earlier this year I was invited by Nick
Skidmore editor of vintage classics at
penguin to write the foreword to the
50th anniversary edition of the single
vol abridged version of Alexander
Solzhenitsyn 's The Gulag Archipelago
this was perhaps the single greatest
honor that has ever befallen me given
the historical importance of
Solzhenitsyn's book as well as its great
personal impact on me the Gulag
Archipelago
in its full form was a three volume text
originally written between 1958 and 1968
it first saw publication in 1973 and was
translated into English
a year later it describes life in the
Soviet forced labor camp system the
gulag through a narrative compiled from
interviews personal statements from
inmates Diaries legal and historical
documents and the author's own
experience as a gulag prisoner following
its appearance the book circulated
underground in the Soviet Union until
its formal publication in 1989 in the
literary journal Novi mirror which
published a third of the work and three
issues since the Soviet Union dissolved
the entire book has been published and
has been made mandatory reading in the
Russian school curriculum the 50th
anniversary edition is slated for
release
November 1st 2018 here's a brief
biography of the author Alexander
Solzhenitsyn
from the book Solzhenitsyn was born in
1918 and grew up in rostov-on-don
he graduated in physics and mathematics
from rostov University and studied
literature by correspondence course at
Moscow University in World War 2 he
fought as an artillery officer attaining
the rank of captain in 1945 however
after making derogatory remarks about
Stalin in a letter he was arrested and
summarily sent
to eight years in forced labor camps
followed by internal exile in 1957 he
was formally rehabilitated and settled
down to teaching and writing here's a
description of the book from the back
cover the officially approved
abridgement of the Gulag Archipelago
volumes 1 2 & 3
a vast canvass of camps prisons transit
centers and secret police of informers
and spies and interrogators but also of
everyday heroism the Gulag Archipelago
is Alexander Solzhenitsyn Grandmaster
work based on the testimony of some 200
survivors and on the recollection of
Solzhenitsyn zone 11 years in labor
camps in exile it chronicles the story
of those at the heart of the Soviet
Union who opposed Stalin and for whom
the key to survival lay not in Hope but
in despair a thoroughly researched
document and a feat of literary and
imaginative power this edition of The
Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one
volume at the author's wish and with his
full cooperation Doris Lessing 1919 to
2013 a British novelist playwright
librettist biographer and short story
writer and winner of the 2007 Nobel
Prize for Literature says of the Gulag
Archipelago it helped to bring down an
empire its importance can hardly be
exaggerated
this is Solzhenitsyn's own foreword to
the original abridgement I dedicate this
to all those who did not live to tell it
and may they please forgive me for not
having seen at all nor remembered at all
for not having divined at all if it were
possible for any nation to fathom
another people's bitter experience
through a book how much easier its
future fate would become and how many
calamities and mistakes it could avoid
but it is very difficult there always is
this
fallacious belief it would not be the
same here here such things are
impossible alas all the evil of the 20th
century is possible everywhere on earth
yet I have not given up all hope that
human beings and Nations may be able in
spite of all to learn from the
experience of other people without
having to live through it personally
therefore I gratefully accept professor
Erickson suggestion to create a
one-volume abridgement of my
three-volume work the Gulag Archipelago
in order to facilitate its reading for
those who do not have much time in this
hectic century of ours
I thank professor Ericson for his
generous initiative as well as for the
tactfulness the literary taste and the
understanding of Western readers which
he displayed during the work on the
abridgement Edward II Erickson jr. 1939
to 2017 who served as the editor of the
abridged single-volume version of The
Gulag Archipelago was professor emeritus
of English at Calvin College and the
author of many other books including the
Solzhenitsyn reader the apocalyptic
vision of Mikhail Bulgakov's the master
and margarita and the soul and barbed
wire an introduction to Solzhenitsyn
this is what he had to say when he
introduced the abridged version in 1994
after 20 years of forced exile in the
West Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to
Russia at one town meeting held on his
trans-siberian Whistlestop tour to
reacquaint himself with his homeland he
was confronted by this rebuke it is you
and your writing that started it all and
brought our country to the verge of
collapse and devastation Russia doesn't
need you so go back to your blessed
America Solzhenitsyn instantly replied
that to his dying day he would keep
fighting against the evil ideology that
was capable of slaying one-third of his
country's population the meeting erupted
in applause that sort of exchange was on
the matter
when the present abridgement of the
Gulag Archipelago first appeared in 1985
almost no one expected then that within
a few years the soviet union would
collapse and almost in a day like the
legendary one-horse Shay yet now the
dramatic events that put the closing
punctuation mark on the Soviet
parentheses in Russian history have also
we may say brought an end to what the
great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova called
the true 20th century this foreshortened
century running from 1914 to 1917 to
1989 1991 was the era when utopian
dreams rooted enlightenment optimism
came to rely on brute force to make
ideological schemes prevail the 20th
century is proven in quantitative terms
at least the most murderous in human
history as governments killed their
subjects at record rates for decades the
word Holocaust served as shorthand for
modern man's inhumanity to man then one
lone man added a second such term gulag
which now appears in dictionaries as a
common noun
Solzhenitsyn was one of the precious few
who did anticipate the demise of the
Soviet experiment and he thought his
book would help oh yes gulag was
destined to affect the course of history
I was sure of that on one of his darkest
days February 12 1974 the day before he
was forced into exile and precisely
because the gulag had appeared in the
West he mused you Bolsheviks are
finished there are no two ways about it
what satisfaction he felt then when some
early reviews such as one from the
frankfurter algemene a leading German
newspaper caught his intentions the time
may come when we date the beginning of
the collapse of the Soviet system from
the appearance of gulag American
diplomat and scholar George F cannon
hailed the work as the greatest and most
powerful single indictment of a
political regime ever to be leveled in
modern
one sure to stick in the craw of the
Soviet propaganda machine with
increasing discomfort until it has done
its work Solzhenitsyn
has proven prescient on other matters as
well not only did he reiterate in the
teeth of the prevailing opinion of
Western specialists on Soviet affairs
that he was absolutely convinced that
communism will go he also insisted most
resolutely and against all seeming
reason that he expected to be reunited
with his beloved Russia in a strange way
I not only hope I'm inwardly convinced
that I shall go back I mean my physical
return not just my books and that
contradicts all rationality his
improbable prerequisites were that his
citizenship be restored that the charge
of treason against him be dropped and
that all his books be published in his
homeland after his prophecies were
fulfilled a friend of his reminisced it
seemed crazy to me at the time but it
was a real conviction a poet's knowledge
he sees the man seized however
historians ultimately apportioned the
credit for ending the Cold War
Solzhenitsyn indubitably played a part
in bringing the Soviet edifice down to
rubble his writings D legitimized
communism in his homeland and
discredited it abroad he was much too
modest in depicting himself as a little
calf foolishly budding a mighty oak and
thinking this could bring it down as
David Remnick editor of The New Yorker
declares in terms of the effect he has
had on history
Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of
the century who else compares Orwell
Kessler Remnick concludes that to some
extent you have to credit the literary
works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn with
helping to bring down the last Empire on
earth so after that introductory
material my forward
it begins with an excerpt from the
speech delivered by Solzhenitsyn to the
Swedish Academy on the occasion of his
acceptance of the Nobel Prize for
Literature once we have taken up the
word it is thereafter impossible to turn
away a writer is no detached judge of
his countrymen and contemporaries he is
an accomplice to all the evil committed
in his country or by his people and if
the tanks of his fatherland have
bloodied the pavement of a foreign
capital then rust-colored stains have
forever be spattered the writers face
and if on some fateful night a trusting
friend is strangled in his sleep
then the palms of the writer bare the
bruises from that rope and of his
youthful fellow citizens nonchalantly
proclaimed the advantages of debauchery
over humble toil if they abandon
themselves to drugs or seize hostages
then this stench too is mingled with the
breath of the writer have we the
insolence to declare that we do not
answer for the evils of today's world
the simple act of an ordinary brave man
is not to participate in lies not to
support false actions his rule let that
come into the world let it even reign
supreme
only not through me but it is within the
power of writers and artists to do much
more to defeat the lie for in the
struggle with lies art has always
triumphed and shall always triumph
visibly irrefutably for all lies can
prevail against much in this world but
never against art one word of truth
shall outweigh the whole world first you
defend your homeland against the Nazis
serving as a twice decorated soldier on
the Eastern Front in the criminally
ill-prepared Soviet Red Army
then you're arrested humiliated stripped
of your military rank charged under the
auspices of the all-purpose article 58
with the dissemination of anti Soviet
propaganda and dragged off to Moscow's
infamous Lubyanka prison there through
the bars of your cell you watch your
beloved country celebrating its victory
in the Great Patriotic War then you're
sentenced in absentia to eight years of
hard labor but you got away easy it
wasn't so long afterward the people in
your position were awarded a tenner and
then a quarter of a century and fate
isn't finished with you yet not by any
means you develop a deadly cancer in the
camp endure the exile imposed on you
after your imprisonment ends and pass
very close to death despite all this you
hold your head high
you refuse to turn against man or God
although you have every reason to do so
you write instead secretly at night
documenting your terrible experiences
you craft a personal memoir a single day
in the labor camps and miracle of
miracles the clouds part the Sun shines
through your book is published and in
your own country it meets with
unparalleled acclaim nationally and
internationally but the sky darkens once
again and the Sun disappears the
repression returns you become once again
a non-person the secret police the dread
KGB seize the manuscript of your next
book it sees the light of day
nonetheless but only in the West there
your reputation grows beyond the wildest
of imaginings the Nobel Committee itself
bestows upon you its highest literary
honour the Soviet authorities stripped
of their camouflage are enraged they
order the secret police to poison
you you pass once again near death but
you continue to write driven solitary
intolerably inspired your Gulag
Archipelago documents the absolute and
utter corruption of the dogmas and
doctrines of your state your empire your
leaders and yourself and then that is
printed to not in your own country but
in the West once again from copies oh so
dangerously hidden and smuggled across
the borders and your great book bursts
with unparalleled and dreadful force
into the still naive and unexpected
literary and intellectual world you're
expelled from the Soviet Union stripped
of your citizenship forced to take
residency in a society both strange to
you and resistant in its own way to your
prophetic words but the power of your
stories and the strength of your morals
demolish any remaining claims to ethical
and philosophical credibility still made
by the defenders of the collectivist
system that gave rise to all that you
witnessed years pass but not so many
from the perspective of history then
another miracle the Soviet Union
collapses you return home your
citizenship is restored you write and
speak in your reclaimed homeland until
death claims you in 2008 a year later
the Gulag Archipelago is deemed
mandatory reading by those responsible
for establishing the national school
curriculum of your home country
you're impossible victory is complete
the three volumes of the Gulag
Archipelago one continuous extended
scream of outrage are paradoxically
brilliant bitter disbelieving and
infused with awe awe at the strength
characterizing the best among us in the
worst of all situations in that
monumental text published in 1973
alexander solzhenitsyn conducted an
experiment in literary investigation a
hybrid of journalism history and
biography unlike anything ever written
before or since
in 1985 the author bestowed his approval
upon Edward II Erickson Jr's
single-volume abridgement republished
here on the 50th anniversary of the
completion of the full three volume
edition and centenary of the author's
birth and sold some 30 million copies in
35 languages between the pages of
Solzhenitsyn's book apart from the
documentation of the horrors of the
legions of the Dead counted and
uncounted and the masses whose lives
were torn asunder are the innumerable
soul chilling personal stories carefully
preserved making the tragedy of mass
betrayal torture and death not the mere
statistic Stalin so disdainful II
described but individual real and
terrible it is a matter of pure
historical fact that the Gulag
Archipelago played a primary role in
bringing the Soviet Empire to its knees
although economically unsustainable
ruled in the most corrupt manner
imaginable and reliant on the slavery
and enforced deceit of its citizens the
Soviet system managed to stumble forward
through far too many decades before
being cut to the quick the courageous
leaders of the labor unions in Poland
the great pope john paul ii and the
american president ronald reagan with
his blunt insistence that the West faced
an evil empire
all played their role in its defeat and
collapse it was Solzhenitsyn however
whose revelations made it positively
shameful to defend not just the Soviet
state but the very system of thought
that made that state what it was it was
Solzhenitsyn who most crucially made the
case that the terrible excesses of
communism could not be conveniently
blamed on the corruption of the Soviet
leadership the cult of personality
surrounding Stalin or the failure to put
the otherwise stellar and admirable
utopian principles of Marxism into
proper practice it was Solzhenitsyn who
demonstrated that the death of millions
and the devastation of many more were
instead a direct causal consequence of
the philosophy worse perhaps the
theology driving the communist system
the hypothetically egalitarian
Universalist doctrines of Karl Marx
contained hidden within them sufficient
hatred resentment envy and denial of
individual culpability and
responsibility to produce nothing but
poison and death when manifested in the
world for Marx man was a member of a
class an economic class a group that and
little more and history nothing but the
battleground of classes and groups his
admirers regarded continued to regard
Marx's doctrine as one of compassion
moral by definition virtuous by Fiat
consider the working classes in all
their oppression and work forthrightly
to free them but hate may well be a
stronger and more compelling motivator
than love in consequence it took no time
in the aftermath of the Russian
Revolution for solidarity with the
common man and the apparently laudable
demand for universal equality to
manifest its unarticulated and ever
darkening shadow first came the most
brutal indictment of the class enemy
then
came the ever-expanding definition of
that enemy until every single person in
the entirety of the state found him or
herself at risk of encapsulation within
that insatiable and devouring net the
verdict delivered to those deemed at
fault by those who elevated themselves
to the simultaneously held positions of
judge jury and executioner the necessity
to eradicate the victimizers the
oppressors in toto without any
consideration whatsoever for reactionary
niceties such as individual innocence
let us note as well this outcome wasn't
the result of the initially pristine
Marxist doctrine becoming corrupt over
time but something apparent and present
at the very beginning of the Soviet
state itself
Solzhenitsyn cites for example one
Martin Latsis writing for the newspaper
read terror November 1st 1918 we are not
fighting against single individuals we
are exterminating the burgeois z as a
class it is not necessary during the
interrogation to look for evidence
proving that the accused opposed the
Soviets by word or action the first
question you should ask him is what
class does he belong to
what is his origin his education and his
profession these are the questions that
will determine the fate of the accused
such is the sense and essence of red
terror it is necessary to think when you
read such a thing to meditate long and
hard on the message it is necessary to
recognize for example that the writer
believed that it would be better to
execute 10,000 potentially innocent
individuals than to allow one poisonous
member of the oppressor class to remain
free it is equally necessary to pose the
question who precisely belonged to that
hypothetical entity the bourgeoisie it
is not as if the boundaries of such a
category are self-evident
therefore the mere
thieving they must be drawn but where
exactly and more importantly by whom or
by what if it's hate inscribing the
lines instead of love they will
inevitably be drawn so that the lowest
meanest most cruel and useless of the
conceptual geographers will be justified
in manifesting the greatest possible
evil and producing the greatest possible
misery members of the bourgeoisie beyond
all redemption they had to go as a
matter of course one of their wives
children even their grandchildren off
with their heads too all were encouraged
oblique errupted by their class identity
and their destruction therefore
ethically necessitated how convenient
that the darkest and diarist of all
possible motivations could be granted
the highest of moral standings that was
a true marriage of hell and of heaven
what values what philosophical
presumptions truly dominated under such
circumstances
was it desire for Brotherhood dignity
and freedom from want not in the least
not given the outcome it was instead and
obviously the murderous rage of hundreds
of thousands of biblical canes each
looking to torture destroy and sacrifice
their own private Abel's there is simply
no other manner of accounting for the
corpses what can be concluded in the
deepest most permanent sense from
Solzhenitsyn's anguished gulag narrative
first we learn what is indisputable what
we all should have learned by now what
we have nonetheless failed to learn that
the left like the right can go too far
that the left has in the past gone much
too far second we learn what is far more
subtle and difficult how and why that
going too far
we learn as Solzhenitsyn so profoundly
insists that the line dividing good and
evil cuts through the heart of every
human being and we learn as well that we
all are each of us simultaneously
oppressor and oppressed thus we come to
realize that the twin categories of
guilty oppressor and justice seeking
victim can be made endlessly inclusive
this is not least because we all benefit
unfairly and are all equally victimized
by our throne as' our arbitrary
placement in the flow of time we all
accrue undeserved and somewhat random
privileged from the vagaries of our
place of birth our inequitably
distributed talents our ethnicity race
culture and sex we all belong to a group
some group that has been elevated in
comparative status through no effort of
our own this is true in some manner
along some dimension of group category
for every solitary individual except for
the single most lowly of all at some
time and in some manner we may all in
consequence be justly targeted as
oppressors and may all equally seek
justice or revenge as victims even if
the initiators of the revolution had
therefore in their most pure moments
being driven by a holy desire to lift up
the downtrodden
was it not guaranteed that they would be
overtaken by those motivated primarily
by Envy hate and the desire to destroy
as the revolution progressed
hence the establishment of the hungrily
growing and most often fatal list of
class enemies right from the very first
moments of the Communist revolution the
demolition was aimed first at the
students the religious believers and the
Socialists continuing under Stalin with
the old revolutionaries themselves and
was followed soon thereafter by the
annihilation of the successful peasant
farmer kulaks and this appetite for
destruction was
of the type to be satiated with the
bodies of the perpetrators themselves as
Solzhenitsyn writes they burned out
whole nests whole families from the
start and they watched jealously to be
sure that none of the children 14 10
even 6 years old got away to the last
scrapings all had to go down the same
road to the same common destruction this
was driven by the perceived even self
perceived guilt of all how else was it
possible for the hundreds of thousands
or perhaps even millions of informants
prosecutors betrayers and unforgivably
mute observers to Pring and unforgivably
mute observers to spring so rapidly into
being in the tumult of the Red Terror
thus the doctrine of group identity
inevitably ends with everyone identified
as a class enemy an oppressor with
everyone unclench ibly contaminated by
bourgeois privilege unfairly enjoying
the benefits bequeathed by the vagaries
of history with everyone prosecuted
without respite for that corruption and
injustice no mercy for the oppressor and
no punishment too severe for the crime
of exploitation
expiation becomes impossible because
there is no individual guilt no
individual responsibility and therefore
no manner in which the crime of
arbitrary birth can be individually
accounted for and all the misery that
can be generated as a consequence of
such an accusation is the true reason
for the accusation when everyone is
guilty all that serves justice is the
punishment of everyone when the guilt
extends to the existence of the world's
misery itself only the fatal punishment
will suffice
it is much more preferable instead and
much more likely to preserve us all from
metastasizing hells to state
forthrightly I am indeed throwing
arbitrarily into history I therefore
choose to voluntarily shoulder the
responsibilities of my advantages and
the burden of my disadvantages like
every other individual I am morally
bound to pay for my advantages with my
responsibilities
I am morally bound to accept my
disadvantages as the price I pay for
being I will therefore strive not to
descend into bitterness and then seek
vengeance because I have less to my
credit and a greater burden to stumble
forward with than others is this not our
or even the essential point of
difference between the West for all its
faults and the brutal terrible
egalitarian systems generated by the
pathological communist doctrine the
great and good framers of the American
Republic were for example anything but
utopian they took full stalk and full
measure of inner Attica Balu Minh
imperfection
they held modest goals derived not least
from the profoundly cautious common-law
tradition of England they endeavoured to
establish a system the corrupt and
ignorant fools we all are could not
damage to fatally that's humility that's
clear-headed knowledge of the
limitations of human machination and
good intention but the Communists the
revolutionaries they aimed grandly and
admirably at least in theory at a much
more heavenly vision and they began
their pursuit with the hypothetically
straightforward and oh so morally
justifiable enforcement of economic
equality wealth however was not so
easily generated the poor could not
simply become rich but the
riches of those who had anything more
than the greatest pauper no matter how
pitiful that more was that could be
redistributed or at least destroyed
that's equality to that sacrifice in the
name of heaven on earth and
redistribution was not enough with all
its theft betrayal and death mere
economic engineering was insufficient
what emerged as well was the overarching
and truly totalitarian desire to remake
man and woman as such the longing to
restructure the human spirit in the very
image of the Communists preconceptions
attributing to themselves this divine
ability this transcendent wisdom and
with unshakable belief in the glowing
but ever receding future the newly
minted Soviets tortured thieved
imprisoned lied and betrayed all the
while masking their great evil with
virtue
it was Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag
Archipelago that tore off the mask and
exposed the feral cowardice envy deceit
resentment and hatred for the individual
and for existence itself that pulsed
beneath others had made the attempt
Malcolm Muggeridge reported on the
horrors of dekulakization the forced
collectivization of the all too recently
successful peasantry of the Ukraine and
elsewhere that preceded the horrifying
famines of the 1930s in the same decade
and in the following years George Orwell
risked his ideological commitments and
his reputation to tell us all what was
truly occurring in the Soviet Union in
the name of egalitarianism and
brotherhood but it was Solzhenitsyn who
truly shamed the radical leftists
forcing them underground where they have
festered and plotted for the last forty
years
failing unforgivably to have learned
what all reasonable people should have
learned from the Cataclysm of the 20th
century and its egalitarian utopianism
and
day despite everything and under their
sway almost three decades since the fall
of the Berlin Wall and the apparent
collapse of communism we are doing
everything we can to forget what
Solzhenitsyn so clearly demonstrated to
our great and richly deserved peril why
don't all our children read the Gulag
Archipelago in our high schools as they
now do in Russia why don't our teachers
feel compelled to read the book aloud
did we not win the Cold War where the
body's not piled high enough how high
then would be enough why for example is
it still acceptable and in polite
company to profess the philosophy of a
communist or if not that to at least
admire the work of Marx why is it still
acceptable to regard the Marxist
doctrine as essentially accurate in its
diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of
the free-market Democratic West to still
consider that doctrine progressive and
fit for the compassionate and proper
thinking person 25 million dead through
internal repression in the Soviet Union
according to the black book of communism
60 million dead in Mao's China and an
all too likely returned to autocratic
oppression in that country in the near
future the horrors of Cambodia's killing
fields with their two million corpses
the barely animate body politic of Cuba
where people struggle even now to feed
themselves Venezuela where it has now
been made illegal to attribute a child's
death in hospital to starvation no
political experiment has ever been tried
so widely with so many disparate people
in so many different countries with such
different histories and failed so
absolutely and catastrophic Lee is it
mere ignorant Al biet of the most
inexcusable kind that allows today's
Marxist to flaunt their content
allegiance to present it as compassion
and care or is it instead envy of this
successful in near infinite proportions
or something akin to hatred for mankind
itself how much proof do we need why do
we still avert our eyes from the truth
perhaps we simply lack sophistication
perhaps we just can't understand perhaps
our tendency toward compassion is so
powerfully necessary in the intimacy of
our families and friendships that we
cannot contemplate its limitations it's
an ability to scale and it's propensity
to mutate into hatred of the oppressor
rather than allegiance with the
oppressed perhaps we cannot comprehend
the limitations and dangers of the
utopian vision given our definite need
to contemplate and to strive for a
better tomorrow
we certainly don't seem to imagine for
example that the hypothesis of some
state of future perfection
for example the truly egalitarian and
permanent brotherhood of man can be used
to justify any and all sacrifices
whatsoever the pristine and heavenly and
making all conceivable means not only
acceptable but morally required there is
simply no price too great to pay in
pursuit of the ultimate utopia and this
is particularly true if it is someone
else who foots the bill and it is
clearly the case that we require a
future toward which to orient ourselves
to provide meaning in our life
psychologically speaking it is for that
reason we see the same need expressed
collectively on a much larger scale in
the judeo-christian vision of the
promised land and the kingdom of heaven
on earth and it is also clearly the case
that sacrifice is necessary to bring
that desired end state into being
that's the discovery of the future
itself the necessity to forgo
instantaneous gratification in the
present to delay to bargain with fate so
that the future can be better twinned
with the necessity to let go to burn off
to separate wheat from chaff and to
sacrifice what is presently unworthy so
that tomorrow can be better than today
but limits need to be placed around who
or what is deemed dispensable and it is
exactly the necessity for interminable
sacrifice that constitutes the
counterpart of the utopian vision heaven
is worth any price but who pays
Christianity solved that problem by
insisting on the sacrifice of the self
insisting that the suffering and
malevolence of the world is the
responsibility of each individual
insisting that each of us sacrifice what
is unworthy and unnecessary and
resentful and deadly in our characters
despite the pain of such sacrifice so
that we could stumble properly uphill
under our respective and voluntarily
shouldered existential burdens but it
was and is the opinion of the
materialist utopians that someone else
be sacrificed so that heaven itself
might be attained some perpetrator or
victimizer or oppressor or member of a
privileged group a cynic might be
forgiven in consequence for asking is it
the City of God that is in fact the aim
or is the true aim the desire to make a
burning sacrificial pyre of everyone and
everything and the hypothesis of the
coming brotherhood of man merely the
cover story the camouflage perhaps it is
precisely the horror that is the point
and not the utopia it is far from
obvious in such situations just what is
horse and what is cart it is precisely
in the aftermath of the death of a
hundred million people or more that such
dark questions must be asked and we
should also note that the utopian vision
dressed as it is inevitably in
compassion is a temptation particularly
difficult to resist and may therefore
offer a particularly subtle and
insidious justification for mayhem here
are some thoughts know some facts every
social system produces inequality at
present and every social system has done
so since the beginning of time the poor
have been with us and will be with us
always analysis of the content of
individual Paleolithic grave sites
provides evidence for the existence of
variance in the distribution of ability
privilege and wealth even in our distant
past the more illustrious of our
ancestors were buried with great
possessions hoards of precious metals
weaponry jewelry and costuming the
majority however struggled through their
lives and were buried with nothing
inequality is the iron rule even among
animals with their intense competition
for quality living space and repre
ducked Ivana Hmong plants and cities
even among the stellar lights that dot
the cosmos themselves where a minority
of privileged and oppressive heavenly
bodies contain the mass of thousands
millions or even billions of average
dispossessed planets inequality is the
deepest of problems built into the
structure of reality itself and will not
be solved by the presumptuous ideology
inspired retooling of the rare free
stable and productive democracies of the
world the only systems that have
produced some modicum of wealth along
with the inevitable inequality and it's
in tendency along with the inevitable
inequality and its attendant suffering
the only systems that have produced some
modicum of wealth along with the
inevitable inequality and its attendant
suffering are those that evolved in the
West with their roots in the
judeo-christian tradition precisely
those systems that emphasized above all
the essential dignity divinity and
ultimate responsibility of the
individual in consequence any attempt to
attribute the existence of inequality to
the functioning of the productive
institutions we have managed to create
and protect so recently in what is still
accurately regarded as the free world
will hurt those who are weakest and most
vulnerable first the radicals who
conflate the activities of the West with
the oppression of the downtrodden
therefore do nothing to aid those whom
they purport to prize and plenty to harm
them the claims they make to act under
the inspiration of pure compassion must
therefore come to be regarded with the
deepest suspicion
not least by those who dare to make such
claims themselves the dangers of the
utopian vision have been laid bare even
if the reasons those dangers exist have
not yet been fully unacceptably
articulated if there was any excuse to
be a Marxist in 1917 and both
Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche prophesied
well before then that there would be
hell to pay for that doctrine there is
absolutely and finally no excuse now and
we know that mostly because of Alexander
Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag Archipelago
thank heaven for that great authors
outrage courage and unquenchable thirst
for justice and truth it was
Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the
catastrophes of the Soviet state were
inextricably and causally linked to the
deceitful blandishments of the marxist
utopian vision it was Solzhenitsyn who
carefully documented the price paid in
suffering for the dreadful communist
experiment and who distilled from that
suffering the wisdom we must all heed so
that such catastrophe does not visit us
again perhaps we could take from his
writing the humility that would allow us
to understand that our mere good
intentions are not sufficient to make us
good men and women perhaps we could take
from his writing the humility that would
allow us to understand that our mere
good intentions are not sufficient to
make us good men and women perhaps we
could come to understand that such
intentions are instead all too often the
consequence of our unpardonable
historical ignorance our utter willful
blindness and are voracious hidden
appetite for vengeance terror and
destruction perhaps we could come to
remember and to learn from the
intolerable trials endured by all those
who pass through the fiery chambers of
the marxist collectivist ideology
perhaps we could derive from that
remembering and learning the wisdom
necessary to take personal
responsibility for the suffering and
malevolence that still so terribly and
unforgivably characterizes the war
world we have been provided with the
means to transform ourselves and do
humility by the literary and moral
genius of this great Russian author we
should also pray most devoutly -
whatever daddy guides us implicitly or
explicitly for the desire and the will
to learn from what we have been offered
may God himself eternally failed to
forgive us if in the painstakingly
revealed aftermath of such bloodshed
torture and anguish
we remain stiff-necked in cautious and
unchanged