Posted on 08/30/2015 11:09:50 AM PDT by tbw2
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a historical record of the Soviet era work camps, police state and subtle oppressions and outright torture under the Russian government between the First World War and 1956. What are some of the lessons we can draw from this book? What have too many forgotten of the death camps of the Soviet Union?
Lessons Learned from the Gulag Archipelago
http://tamarawilhite.hubpages.com/hub/Lessons-Learned-from-the-Gulag-Archipelago
The real problem is how few people even know (or acknowledge) the Gulags they existed.
Left wing governments have killed so many millions of their productive classes. When I try to explain this to democRATS I usually just get a blank stare.
Why don’t you tell us instead of expecting us to click through to a blog?
Never read the Gulag Archepelago. I did read “The Forsaken” by Tim Tzouliadis, about American emmigrants in Soviet Russia during this era, their subsequent abuse, and the utter indifference of the Roosevelt administration and the American left to their plight. Fascinating stuff. I think he cites the GA as a source for some of his research.
If you haven't read the book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, put it on your list. It's a lengthy book but one of the better historical books I've read. Years ago, P.J. Comix turned me on to the book, with his Freeper book club. Which I miss, by the way.
I re-read it every few years. Long but worth the time.
L
‘The Forsaken’ is a gripping book and left me angry and sad. More angry, I suppose. I just can’t believe these Americans were left to starve and die in the Gulag.
You must read the GA, really.
Perhaps instead try “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It will give you the flavor of The Gulag Archipelago after reading around 100 pages versuses the 1,000+ pages of the three volume Gulag Archipelago.
I was thinking of starting a Sci-Fi/Fantasy thread. Any advice?
""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? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. 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!" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from "The Gulag Archipelago"
"Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.' Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible 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 have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.'”-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, (Edward E. Ericson, Jr., “Solzhenitsyn – Voice from the Gulag,” Eternity, October 1985, pp. 23-4)
That’s one of my favorites too.
“‘The Forsaken’ is a gripping book and left me angry and sad.”
I felt the same way - angry and sad. It surprised me, because I don’t usually react that way to historical non-fiction.
I may give GA a tumble - thanks!
Bookmark
Awesome.
Actually, this blog could be used as a crib sheet on what to do or not do if we go the way the leftists want. A sample:
About Arrests
•You have a chance of evading arrest in public if you yell, shout and make a scene. If you go quietly, you have no chance of escaping the system.
•If you escape, don’t go home. They will come back at night and take you then.
•Arresting officers don’t care about your innocence, though anything you say then may be used against you later.
•When officers have arrest quotas or the administration has numbers of prisoners to be sent to the camps each month, they will deliberately take anyone and everyone they have in their hands and ship them off.
But the blog author seems to be an atheist or anarchist with this conclusion:
Ideology gives the evil-doer the steadfastness and certainty to keep going. Moral busybodies know no rest, for they cannot stop until the world matches their vision. Evil doers that find sanction in an ideology gain permission for their acts, a moral basis for evil deeds others might shun or condemn, and energy to keep going when a mere criminal might be sated with a dozen bodies.
Thus his ideology presumes to define what "evil" is, and in which contending for moral ideology is something that should be censored if contended for. His alternative is thus a ideology that has an animus to the promotion of moral ideology, which leads to anarchy and then dictatorship as an alternative to chaos.
But while the world abounds with examples of moral ideology being used for evil, as in Communism and Islam, this does not make moral ideology itself a problem any more than any education is itself. Instead it depends what is taught and how it was used.
The founders of the USA did not presume moral ideology was evil, but instead they depended upon a certain basic one. Under which souls were ruled from within so that smaller government, for basic functions, was enabled.
Washington's Farewell Address, 1797 — Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. . . . And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. (Farewell Address, 1797; http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp)
John Adams (1735—July 4, 1826. Second President and one of the Founding Fathers. Assisted Thomas Jefferson in drafting the Declaration of Independence) — "No simply form of government can possible secure men against the violence of power...Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few." (An Essay on Man's Lust for Power, August 29, 1763)
• ...we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. (From a letter Adams wrote on 11 October 1798 to the officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, of the Massachusetts Militia).ion of the Militia of Massachusetts,” October 11, 1798)
• Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure, than they have it now, they may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty. They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies." (Letter to Zabdiel Adams, June 21, 1776; http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/hlaw:@field%28DOCID+@lit%28dg004210%29%29
Robert Winthrop (May 12, 1809 – November 16, 1894), and Speaker of the House from 1838 to 1840, and later president of the Massachusetts Bible Society, explained that, “Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the Word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or the bayonet."
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