I had the great privilege of writing the foreword to the 50th anniversary version of the abridged version of one of the most important books of the 20th century, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a devastating account of the absolute horror wreaked upon the people of the Soviet Empire by the acolytes of the doctrine of Karl Marx. I read the foreword here, in its entirety, and encourage everyone to purchase and study the book. It changed the world.
h/t Ken (Kulak)
Anyone who is a socialist, is both stupid and evil. Stupid, because they ignore the obvious truth that it just don’t work, not then, not now, not ever. Evil because all socialists want is death for everyone around them. Basically, to be a socialist is to be a serial killer, or at the very least an aspiration to be one.
There is no cure for either condition. There is no debating with either condition. There is no reasoning with either. There is no chance either will recant, or reform, or go apostate. It is not possible to have a society, where either of those two types attains any power or influence.
Very Good and this link is good as well. I enjoy interviews Jordan Peterson has had when he engages with a person who has swallowed the kool-aid at full strength. It is a remarkable thing to listen to an individual who has never had their ideas challenged or been asked to defend their position in a logical way as they attempt to ‘take down’ Peterson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZYQpge1W5s
Jordan runs circles around that well programmed NPC.
I re-read the first two volumes of the unabridged version earlier this year. I wept after finishing each volume. It’s almost incomprehensible that people can treat each other the way they were treated in the Gulag. It should be required reading in schools in the west.
It could be, if you voted in your local school board elections.
I voted in my local school board elections two weeks ago. Thanks for the gratuitous comment.
“It’s almost incomprehensible that people can treat each other the way they were treated in the Gulag.”
Yes, the brutality of the Russian culture is incomprehensible to civilized peoples.
I first read this three volume(7 books in English) work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn back in 1980. I doubt that any western schools could be expected to add such a huge tome to their curriculum.
It’s naive and intellectually lazy to believe that the brutality chronicled in the Gulag Archipelago is somehow restricted to the Russian culture and that “civilized peoples” are somehow above it all.
Is it also the Russian culture that allows for the compulsory study of the book in Russian schools but that civilized peoples in western schools are above that too?
“It’s naive and intellectually lazy to believe that the brutality chronicled in the Gulag Archipelago is somehow restricted to the Russian culture”
Restricted? That must be what you believe, because that isn’t what I wrote. Naïve and intellectually lazy indeed.
That said, tell me of any other culture that has murdered as many of their own people in all of history as the Russians did in the 20th century. With 3x the population, not even the Chinese murdered as many as their own people, in sheer numbers, as the Russians did.
I really like the “I’m rubber and you’re glue, what ever you say, bounces off me and sticks to you” defence you’ve deployed. It fits right in with the naive and intellectually lazy motif.
And by the way, if it’s body counts you’re interested in, there are plenty of scholars who say Mao is the hands-down winner. So it’s not as straight forward as you claim.
But Solzhenitsyn’s book isn’t about body counts, or Russian culture as Slaw points out.
“But Solzhenitsyn’s book isn’t about body counts, or Russian culture as Slaw points out.”
If you’ve read the Gulag Archipelago, which obviously you haven’t, you would know that BODY COUNT is very important in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s account because the exact number and names of people who had entered and died in the Gulag which Aleksandr Solznihetsyn experienced were tattooed on the bodies of interned survivors and on Aleksandr Solznihetsyn’s OWN body .
This was a BIG DEAL and important motive in the book for Aleksandr Solznihetsyn to have written the book at all.
Nevertheless I will address your Bull Shit response to my original post. You’ve sidestepped my factual response to your original BS claim. You don’t know the book or Russian culture or if you do your position is as a Russian agent of influence.
Steve E said: But Solzhenitsyn’s book isn’t about body counts, or Russian culture as Slaw points out.”
I’m not arguing with Slaw, A-Hole. You have written that I have imputed/implied/or stated that , “the Gulag Archipelago is somehow restricted to the Russian culture.
I have/had done nothing of the kind. You Steve E are a LIAR. You have created a strawman out of whole cloth and imputed it to me. You are intellectually lazy, stupid, and generally a Piece Of Shit.
Don’t pretend to argue against me, stop pretending your created Strawman represents my statements, the truth of my statements are written above for all to read.
I know it’s the weekend, but you should really take your meds every day of the week especially if you’ve got a keyboard in front of you.
“tell me of any other culture that has murdered as many of their own people in all of history as the Russians did in the 20th century.”
KR murdered approx 1/4 of Cambodians in four short years.
(BTW, purges in Mongolia and Cuba were proportionately worse than that in the USSR.)
(BTW2: Adolf Hitler failed to capitalize on the “endemic hostility of the Russian people towards the Soviet government.” Nikolai Tolstoy in Stalin’s Secret War)
Um, one of the main lessons to draw from the work is that what happened in Russia can happen anywhere. Solzhenitsyn actually writes at one point in the book how the great evildoers throughout history all use some ideology to fortify their works and convince themselves and others that the evil they are doing is actually good. That’s precisely how they can achieve such harm. It wasn’t meant as a damning indictment of Russians, it was a damning indictment of what they became because of communist ideology.
Another book that echoes that same thought is “Ordinary Men” – the story of a police battalion that was responsible for killing thousands of Jews under the Nazis. So yes, it is possible for any one to become that evil if the circumstances are provided and the unique value of the individual person is lost.
the brutality of the Russian culture is incomprehensible
the brutality of the
Russian cultureSoviets is incomprehensibleOrganisations like COMINTERN, SMERSH and Blocking Units did not exist prior to 1917.
I read the unabridged version when it first came out, the horror of that work has stayed with me ever since,and whenever I hear some idiot expound on the wonders of socialism, tell them to read “The Gulag Archipelago”.
Unfortunately, very few do, and they miss one the best written books ever produced. Solzhenitsyn’s writing is the poetry of Hell on Earth.
btw,why is the 50th anniversary version abridged? What did they leave out?
There has been an abridged version for some time (I believe the mid-80s) – I read it in the mid-90s. I have never read the full text but I understand the abridged version leaves out lot of the writing about the various trials and such. The abridged version is good enough for most people and is blessed by the author. The editor was/is(?) probably the foremost scholar on Solzhenitsyn and convinced him to publish the abridged version to be more accessible to wider audiences.
I re-read my decades-old paperback edition (held together with rubber bands now). One needs to be reminded of these things. At present, Solzhenitsyn is being dismissed along with Boris Pasternak, whose brilliant novel DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (the movie versions are beautiful, but incomplete) made the world aware of what was happening inside the workers’ paradise (cough), so we should recommend (avoid the “must-read” thing) them or give them to our friends.
My understanding is that the sophisticated set has not learned the important lessons from history. When they read about the horrors of authoritarianism -communism, fascism, Nazism, religious theocracy- they do not reject the premise of assigning group guilt and group punishment or unending, escalating class warfare and identity politics. No, they simply move on to a new scapegoat class and continue the work and methods of authoritarianism. New oppressors, same solution, same blindness, same violent destination.
My concern is how much time is spent arguing about the problem rather than providing workable solutions. You never really win an argument with a fanatic, just like you don’t cure an addiction by discussion. You replace old habits with new ones. Replace identity politics with humanism, perhaps:
“Lee Jussim@PsychRabble
·Oct 28
I had the most amazing meeting on Thursday. The Social Sciences Dean periodically meets with the chairs. There were 7 chairs there. He proposed a new initiative purposely NOT emphasizing diversity or difference, but, instead, Our Common Humanity. 1/n
One said something like, “We’ve tried emphasizing diversity for decades. It has not worked and has produced all sorts of bad outcomes. It brought us to where we are today. Its time to try this.” 3/n
The Dean talked about having pitched this idea at a meeting that included some potential rich donors. Business types. Unlikely to be crazy radical academic left types (range prob conventional Dem to conservative Repub). They loved it too. 5/n”
I think people are sick of identity politics and the angry, divisive power structure it created. They are looking for something else.
My uncle was born in the Yorkton, Sk. area (Mikado?), his parents from Ukraine had arrived here in the 1920’s and had known of those millions that had disappeared, starved and worked to the death.
At some point in the early 1970’s our families were eating together and having some conversations, when freedom was brought up, my uncle had mentioned the name Solzhenitsyn and had spoken briefly of him as someone that had known a thing or two of freedom. This was in the news at that time of his exile. I had a look at the public library for his books and over the course of the next couple of years had read my way through what was available there, including the 3 original length volumes of The Gulag Archipelago.
There’s a lot there to digest for a 14-15 year old guy without a driver’s license, but it’s not so difficult to take up and read weekly, as I’d explained since then to my kids, “nobody lives more than about 20 pages anyways, so it’s an easy read, like a series of short stories”.
The ending to all those short stories is the same, death, or ruined lives. To accept the idea of “socialism lite” or “just a little bit of state control” wasn’t going to be an easy argument to make to me after having read these. For the same reasons I could never accept that a leftist may be right on “some things” … as I knew how their stories (in the long game) always end.
Some folks easily forget the trauma in their lives more than others, but you can’t “unlearn” what you know.
Aside from the horror and depressing nature of the book, one thing that stood out immediately to me was his contrasting of the Gestapo and NKVD (predecessor of the KGB). In it, he claimed that the former was actually interested in whether or not suspects were guilty while the later was only interested in adding human quota to the Gulags. This should be compulsory reading in schools but it definitely should be in education faculties that pour out “educators”.
I read all three volumes in the seventies and one cannot read them without being profoundly affected. It is certainly possible for human beings to abuse each other and commit grave injustices one to the other as part of their routine interactions and power relationships vis a vis their economic interactions (“capitalism” to the Marxists). But to commit such appalling atrocities and on such a scale as described in The Gulag Archipelago requires rigid control of the centralized apparatus of the state. This is simply inescapable. Thus we should be forever suspicious of government and of those too eager to grasp and exercise its authority no matter how supposedly benevolent may be their stated intentions.
Don’t make the mistake in thinking that billionaires are right wing/Conservative. George Soros, Tom Steyer, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., are all champagne socialists.
Why you never give up your firearms. “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Steve E is right by saying, “It’s naive and intellectually lazy to believe that the brutality chronicled in the Gulag Archipelago is somehow restricted to the Russian culture and that “civilized peoples” are somehow above it all.” Exactly!
We see the potential perpetrators of the same sort of horrors around us everyday now at almost all universities. They were there at the Roy Thompson Hall to protest Bannon.
To paraphrase Mrs. Clinton: “You cannot be civil…”
https://twitter.com/pdkmitchell/status/1058325863257792513
Professor-Doctor Jordan B Peterson’s introduction to The Gulag Archipelago:
// Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive opportunity—even among plants, and cities—even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of average, dispossessed planets. //
Yep. Our fate IS in the stars.