LEST WE FORGET : The Gulag Archipelago confirmed the horrors of the Soviet Union and Marxist collect

[rangerrebew]

LEST WE FORGET : The Gulag Archipelago confirmed the horrors of the Soviet Union and Marxist collectivist ideology
Posted: July 2, 2020 | Author: Jamie Spry

“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever levelled in modern times. One sure to stick in the craw of the Soviet propaganda machine with increasing discomfort until it has done its work.” — George F. Kennan (American diplomat and scholar)

“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” — David Remnick, New Yorker

“Best Nonfiction Book of the Twentieth Century” — Time magazine

***

JORDAN PETERSON’s forward to the abridged version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic The Gulag Archipelago is a literary masterpiece. Lucid, instructive and powerful. Who, having enjoyed the experience of reading it, would doubt Peterson’s claim that “If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917… there is absolutely and ­finally no excuse now.” For history is littered with diabolical examples of national leaders implementing grotesque, murderous means to justify the end, an impossible utopian Marxist mirage.

POSTING this on Climatism, today, as a reminder that the same Marxist collectivist ideology that enabled a third of Stalin’s Soviet population to be slain is the same poisonous ideology driving Democrat states and cities across America to ruin.

https://climatism.blog/2020/07/02/lest-we-forget-the-gulag-archipelago-confirmed-the-horrors-of-the-soviet-union-and-marxist-collectivist-ideology/

[Slide Rule]

Jordan Peterson has done us a major favor by promoting the book, The Gulag Archipelago, written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. What a fine introduction by one of the rare individuals that understands so well the danger.

The book and circumstances that Jordan Peterson brings to a highlight today focus on immediate problems in the World and in the US.

I have given significant time to Peterson's works and I have read Gulag Archipelago and all the other works of Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn is a great man, an outstanding author, one who suffered in the Gulag and basically stopped Russia in its tracks.

Pulitzer Prize also.


Solzhenitsyn wrote while in the Gulag. He did not have writing instruments nor paper.

He wrote in his mind and captured that story month by month by a memory device. He had someone make him a device like a rosary but it had 20 or so beads. Then one week a month he burned what he had written into his mind. Names, dates, and all the gory details of everything.

It takes quite a man and fortitude to do this for a long prison sentence.

The book is breathtaking in its start. Solzhenitsyn was a Captain in Artillery and was summoned to his General. There were two political officers there. Fortunately his General and friend asked him some key questions. Did you write about Stalin to a friend. This information would serve him well during the upcoming torture. Usually under torture you will give up every name you can remember and make up something about each for a brief escape. The information saved him from destroying friend and family.

A remarkable man, remarkable story, and remarkable outcome.

Pick up a book that he has written. They are all outstanding and highly recommended.

[PeteS in CA]

In paperback, Gulag is 3 volumes, ~2700 pages. I can understand abridging it because of its scale. But that massive scale also drives home how horrific the nearly five decades of Lenin and Stalin were. Abridging the text risks abridging its impact. For me personally, it gave a few very general clues to a family mystery, my Grandmother's brothers going silent in the late 1920s. Her brothers were ethnic German, were "formers" (in their case former Russian army and bodyguards of the Czar), were from the Ukraine, and were sons of land-owning farmers. Any one of which would have sufficed to get them killed outright or sent to a death-project like the Belomor Canal.