Excerpt: The Pen that Toppled an Empire: Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago

Location of Forced-Labor Camps in the Soviet Union

The blog of the victims of communism.org recently posted and article. The Pen that Toppled an Empire: Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago.

We will attempt to do it justice with some excerpts on the main points of the piece.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one of the giants in opposing the evil that is socialism and like many he was initially taken in by it’s grandiose and flowery promises of equality in a “Worker’s Paradise”. Like many he realized that these promises were a chimera. He spent years in the system of oppression that is all too endemic to Socialism and he was able to bring retribution to the regime that perpetuated these and monstrous crimes by bringing it down. It's is our contention that this could be considered to be the beginning of the end of the very idea of Socialism.

The article details his journey from being an enthusiastic adherent of this new and wondrous system to his realisation of the brutal truths of it’s organized evil. Solzhenitsyn learned during his time in the camps that it was Vladimir Lenin that began the state security apparatus the Cheka.

Solzhenitsyn abandoned his youthful idealism the hard way. While serving as an artillery officer in World War II, he was arrested, convicted, and sent to the Gulag (the Soviet forced labor camps) for criticizing Joseph Stalin. It was only in the camps that he realized that nothing had worked out as Marx predicted. In conversations with fellow prisoners, he learned that Lenin had initiated a ruthless security state, suppressing any opposition to Bolshevik rule. After Lenin’s death, the paranoid and sadistic Stalin gained power and began an effort to remake human beings in the communist mold. Property was confiscated, businesses nationalized, churches closed, farmers forcibly relocated to agricultural communes, and so-called “class enemies,” people from the upper or middle classes, whose only crime was being born into the wrong family, sent to the Gulag. It impossible to estimate how many people were executed by Stalin, but we know that working conditions in the camps were so poor that tens of millions died of starvation, disease, and exhaustion.

The article points out the problems of Marx’s bait and switch scheme whereby the all powerful state is supposed to 'wither away’ by some unspecified and miraculous means. The author concludes that the lack of limitation on the government because of this provision was part of the problem. However, this is a situation all too common in history, as the quote from Lord Acton made clear: “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

The nation’s Socialist Left is all too repetitive in issuing the same excuses for the systemic failures of it’s base ideology. One of these is to assert that the state becoming authoritarian is somehow contrary to the teachings of Marx, that the ideal is a stateless society with cooperation being the watchword. History has shown this never takes place and that this miraculous transformation is all but just one of the frauds perpetrated by the Left in these instances. The excuse “That wasn’t real Socialism” or some variation thereof ignores human nature and how the same circumstances will always end in the same results.

One of the fundamental problems of Socialism is that it runs contrary to the basic precepts of human nature. The psychological principle of operant conditioning informs us that punishing a behaviour tends to diminish the repetition of that behaviour. While rewarding a behaviour tends to encourage that behaviour. Taking someone’s hard earned money tends to discourage them from working, handing them other people’s money also tends to discourage them from exerting themselves.

Socialism cannot abide this ‘imperfection’ in human nature and thus must try the impossible and perfect that which cannot be perfected. The article points out this as the fundamental crime of Socialism.

The Gulag reveals that the monstrous evil of the Soviet Union was not caused by the misapplication of Marx’s ideals, by Stalin’s pathology, or by Russian nationalism. The world’s most heinous tyranny was not an apparition or a deviation from Marxist ideals, Solzhenitsyn demonstrates; it was, rather, the inevitable consequence of expecting perfection from imperfect human beings. Wherever communism has existed or will exist, there will be victims.

This one of the primary reasons the immoral, parasitic organized evil that is socialism must be banished from the realm of viable governmental and economic systems. It is an ideology built upon the use of force and fraud that has never worked and can never work and has resulted in the deliberate mass murder of millions of people and the oppression of untold billions more.