Owen Cleverton
As a younger man, and even now, I had an interest in the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His monumental three-part book, “The Gulag Archipelago”, somehow seemed to encapsulate the human condition in all it’s evil and all its virtue. I’ve read it more than once.
It was first published in English in 1974.
The cruel, intolerant and murderous ideology used by the Bolshevik regime, under Lenin and later by Stalin, caused the death and widespread misery of tens of millions of Soviet people. Their “own” people.
“Man’s inhumanity to man, makes countless millions mourn”.
Attributed to Robert Burns, this doesn’t even begin to sum up the brutality and ruthlessness of man’s natural character, not only in the Soviet Union, but throughout the world.
In his 1978 Harvard commencement address, A World Split Apart, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, a fierce enemy of the Soviet system, delivered a forceful and insightful critique of the West, a society which he characterized as spiritually weakened by rampant materialism. Here’s an excerpt:
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”
Amen, to that!
What’s changed since 1978? Not a lot.
“Why is it,” Solzhenitsyn asks, “that Macbeth, Iago, and other Shakespearean evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses, while Lenin and Stalin did in millions” The answer is that Macbeth and Iago had no ‘ideology.’
“Ideology makes the killer and torturer an agent of good….. ‘so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.’ Ideology never achieved such power and scale before the twentieth century.”
“Anyone can succumb to ideology. All it takes is a sense of one’s own moral superiority for being on the right side; a theory that purports to explain everything; and—this is crucial—a principled refusal to see things from the point of view of one’s opponents or victims, lest one be tainted by their evil viewpoint”.
This next quote was intended to describe the NKVD, the Political ruling classes and those indoctrinated into the myth of a utopian socialist state:
“For them, the herd of humanity is but the manure for fertilizing the fields of socialism.”
Observing the simplistic, unrealistic and, yes, ignorant propensity for political factions taking a black and white, “if you’re not with us 100%, then you are our enemy”, position.
Solzhenitsyn, again:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Is it just me, or were Solzhenitsyn’s observations so prescient that today’s polarised political climate reflects and even exaggerates his observations?
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