Future Gulags

In a recent post I offered a brief description of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic examination of the ruthless and brutal persecution of the Russian people perpetrated by the communist authorities after the revolution of 1917 -- The Gulag Archipelago (hereafter abbreviated as GA). Millions were killed, imprisoned, or exiled during the decades that followed and Solzhenitsyn, as one of the survivors, had the passion and the spirit to conduct the difficult research in complete and necessary secrecy, and the courage to tell the story.

I also included just a sampling of some of the recent comments made by those on our political left, comments that are reminiscent of the attitudes that drove the thinking of the communists who so fervently slaughtered and imprisoned so many Russians. How sad that those on the left seem to despise the protections of religion, speech, and press, among others, provided by our nation's Constitution.

In truth, there's little difference between the totalitarians of either left or right. They both believe the state should control all aspects of people's lives -- they are, after all, totalitarians -- but there are some differences in practice, particularly related to the way they view and handle a society's means of production. Communists despise the idea of private property and corporate ownership and believe the state should own pretty much everything. Of course, once government bureaucrats take over an industry, thus eliminating all competition and any incentive to succeed, the industry descends into gross inefficiency and chaos. Fascists are actually a bit (but only a bit) smarter since they realize total government control would likely destroy any industry. They, therefore, allow private companies to run their businesses efficiently but demand subservience. Adolph Hitler, for example, didn't have to nationalize Krupp, I. G. Farben, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, and so many others. All he had to do was threaten them and they willingly did his bidding. Armed troops outside the front door of a business or a home can be an effective motivator.

We're starting to see signs of this among our hi-tech giants who do the bidding of the liberal establishment by "canceling" those who disagree with the prevailing ideology. The threat? Be good or the first thing we'll do is repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and allow anyone to sue you for what someone else says about them on one of your platforms. Oh, yes, we can also apply a host of anti-trust legislation and break your big company up into a slew of smaller, more easily controlled firms. There’s so much we can do to you.

Are the "leftists" who have infected Congress, government agencies, academia, big business, and the media really on the political left, or are they more closely aligned with the far right? It actually makes little difference since both extremes have similar ends -- control of others through the expansion and application of power -- and use similar means to achieve them. Solzhenitsyn makes this point often enough when, for example, he compares the ruthless application of power by both Hitler and Stalin, and their minions.

In writing the truth about what his country and its people endured, Solzhenitsyn offers us many prophetic insights. I certainly don't intend to relate them all, but hope only to show that the disturbing things we are experiencing and hearing now are nothing new. We must be wary, or this "one nation, under God" could easily lead to the end visualized by James Burnham in his 1964 book, Suicide of the West.

Let me conclude this post with a comment by Solzhenitsyn in which he describes the legal means put in place and implemented by the Soviet communist government, a new form of justice necessary if they hoped to carry out their brutal persecution:

"And so an entirely new form was adopted: extrajudicial reprisal, and this thankless job was self-sacrificingly assumed by the Cheka, the Sentinel of the Revolution, which was the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict" GA...p. 28.

It was called “reprisal” because it’s primary purpose was to rid the society of real and potential political opponents of the Bolsheviks. It was a form of political cleansing driven as much by revenge as by necessity. Sound familiar? And when I hear of the secrecy and obvious extra-legal actions of federal law enforcement and its involvement with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, I can’t help but think that perhaps we’ve taken a first step toward the “extrajudicial” approach taken by those communist revolutionaries. 

In my next post I hope to show how that which began in Russia a century ago merely foreshadowed some of what we are witnessing today.