This piece was previously published in Daruma.
recipe for eternal suppression free speech
of
(9.2 million ratings)1
by joseph stalin, 1929
ingredients
½ cup of journalists
2 cups of censorship (disguise as cleansing of the media)
high gini coefficient (works best with >0.5)
a pinch of elites and a generous amount of peasants (1 : 20 ratio)
skyrocketing unemployment rate (the higher, the better)
vast land area to hold crimson ink spilled by journalists (shush, don’t call it blood)
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1847) for indoctrination
handfuls of raging political instability
arbitrary hopes and dreams for major reform (disguise as a pragmatic plan)2
a pinch of leadership (the charismatic kind)
totalitarianism and ruthless dictatorship to taste
assembly
slowly simmer away all remaining sense of morality/indoctrinate your veins with the fruit of Marx’s mind/separate your bourgeois class with the proletariats. a heterogeneous mixture is ideal. maintain the 1 : 20 ratio or all else will fail.
carefully extract the heart of your deteriorating country and drown all ½ cups of journalism with censorship/all truth should be cleanly washed and deceit should lie stark naked – yet one has to shield this from the public’s eyes. garnish with overweening ambition and charisma. govern a flock of over-submissive sheep/meal prep done./start crushing your men of their conscience. melt power and pale skin into one. flambe your country to the ground and its 125 million
people3/you are in the большевик 4 (majority) as long as you dispose of the other большевик (majority) /finally call it “free speech”.
author’s note: the journalists will spill red ink. don’t let it stain your flag.
deconstruction
i see cracks start to appear everywhere/our social fabric rendered to rags and pieces of cloth strung together our remaining sense of humanness/the aching of hunger pervades my body/transparency sits decomposing on our earth/our society is a rotting log feeding off the
souls of the malnourished and exploited/our nation’s breath reeks of corruption/yet he is glorified./is freedom supposed to lock our voices in a chokehold? i write to deconstruct, to deconstruct this narrative until…
the secret police come and shove their hands down my mouth Russia’s mouth/farewell, mother.
storage time: until death. store country in an airtight container. remember, oxygen allows them
to speak.
nutrition facts
0mg ethical principles; 0g democratic values 0% DV; 1,000g horror, bloodshed, loss; 0g freedom, 100g “freedom”
m.zedong__, adolf.hitlerr, and others have
made this recipe.
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1 The approximate number of people who passed away under Stalin’s reign.
2 A reference to Stalin’s Five Year Plans, as well as other dictators’ promises of reform
3 The population of Russia at the height of Stalin’s power
4 Pronounced “Bol’shevik” in Russian
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bandit. 
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