent. It is their more than ten years of silence that has made this system stronger and stronger. When Marousia's grandma kept reminiscing about how beautiful the music "before liberation" was, Sergei asked: If you really think how beautiful the past is, why don't you stand up and defend it? You once had the opportunity to choose.
"You once had the opportunity to choose", the essence of liberalism. As a political philosophy, liberalism is a theory about the role of government, but on the other hand, it is also a theory about individual responsibility—because it is the individual’s practice of freedom in their daily lives that makes it possible to restrict government monopoly . A free system is like a highway. Without countless cleaners and road repairers, it will quickly degenerate into a wilderness in the wind and sun. It is in this sense that the premise of a "minimal government" is precisely the "fullest individual." The impulse of human beings to escape freedom through left-wing or right-wing totalitarianism is also understandable, because greater freedom means greater responsibility, because a free person is destined to be a spiritual orphan, and he is helpless, except for himself. Mind and heart.
Watching this drama, one cannot think of the cruel political movement in China. From the 1980s to the present, "scar literature" has emerged one after another. From the old right to the Red Guards, almost everyone claimed to be a victim. Maybe all these people should read "Burnt by the Sun", then they might understand: if you have actively criticized others in the early period of the Cultural Revolution, then you will no longer be innocent when you were driven down in the late period of the Cultural Revolution; if you ever During the Great Leap Forward, the farmers were forced to surrender the non-existent Tibetan grain, then you would no longer be innocent when you were criticized in the Four Cleans; if you ever violently deprived the property of the “rich land and opposing the bad rightists”, then you would stand by in the communalization movement. Watching that your own food was no longer innocent when it was snatched by the village cadres; if you ever accepted the title of a committee member and the treatment with peace of mind, then you would no longer be innocent when you were labeled as a rightist... If you have been in all these sports Keep silent, then when you are embroiled in the machine of political struggle, you have to know that it is not someone else, you, yourself, is your own gravedigger.
Of course, it may be too extravagant to criticize historical figures today. The choice between physical destruction and spiritual destruction may not be freedom at all. The cruelty of an autocratic system is that it allows individuals to choose between this kind of "impossibility" and that kind of "impossibility." From this perspective, people born and older than today are not necessarily better, they are just luckier. Perhaps what people of any age can do is to say no in time before "possible" becomes "impossible."
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