Thursday, March 11, 2021
Commentary: The Narrative, the Coup, and the Bourgeoisie
The purges began shortly after the revolution. For all its haste and ill-preparedness, the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, led by the perpetually temperamental Vladimir Lenin and fueled by a fierce devotion to Marxism, quickly gave rise to the vast and unimaginably harsh Soviet labor camp system that would come to be known as the “gulag.” As the leader of the newly established Russian Soviet Republic, Lenin wasted no time in ordering the establishment of decrees calling for the severe punishment of anyone deemed a “class enemy” to the new Soviet Republic.
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The gulag system was in place before Lenin and Stalin showed up. If I'm not mistaken, Lenin spent time in Siberia because of his political stance.
ReplyDeleteSupposedly that what the so called FEMA camps will be used for. I saw a map of all of the supposed FEMA camp locations 10-12 years ago during the OBobozo's first term. I had to laugh at the location of some of them after searching those locations on Googleydodo. The one supposedly located in the very northern part of my state was a n empty field, not that I'd put it past the Usurper's staff to gin up something in a hurry if they put their mind to it.
ReplyDeleteNemo
Same here. They had one supposed FEMA camp on some property that I hunted between Jamestown and Oakdale, CA. There's nothing there but graze land. That's when I started blowing the whole FEMA camp shit off.
DeleteWondering if Bill Gates owns that land now?
DeleteI'm just glad there are still people talking about Solzhenitsyn. Must be something in the air, as I felt compelled to write about The GULAG Archipelago myself just a few days ago.
ReplyDeleteOne gripe, though--not quite trivial--on the otherwise great linked article itself. Regarding this paragraph:
"...To be clear, I am by no means suggesting the removal of Parler from the internet is comparable to the mass extermination of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II or the horrors of the gulag in the Marxist Soviet Union. That would require a dangerous level of disgusting hyperbole monopolized for use by the present-day fanatical Left in America..."
I understand what he's getting at here, but this currently-popular type of unwarranted conciliation is frustrating. Why is it so necessary to insist on marginalizing the importance of the cautionary tale itself? FFS, the whole point of the cautionary tale is to be able to recognize otherwise innocuous-looking or superficially unconnected early-stage events, for their critical role along the path to tipping-point inevitability. And so by voluntarily disassociating early indicators (e.g., the coordinated assassination attempt on Parler) from the late-stage, body-count events that arise only after the early indicators go unchecked, just because those things are not exactly equivalent in degree, it sure seems like he's undermining his own point by pulling the inherent gravity right out of it, removing the connection from the attempt to make the connection in the first place. I admit I'm a horrible 'mudge, but to me this just seems like pre-emptive surrender.
There is no hyperbole in pointing out that the purely ideologically driven silencing of a political opponent's speech, if unchecked, carries with it a historically provable tendency to result in body bags down the road. How many body bags, and how far down the road, are matters of degree only, not of principle, and we're never going to make any headway if we can't even point out that the early event may well lead to the late event just because they're not the same.
Okay, pet peeve vented. Honestly, aside from that and the author's from-the-playbook fetish jab against libertarians*, the article is something we need a lot more of.
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* Mocking people whose stated principal interest is minding their own business, for minding their own business, is a petty practice that makes little sense to me. And he obviously inhabits a different universe than I do, because there has been no such shortage of outrage among libertarians. (I strongly suspect that here he is guilty of the common confusion of actual liberty-loving, "freedomista" (as Claire Wolfe calls them) libertarians, with those simply willing to co-opt the name, usually to bring some sort of legitimacy back to their own fouled nests, and who have no real intention of sticking around once the major party machines will have them back. One thing many "real libertarians" love to joke about is how ironically easy it is, within a political system, to infiltrate and commandeer people whose principal interest is minding their own business. It's funny because it IS true. :-)
Besides, regardless of what they might call themselves--most "real libertarians" of my experience don't much care to use the name at all (and certainly not the capital-L form), just like most gunnies I know want no association with the NRA because it's the RINO of gun-rights organizations--what matters, here, ought to rise beyond names anyway: if it's actually about liberty, as so many like to claim, then the names shouldn't matter.