Word: unfreedom
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...opposite of freedom may be slavery or captivity, but the range of unfreedoms is wide and subtle and often alarmingly interior. Ignorance and illness are unfreedoms. Unfreedom, like freedom, is often subjective. Compulsion and fear are states of unfreedom. But objective enslavement can make one strong. The soul is a cagey survivor. Prisoners in states of unfreedom contrive their own covert liberty. The Soviet writer Andrei Sinyavski, sent to the labor camps for six years (1966 to 1971) for "manufacturing" anti-Soviet works, wrote, "I measure life by the number of times my head is shaven." He thought about Mozart...
Civil rights will not be the first political value to have its meaning reversed. The use of the term freedom to describe unfreedom goes back at least as far as Rousseau, who wrote, without irony, of an ideal republic in which men would be "forced to be free." In our day, the word democracy is so beloved of tyrants that some have named their countries after it, as in the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany). And from Beirut to San Salvador, every gang of political thugs makes sure to kneel at least five times a day in the direction...