Wisdom from a man who saw it
I am brushing up on my Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
George Orwell’s 1984 is a must read. It is mandatory reading in mos high schools. It is a scary book, of course, but because it is fiction, I think some people don’t take it seriously.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the Soviet Union’s George Orwell. He actually spent eight years doing labor in a Gulag because of a private letter he wrote to a friend. He lived what Orwell only saw from afar. Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opera are One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago.
Both are excellent, and should be mandatory reading by all Americans once per election cycle. If I could ever get the funding I would make The Gulag Archipelago into a movie or maybe a mini series.
There is a passage from The Gulag Archipelago that should be branded onto the soul of every gun owner and patriot in America:
“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.”
That quote has always been my answer to the question “Do you believe that if the Jews in Germany had been armed, could the Holocaust been averted.”
Solzhenitsyn knew and in that passage explained that every tyrannical law handed down from above has to be carried out by boots on the ground. If you can make the boots on the ground fear carrying out the law more than they fear punishment from higher ups (who are just another layer of boots) tyranny breaks down. But you HAVE TO BE WILLING TO FIGHT.
The negative corollary of this is the Ferguson Effect. Rather than violence, the boots on the ground feared public humiliation of lawsuits and so walked away, allowing chaos to reign.
But this was not the passage that prompted this post.
This is from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.
The shorter version of this is:
Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle. Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
In this sentiment, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on Antifa. It is a movement built on lies and distortions to justify the desire for violence.
These people would fit right in with the NKDV, they just don’t have a Stalin to lead them.
