Thread by @squidlord

If you have not read The Gulag Archipelago, you owe it to yourself (and everyone around you) to do so.

https://twitter.com/wretchardthecat/status/1548159644040048641

1/47

Not the least reason being that it is a great piece of literature nor that it is revelatory when it comes to understanding human nature when it comes to what is rightly considered weakness in the face of overwhelming social pressure. 2/47

No, you should read it because it is a bright and shining spotlight cast directly on the heart of what "people smarter than you" thought was a good idea and which they continue to push on you: Communism. Specifically, Marxism.

solzhenitsyncenter.org/his-writings/l… 3/47

It may call itself "democratic socialism," but it has more in common with the way the pigs ran Animal Farm then anything you might recognize as democracy.

archive.org/details/Animal… 4/47

Or, more concisely, three wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. 5/47

Part of the reason that you should avail yourself of the opportunity to read The Gulag Archipelago is because, somehow, despite the obsession with "knowing the history of oppression" a lot of people are unaware of what the Soviets were up to.

No, it's not ancient history. 6/47

This is in the book that was written in 1840, or 1910. It was originally published in 1973. Things were not looking pretty in 1973. 7/47

Despite the best efforts of William Duranty, things were beginning to leak out of communist Russia. Terrible things. Marxist ideas, for one. How horrible the results of them for the citizenry of a country, not just physically but emotionally and psychologically, another. 8/47

I just realized that some of you might not know who Walter Duranty was and why I referred to him in a negative context.

In short, he was a journalist who was an aggressive apologist for the horrors which the Soviets were wreaking on the Russian people. 9/47

A well-known journalist. Wrote for the New York Times.

In particular, he wrote a lot of articles about the situation in the United Soviet States of Russia. All pretty much completely bullshit.

For which he won a Pulitzer Prize.

pulitzer.org/news/statement… 10/47

If you are a person with some degree of conscience, even a vague sense of morality, or an iota of compassion – all traits which I am generally lacking in, but if you're not, we probably agree on our response to this: 11/47

Not a particularly strong respect for either the New York Times or the Pulitzers.

It's hard to pass off the statement from the Pulitzer Prize Committee regarding said award as anything respectable.

And that would be the right response. 12/47

Because once you're an apologist for Joseph Stalin and complicit in hiding his crimes, not even I can give you a pass.

cato.org/blog/mr-jones 13/47

He wasn't alone in being a horrible, lying, underhanded bastard. There were a fair number of people at the time shilling for Uncle Joe and Communism. And he certainly wasn't the last.

Which brings us around back to the Gulag Archipelago. 14/47

It was published in 1973 but it was written between 1958 in 1968 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (A name which I will never, ever manage to pronounce correctly.)

Keep in mind the timeline here. Duranty received his Pulitzer for his work in 1933 in 1934. 15/47

The GA was written more than 20 years later and published roughly 4 years after that.

In that time, things did not get better. 16/47

Duranty went out of his way to cover up the Holodomor, which was effectively the wholesale devastation of the Ukrainian population by the millions.

cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust… 17/47

It was only part of the collapse of the Soviet agricultural plan when Communism made contact with reality, weaponized as a crisis that had to be turned into an opportunity by the Party apparatchiks and Stalin himself. 18/47

The Soviet Marxists never passed up an opportunity to murder the undesirables, see. And by that they meant everyone from the Little Russians to the rest of the kulaks whenever they could.

history.com/news/ukrainian… 19/47

Which is why when I say "things didn't get better" you may wonder how that's possible over the next 20 years. And the next 40 years.

That brings us, finally, back to The Gulag Archipelago. Specifically to gulags. 20/47

It's very difficult kill millions, perhaps tens of millions of people even with the full incompetence of a Communist government at your fingertips. Well, to be fair, they are quite good at killing people. 21/47

But you can't kill everyone, even when you have conveniently defined pretty much everyone in the middle class in your society as a greedy undesirable worthy only of destruction. You need them. They do work. 22/47

(Any parallels to modern political environments in the West are purely intentional and absolutely you should come away feeling disquieted and uncomfortable.) 23/47

But since work needed to be done, even if it was the annoying work of digging graves to dispose of the educated, the individualist, or the inconvenient, Stalin had a brilliant plan. 24/47

Round them up and put them in forced labor camps to slave away for the good of everyone else, preferably until they died horribly in out-of-the-way places.

That's a gulag. 25/47

Siberia was very popular for them both because Siberia is huge and because you could stick a lot of people in the middle of nowhere, keep them on the brink of starvation, and effectively have nowhere they could escape to.

Absolutely lovely places. 26/47

TGA is about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's personal experience of being sent to a gulag as well as interviews that he did with other people while there, diaries, legal documents, etc. 27/47

Because unlike Walter Duranty, Solzhenitsyn was a good writer and had more than a shred of personal dignity.

So this is a book that you should read. You should go out of your way to read it. 28/47

You should give it considerable thought while looking around the world and being discomforted by it. 29/47

(I've taken the long way around to get to this point because I'm just not sure how many people who might read this don't know any of it. I used to think that a basic understanding of world history was fairly common. 30/47

I have been proven wrong on too many occasions for me to be comfortable continuing to make that assumption. Especially when it comes to collectivist political reality. 31/47

Whether it be Maoism or Marxism, there seems to be a woeful lack of background education, so there we are.) 32/47

A few short quotes from the book, while we're here:

> “Nothing is easier than stamping your foot and shouting: ‘That’s mine!’ It is immeasurably harder to proclaim: ‘You may live as you please.’” 33/47

> “We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.” 34/47

> “You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.” 35/47

> “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

Which brings us back around to where we started. 36/47

> He who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

-- cato.org/publications/c… 37/47

That's been said in many contexts. But it is not entirely true. You don't have to *believe* absurdity to commit atrocities. You just have to mouth it. You just have to let it pass unchallenged. Playing along suffices. 38/47

On the positive side I think that Western culture, particularly American culture, is reaching a critical moment as it comes to recognizing the lies they tacitly accept.

What they will actually do with that knowledge remains unclear. 39/47

Many are beginning to push back against being coerced into mouthing platitudes.

But not everyone.

That's where the gulags come in. That's where the dissidents get locked away when they are too numerous to be outright killed.

We'll see how it shakes out. 40/47

Until then, you get to decide: Do I keep making the mouth motions they want to see or do I deny lies? 41/47

I'll leave you with one more bit from TGA: 42/47

> 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? 43/47

> 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… 44/47

…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? 45/47

> 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... 46/47

> We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” 47/47