Solzhenitsyn\u2019s epic history of the Soviet Union\u2019s war against its own people is a crippling experience for the reader.\u00a0 The first ninety pages are a seemingly endless list of purges that went on from 1917 to well into the 1950\u2019s.\u00a0 The scope, the strategies and the tactics that were used to terrorize, imprison, torture and mostly murder these poor human beings is almost beyond comprehension.\u00a0 In Solzhenitsyn\u2019s own words \u201cIf I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.’\u201d<\/p>\n
To try and understand how a government of men would choose to decimate and more than decimate its own people is very difficult.\u00a0 But it is telling that in every society where radical socialism has taken hold it follows the same pattern and causes monstrous suffering.\u00a0 Because this same ideology is now loose in our own society, I thought it would be useful to select specific details from the Gulag Archipelago and elaborate on how they relate to our time and place.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll start off the series with the concept of show trials.\u00a0 Among the many purges there was a period when a decision was made to go after engineers.\u00a0 They were selected because previously they had been given a certain immunity due to their usefulness.\u00a0 Because of the backwardness of pre-revolutionary Russia and because of the agricultural disruptions that occurred due to the collectivization of the farmlands, having men who could manufacture and repair and improve modern equipment like tractors and automobiles was quite important.\u00a0 Sending them to the gulag was quite counterproductive.\u00a0 But at a certain point logic ceased to be strong enough to prevent the next victim group from being fed into the maw of the meat grinder.<\/p>\n
And it was quite easy to incriminate engineers.\u00a0 By definition they were intellectuals, a classic category of counter-revolutionaries.\u00a0 Also, most of them had studied at the universities during the czarist period so there were all kinds of associations and attachments to people and organizations that had already been condemned and consumed in the earlier purges.<\/p>\n
But the technique that the authorities wanted to most use was to find someone innocent of any real crimes and tell him that if he would denounce himself and all his fellows of some absurdly improbable crime in a public exhibition then he would get a lighter sentence.\u00a0 And so, we got the show trial.<\/p>\n
At the trial the accused had to go through the full histrionics of denouncing himself and confess to all his crimes and accuse all of his co-conspirators.\u00a0 In the best case all of the other equally innocent men would also confess to their inhuman crimes against the collective.\u00a0 And finally, they would finish off by demanding their own deaths as the only fitting punishment for their atrocious crimes.\u00a0 And ironically, despite the assurances that they had received of a lighter sentence, often death was awarded to them.\u00a0 But either way this theater of the perverse was conducted and make-believe crimes were punished and more fodder was fed into the killing machine.<\/p>\n
Amusingly, these trials came to an end when during the show trial against the ceramic industry the defendants as a body decided at the last minute to deny all charges.\u00a0 And since the prosecution had no actual evidence to produce against them at this very public trial, they were exonerated.\u00a0 It just goes to show sometimes courage is rewarded.<\/p>\n
Currently, examples of show trials in our country are only the thinnest of ghosts of what the Stalinist regime could perpetrate.\u00a0 A recent example is New York Times science writer Donald McNeil Jr.\u00a0 He was denounced for the use of the black ethnic slur that shall not be repeated unless you are black.\u00a0 He was on a trip with students in Peru, for some reason, and one of his students finked out another of the students for having used the black ethnic slur that shall not be repeated unless you are black (tbestsnbruyab).\u00a0 When McNeil said tbestsnbruyab in the context of condemning the use of tbestsnbruyab he was reported by those present of using tbestsnbruyab.\u00a0 He was condemned by his colleagues and the incident was forgotten.\u00a0 But two years later the retroactive punishment for this offense became capitol and his colleagues demanded his firing.\u00a0 And being the good progressive that he is, he made a statement applauding his professional lynching.\u00a0 Now admittedly this is poor stuff compared to shipping him off to a labor camp or putting a bullet in his brain.\u00a0 But it\u2019s a rousing start when it occurs in the so-called land of free speech.<\/p>\n
I expect there will be other examples of looney lefties denouncing themselves.\u00a0 And I think we\u2019ll also see that after the fact they\u2019ll be heard caterwauling at the gates of the Emerald City claiming that they weren\u2019t given a chance afterward to be re-educated and rehabilitated.\u00a0 But it\u2019s a funny thing.\u00a0 Once you\u2019ve been cast out into that void it\u2019s really hard to get the \u201cgood\u201d people to take your calls.\u00a0 Contamination from bad thinking is much scarier than COVID.\u00a0 They\u2019re going to have to get back to you sometime in the future.\u00a0 And that future sure isn\u2019t tomorrow and chances are it\u2019s never.<\/p>\n
So, as you can see, we are only at the very beginning of the great revolution that the Russians perfected.\u00a0 But I will continue this series and I\u2019m sure we\u2019ll use our Yankee ingenuity to innovate and who knows even show the masters a thing or two.\u00a0 So, stay tuned comrades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Solzhenitsyn\u2019s epic history of the Soviet Union\u2019s war against its own people is a crippling experience for the reader.\u00a0 The first ninety pages are a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,5,237],"tags":[2256,2905,2904,2894,1437,2696],"class_list":["post-13469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-current-events","category-reviews","tag-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn","tag-attack-on-the-bill-of-rights","tag-enslavement-of-americans","tag-gulag-archipelago","tag-socialism","tag-woke-world"],"yoast_head":"\n