Garbanzo Toons

More Thoughts on the Gulag

I've gotten to the point where for the most part, I've become an opportunistic book buyer. I used to go looking for specific books and I would (mostly) buy the book I was looking for before buying anything else. Now, there are so many books that I want to read that unless it's by one of my rare "must have" authors, I don't bother until I find it cheap somewhere around town, whether it's in a used book store, or even better, at a yard sale. This week I picked up a nice paperback copy of Thackery's Vanity Fair. Eventually I'll read it.

I've already written about volume I of The Gulag Archipelago which I found as a paperback at the local YMCA's used book sale. Early this summer I found volume II in hardcover at a used book store. It's big, and it's heavy, and I'm guessing that very few people bought it, and even fewer people read it.

I am not like other people however, and I brought it to keep me company on the six hour train rides to and from Chicago. It is truly as fascinating as the first volume. As with the first volume, the irony and sarcasm keeps this book from making the reader suicidal.

With about 200 pages left to go, it suddenly hit me that a totalitarian society - as the USSR, as the other communist dictatorships, as the Third Reich, as Islamic countries are and always have been - suicidal. No, that's not right. They still survive. They are self-defeating. They can never rise up from the mud because they destroy their best and brightest. Solzhenitsyn writes of engineers, scientists, writers, composers, poets, artists, and others who should have been inventing and creating new products, and building the wealth, and forming the spirit of the USSR, being instead, forced to live as political prisoners and slave laborers in prison camps across Russia. Lenin had his opponents murdered, and the entire slave labor system began under his leadership. Stalin, in addition to imprisoning and killing the best and brightest Russia had to offer, purged his generals before WWII. Oops! And then there was China. How many brilliant, creative, hard-working people were murdered during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward? Under Pol Pot in Cambodia, people with glasses were killed under the assumption that they were dangerous intellectuals. How many political prisoners has Castro imprisoned?

You want to talk non-communist dictators? How about Zimbabwe's Mugabe turning a net food exporting country into a nation of starving disease-ridden beggars? Yes, the Rhodesian apartheid system was immoral, but are Zimbabweans better or worse off now?

Islam, although it has conquered a large portion of the world, as its holy book, the Qu'ran instructs its followers to do, it doesn't allow Muslims to rise in the world in any meaningful manner. Jihad doesn't allow for excellence in fields that improve the lot of mankind, there is no incentive to create and nurture industry, medicine, art, literature, etc. It's all about conquest and control over the lives of Muslims - and non-Muslims. We are supposed to be tolerated as dhimmis. Not that Islam has contributed nothing, but considering 20 percent of the world's population is Muslim, it seems to me that if there were genuine freedom in Islam and in Islamic nations, we would hear more positive news and less of the kind that insists we in "dar al harm" ignore the pathologies of Islam; jihad, honor killings, terrorism, rioting over cartoons, teddy bears, literature, etc.

But back to the gulag. As I was dawdling with this post over days and weeks, I finished the book. Turns out it's also a philosophy book. And it's not that Solzhenitsyn just tacked some philosophical musings on at the end to give it a bit more kick. Due to the previous 12 to 1300 pages, it is an integral part of the book. It fills a need that the reader (or at least this reader) doesn't even realize needs to be filled until it is filled. He has built a philosophy built on pain and death and the horrors of a slave labor system that is as bad or worse than any other that has ever been conceived by human beings. And I'm not sure he's totally satisfied with this philosophy, but he doesn't excuse himself as a victim. He doesn't "go Obama" on us. He presents his own weakness and fallibility to the reader. (I can't pretend that I would have done any better in his situation. In fact, I don't think I would have lasted very long at all.) He doesn't offer himself as a hero, but merely as another innocent Russian unjustly imprisoned who happened to be lucky enough to survive. His survival amidst all of those who died forces him and the reader to continue to think about the validity of these final thoughts. It also reminded me of Tolstoy's story, God Sees the Truth, but Waits.

I hate to gush, but it you have some spare time, you should read this monster.

Labels: books, Gulag Archipelago, islam, Obama, Russia, Solzhenitsyn

posted by Harry @ 6:22 PM 6 comments

The Gulag Archipelago - Parts I and II

I've been meaning to for years, and I finally read it. I finally read the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago. I could have put it off longer, but I found a paperback copy for a quarter at a yard sale. Then I needed something for the trip to NYC. With all the time one spends at the airport these days when one flies, a hunk of good solid reading material is a must.

This is certainly good solid reading material and it kind of blows the lid off of any thoughts anyone may have of any kind of socialist utopia where "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is possible. And that line about "Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains"? Forget it. It's more like, "Fools of the world, unite. Exchange your current manageable chains for chains that will drag your body down the same way you've dragged your mind down if you still don't understand that communism is a mug's game.!"

Under the circumstances, this could have been a hideously depressing book and impossible to read. In fact, judging from the heft of the book and the number of used copies I've seen over the years, my guess is that more people bought it than read it. A lot more. I also have to surmise that even fewer people bought or read the second volume containing parts III and IV. (I picked that up yesterday at one of our better area used book stores. It's on my book shelf now, and I'll get to it eventually.) Solzhenitsyn softens the pain considerably with his constant sarcastic tone. No, the reader doesn't laugh along with him, but the reader shares the frustration and the irony of a system that some people today still worship as the greatest hope for mankind, but that arrested millions of innocent men and women in order to maintain control over citizens and to feed the gigantic slave labor pool that was needed to build projects that wouldn't have been able to be built otherwise. Let's face it: a controlled economy is no economy and that's what the Russians had under communism. For some of the true believers who were arrested on trumped up charges or on no charges at all, it was the shock of being caught in the system they supported that gave them the realization that something wasn't quite right here.

As musician, poet, and philosopher(?) Sun Ra said,

If you do wrong, you have to pay,
But if you do right, you have to pay too;
Also, if you do nothing
You have to pay.

And it didn't start under Stalin, as some of the apologists would like us to believe. It built upon the prisons and police force of the czars. The inhumanity of the system was taken light years beyond anything the czars ever imagined. And it was taken there by Lenin and his henchmen.

Solzhenitsyn doesn't settle for merely telling his own story as a prisoner of the gulags. His is only one of hundreds that he shares. He also gives a history of the system, and a tour of the system, from his arrest to his arrival at some of his work projects. In between we get others' stories of both intentional and casual cruelty. While the conditions were almost uniformly horrible throughout the system from arrest, through transport, to prisons and work camps, Solzhenitsyn talked to other prisoners. Many of them, of course are long dead, having died somewhere along the way. Some prisoners, like Solzhenitsyn got lucky and were imprisoned in places where it was possible to not be worked to death.

While describing the horrors of the system, and according to him, Soviet jailers were much worse than Nazi jailers, as he met prisoners who were unfortunate enough to experience both, he also writes of the pleasures of talking to other prisoners, intelligent men and women who had important stories to share, of being able to read the occasional great book. He looked for and reported on the positive in a man-made hell.

By the time Solzhenitsyn was arrested the system had been functioning for years and ran like a well-oiled machine. Arrests were done at night so that the befuddled victim was less likely to fight back. Very few, including the author, did. From that point on, the cruelty built. Some of it, including interrogation and torture, was to break the prisoner in order to get false confessions and names of other "conspirators". And some of it was just to keep the system running more efficiently. Prisoners died at every step. Those who lived were moved to the next step, until finally he, or she, ended up at one of the gulags to, most likely, be worked to death.

I'm not sure a lesser writer could have pulled this off. The only part where it drags is in his review of many of the more notorious show trials. Other than that, it's a fascinating look into another facet of man's inhumanity to man.

In closing, I have to share a piece of advice from Solzhenitsyn. It's on page 591 of the paperback edition:

“Do not pursue what is illusory – property and position; all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life – don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.

“It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, and if both ears can hear, then who should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart – and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know; it might be your last act and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory.”

Labels: Gulag Archipelago, Russia, Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Union

posted by Harry @ 1:31 PM 1 comments

If

If the victims in Zimbabwe, Tibet, Darfur, Myanmar, or any other country where innocent citizens are now facing rape, death, starvation, slavery, or any combination of those undesirable conditions want the world to care about them and offer any help at all, here is what they must do. They must declare themselves Palestinians. They must also claim they are being targeted for extermination by an oppressive Zionist regime. It worked for Middle East Arabs, there's no reason why it can't work for others. There is a difference however. People in Zimbabwe, Tibet, Darfur, and Myanmar really have been oppressed. They are suffering at the hands of tyrants, thugs, and murderers. The Arabs in the Middle East who have conned the world into calling them Palestinians and who have had money showered upon them for the past 60 years are oppressors in victim's clothing. They are oppressors of Israel and of their own people.

If Israel was truly the neighborhood bully that its enemies claim it is, nobody would be condemning the Israelis. I just figured that out today by reading this post at The BIDINOTTO BLOG (linked to by way of American Digest).

Why won't the West help Georgia -- say, by immediately admitting the nation to NATO?

How to explain the West's impotent tsk-tsking in the face of this latest Russian aggression?

The answer lies in what I call the "anticipatory capitulation" factor.

The greatest terror of postmodern Westerners is "confrontation": to be compelled into situations in which they must actually face down a bully. And, of course, taking a moral stand may sometimes lead to such "confrontations."

So, in anticipation of any course of action that could possibly lead to a "confrontation," postmoderns never take a moral stand. They look into the future, at where such a stand might lead them -- and, terrified by the prospect, they back down pre-emptively. Often, they seek some sort of "compromise" with thugs that takes the "confrontation" option off the table. "Compromise" here means: anticipatory capitulation.

This is the policy that Border's Books, Comedy Central, and the entire MSM adopted when contemplating even a hypothetical "confrontation" with Islamists who might become angry about their circulation of those Muhammad cartoons: They capitulated and refused to publish the cartoons, in mere anticipation of a possible showdown.

and more importantly,

Bullies, of course, can always smell fear: It's their special talent. They accurately perceive the cowardice that underlies responses of whining, pleading, dithering, and mollycoddling, and know that they will confront no barriers on the paths of aggression.

Besides Russia, Islamists have also been getting away with murder. Besides the acts of preemptive surrender already mentioned, what have we done about Iran over the past 29 or so years since the Iranians declared war on us by taking over our embassy? How many Americans have they killed since? What about facing down Hezbollah? It hasn't happened, has it? They've created themselves a comfortable terrorist state within a state in Lebanon. The world watched and continued to condemn Israel.

Now that we know that bullies, even little bullies, will be allowed to push the rest of the world around, I wonder what would have happened had Israel not sued for peace following their victory in the 1967 six-day war. Let's imagine instead, that they did all of the horrible things that they've been accused of, like removing all of the Arabs from Gaza and the West Bank (and just to be safe, from Israel), and the Sinai, and just kept it all and developed it all. Let's say they flipped the rest of the world the bird and told the UN and anyone else who tried to stick their nose in, that it was none of anyone's business.

Then what if they'd hunted down Arafat and all PLO members wherever they could be found, again daring the world to do anything about it? What if they'd threatened their neighbors with anihilation if they made a wrong move? They'd be a real bully, like the Islamic and Russian ones we're facing today. They could face down their enemies and even be aggressive without worrying about consequences. But they'd be bigger and more ruthless, less trying to appeal to morality and more trying to create fear.

We have to face the fact that the world is an immoral place. There are only a few islands of attempted morality on this Earth and Israel is one of them. That's why the scenario I suggested had no chance of happening. That's also why Israel is always facing an existential threat.

Being Jewish and being chained to their particular moral stance, Israel will always be the scapegoat. It's one of the ways the world can avoid facing the real bullies and still hold its collective head up.

Labels: Bob Dylan, Israel, Palestinians, Russia

posted by Harry @ 7:36 PM 3 comments