"Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe"
About this Quote
Paranoia is the real border in this line: not the Iron Curtain as policy, but the way suspicion colonizes everyday life. Smedley’s “everybody calls everybody a spy” isn’t a flourish; it’s an ecosystem description. The repetition of “everybody” does the work of a statistic without pretending to be one, insisting that the problem isn’t a few bad actors or a particularly nosy state functionary. It’s systemic, contagious, social. “Secretly” is the tell: denunciation doesn’t just happen in courtrooms or party meetings; it thrives in kitchens, stairwells, workplaces, the intimate spaces where trust is supposed to live.
As a journalist who moved through the ideological storms of the early 20th century, Smedley knew how regimes curate narratives about stability and unity. This sentence punctures that performance by focusing on affect: the felt experience of living in a world where accusation is cheap and consequences are expensive. Surveillance here isn’t only technical monitoring; it’s a psychological technology that recruits citizens as sensors. When “everybody” is both watcher and watched, the state doesn’t need omniscience to win - it just needs to make uncertainty permanent.
The closing line, “You never feel safe,” is deceptively plain, almost anti-rhetorical. That’s why it lands. It refuses the romantic language of martyrdom or resistance and instead names the quieter damage: the slow erosion of confidence, speech, and solidarity. The subtext is bleakly modern: control isn’t merely enforced; it’s internalized, until fear becomes the default civic mood.
As a journalist who moved through the ideological storms of the early 20th century, Smedley knew how regimes curate narratives about stability and unity. This sentence punctures that performance by focusing on affect: the felt experience of living in a world where accusation is cheap and consequences are expensive. Surveillance here isn’t only technical monitoring; it’s a psychological technology that recruits citizens as sensors. When “everybody” is both watcher and watched, the state doesn’t need omniscience to win - it just needs to make uncertainty permanent.
The closing line, “You never feel safe,” is deceptively plain, almost anti-rhetorical. That’s why it lands. It refuses the romantic language of martyrdom or resistance and instead names the quieter damage: the slow erosion of confidence, speech, and solidarity. The subtext is bleakly modern: control isn’t merely enforced; it’s internalized, until fear becomes the default civic mood.
Quote Details
| Topic | Privacy & Cybersecurity |
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