Trime Halili (Post) Social–Communism/Feminism nexus | Divergent voices and their impact on the role of women in the society
It has been around three decades since the drastic but gradual changes of political systems and the transformations of a big portion of the states of the South-East and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Under the communist regimes, taking place beforehand, for the majority of these countries, creating and introducing a personal or particular sociopolitical thought, which was different from the one that the state and its policy adopted, could result with severe consequences of many forms, both on individuals and communities. This prompts us to question the role of ideas which are external, new and/or unfamiliar to specific ideologies and political systems in power which enjoy such a degree of hegemony that in turn then conditions the silence of any divergent voices. Moreover, this further gives rise to the need of identifying internal contradictions and blind spots of ideologies which proclaim to foster freedom, equality and the right to an equal value of all voices, and which in practice categorically oppose and hence dispute themselves. While illustrating the characteristics and analyzing the way of thinking of Winston, the main character of the well-known Orwell novel 1984, Edmond Van de Bossche, in his article says: “The large mass of common people do not find in themselves the need to think independently, to question or to investigate what they have been taught. His fellow intellectuals have sold their inalienable right to think freely for security and a semblance of physical well-being.” (de Bossche, 1984). The fact that totalitarian systems were able to impose themselves thrivingly into the masses, comes as a result of a misunderstanding and of the amount of inimaginable effort, which is not always conscious, that is required and expected from people living in that system, in order to survive. In his book “1984” Orwell describes such a situation: “They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.” (Orwell, 1949). These statements, considering the time in which the book was written, appear to be a legitimate and a 164
