Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89
news.bbc.co.uk
news.bbc.co.uk
“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”
“Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.”
“When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.”
“The one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had is art, literature”
“I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances -- from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.”
And finally, an excerpt from "The Gulag Archipelago"... on how to resist fascism & tyranny. The lesson that's just as important today as it was half a century ago.
"During an arrest, you think since you aren’t guilty, how can they arrest you? Why 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 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 goodbye 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! We didn’t love freedom enough. Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself."
Although fascism and Communism are pretty darn close (both seek total control of the economy and the culture), let's not forget that he was specifically writing against a Communist system, not a fascist system.
It's shocking that the BBC link doesn't even use the word "Communism" in it once. Can you imagine an article on someone who stood up to Hitler without using the word Nazi once?
Perhaps Solzhenitsyn can shed some light on that?:
"For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion."
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Solzhenitsyn
"Instead of blaming Russian conditions, he blamed the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, arguing Marxism itself is violent. His conclusion is Communism will always be totalitarian and violent, wherever it is practiced. There was nothing special in the Russian conditions which affected the outcome."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn
I suggest we honour Solzhenitsyn's life by actually not avoiding focusing his criticism directly at Communism and more generally at Totalitarianism.
Solzhenitsyn questions whether democracy would bring real freedom to Russia. "The multiparty parliamentary system is impracticable in Russia," he writes. "It has never been necessary to the prosperity and high achievements of mankind. Authoritarian regimes are not terrible in themselves--only those which are not answerable to God or their own conscience. Russia will most probably move from one authoritarian form of government to another. This will be the most natural and least painful path of development. Our present system is terrible not because it is undemocratic and based on force--a man can still live without harm to his soul under such regimes--what makes ours uniquely horrible is that it demands total surrender of the soul. What we need is not political liberation--only liberation of the soul from participation in the lie forced upon us."
This is an interesting quote. If you replace Marx and Engels with Mohammed, Communism with Islam, and Russian with say Iranian you end up with "something you can't say".
People can criticize communism in Russia today, or outside Russia in the past, but it takes real guts to do what Solshenitzyn did - criticizing communism when he knew it could result in incarceration or worse. It would be like someone in Iran criticizing Khomeini.
Which is again interesting, because it isn't true. You'll have to be pretty blinded not to see the main difference between Marxism and Islam - namely that the latter is a religion which can exists independently of a government, while Marxism in it's very core is a layout for a state.
It doesn't make sense to live as a practising Marxist in a capitalism society, but you can very well live as a practising Muslim in a Christian or secular society.
Way too many governments are using Islam to subdue their people in a totalitarian state, and they are helped by islamophobes in the west, who lend them legitimacy by claiming that it's just the way Islam is.
That amendment isn't for hunting--it's for homicide. It is for invaders and secret policemen.
I also stumbled upon this: Fifteen former LAPD officers have plead guilty to running a robbery ring, which used fake no-knock raids as a ruse to catch victims off guard. The defendants would then steal cash and drugs to sell on the street. This tactic lead Radley Balko, editor of Reason Magazine, to complain "So not only can you not be sure the people banging down your door at night are the police, not only can you not be sure they’re the police even if they say they’re the police, you can’t even be sure it’s safe to let them in even if they are the police."[2][3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-knock_warrant
Also, the people involved in these armed resistance instances don't have to personally come out on top. They affect enforcement; make the powers that be nervous and careful. I'm pretty sure some politicians thought extra hard before abusing poor people's property rights after the Carl Drega incident, even though he was killed. Not that I know Carl Drega was clearly in the right, but you get the point.
Doesn't this quote answer your question?, firearms are much more effective than axes hammers pokers and whatever, we have the God given right, weather or not whatever tyrannical government may happen to be in place recognizes the 2nd or not. Disarmament leads to:, "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" Or worse, sometimes --much much worse.
A new convict arrives at a Gulag labor camp. Everyone gathers around the new man.
- What's your sentence?
- Twenty years.
- What for?
- Nothing, I am innocent!
- Bullsh-t. Innocent people get five.
"If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?"