Solzhenitsyn Saturday (posted 13 September 2008)
It’s a shame about his later work, but The Gulag Archipelago, at least, is a work of passion, insight, and genius. And a work that has a lot to say to us here in the Free World
today—perhaps more than we would like to admit.
Why, then, should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you’ll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And it isn’t just that you don’t put up any resistance; you even walk down the stairs on tiptoe, as you are ordered to do, so your neighbors won’t hear.
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 that 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!
If… If… We didn’t love freedom enough.
(Via The Picket Line 2008-08-06.)
Sergio Méndez replied:
I´ve never read Solzenitsyn, but aside from his very important contribution in denouncing the barbarism of stalisnism, I will not consider him a real defefender of the cause for liberty…I mean, from his positions supporting big tzarist or neo tzarist-traditional orthodox russian Empire (you know, Putin)…And lets no even take aside his moralists outcry about the rol that supposedly religion has to play in public life and has made him the heroe of many in the right
Linked by » Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-12-11 – In which I court public opinion:
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