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4.0
I felt this book was an almost necessary introduction to the Gulag Archipelago (which I'm currently reading) because, since it's about Solzhenitsyn's allies who played their part in the preservation of his numerous texts from the KGB and their underground samizdat distribution (bootleg microfilm photographed versions), it really gives a sense of the operations and the triumph of the human will that occured not only on Solzhenitsyn's part but on all his allies' parts that was responsible in ultimately delivering and detonating the bomb that exploded the Soviet Union.
Apologies have been spared for the concentration camps, and so-called nazis these days are met with total intolerance if not violence (its own separate issue). With that said, who has apologized for the gulags, and how many more millions of corpses are needed to silence those who claim that this or that regime was not *real* communism, as though they knew better than, say, Stalin or Zedong (note to future tyrants: please consult young twenty-somethings in the future for instructions on how to correctly implement total state control).
It seems a mockery of Solzhenitsyn's legacy and every one of the brave individuals who played their part in resistance against communism to wave the hammer & sickle to this day decades after the ideology has cannibalized tens of millions, with so many of the regime's own among them, not only in the Soviet Union but in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong.
Figures like Hamsun, Heidegger and countless other intellectuals who found themselves on the wrong side of history with their National Socialist sympathies can be forgiven for disavowing once they learned of the atrocities the ideology was responsible for.
What of our professors and students and our darling French intellectuals then and decades after who did not disavow once the world learned just how many corpses of men, women and children were buried beneath each utopia?
Apologies have been spared for the concentration camps, and so-called nazis these days are met with total intolerance if not violence (its own separate issue). With that said, who has apologized for the gulags, and how many more millions of corpses are needed to silence those who claim that this or that regime was not *real* communism, as though they knew better than, say, Stalin or Zedong (note to future tyrants: please consult young twenty-somethings in the future for instructions on how to correctly implement total state control).
It seems a mockery of Solzhenitsyn's legacy and every one of the brave individuals who played their part in resistance against communism to wave the hammer & sickle to this day decades after the ideology has cannibalized tens of millions, with so many of the regime's own among them, not only in the Soviet Union but in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong.
Figures like Hamsun, Heidegger and countless other intellectuals who found themselves on the wrong side of history with their National Socialist sympathies can be forgiven for disavowing once they learned of the atrocities the ideology was responsible for.
What of our professors and students and our darling French intellectuals then and decades after who did not disavow once the world learned just how many corpses of men, women and children were buried beneath each utopia?
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