"We are spoiled children, we who can allow ourselves to play with the idea of truth because we are not forced to lie."

      Rémi Brague, Moderately modern, trans. Paul Seaton (South Bend, IN:  St. Augustine's Press, 2019), 149.  And yet we are, in subtler ways (150):  "What Solzhenitsyn suffered and witnessed to in its particularly virulent form, but also its obvious and so to speak frank form, and thus easier to discern, is still present under softer forms, but also more subtle and thus more difficult to confront.  To be sure, the means of diffusion of 'official doctrines' are less concentrated in our European societies than they were with the Soviet News Agency, TASS.  And the techniques of coercion here are very far from those of the KGB or the Red Army.  Nonetheless, today we still have authorized opinion, obligatory opinions, and other interdictions."