Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Is Dead at 89
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Some names are easier than others to spell, but (thank God for cut and paste) Russian author of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died. The Gulag Archipelago was first published in France in 1973. Solzhenitsyn used the word “archipelago” as a metaphor for the scores of prison camps that housed political prisoners “dissidents” and other human rights activists that spread throughout the Soviet Union like a chain of islands. Solzhenitsyn exposed to the world how tens of millions of innocent people were tossed into the gulags, including communists and non-communists; atheists and believers; intelligentsia, workers and peasants. People of different nationalities all fell victim to the terror that hid itself under the slogans of social justice.
Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had “caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.” But don’t worry spacefans, the United States does not go in for savage human rights abuses like the kind that Solzhenitsyn endured. We instead get the soft landing -- like disappearing jobs, homes, healthcare and all the cake and used cooking oil we can steal from our local fast food joints and choke down. Right as rain, Frank, this place is home to the world's most affluent corporate overlord sugar daddies, The Royal We, who have only our best interests at heart and are cooking up schemes every day and, to coin the Oval Office Orangutan, working hard to spread social justice not just at home but all over the whole, wide world. This kind of social justice is so asskicking great that they even have a name for it, globalization.
We're Number One and these guys plan to keep it that way! Besides, there is an election coming up and we get to actually choose between the lesser of two evils like we always do every four years where things have only gotten better…
R.I.P., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
-2Truthy
2 comments:
Solzhenitsyn would have made quite a blogger. He was one guy who had the guts to speak out and report what he saw, no matter what the consequences. His Gulag books were depressing all right, but an important part of recorded history.
I remember hearing how his neighbors in the US thought he was paranoid when he decided to build a security compound around his home, but he knew what he was doing.
Here's hoping that his legacy lives on and encourages other people to expose the truth.
"It is we who shall die — art shall remain," he wrote in his 1970Nobel lecture, which he was not allowed to deliver. "And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?"
Why DOES it seem that building compounds around homes is all the "rage" of late?
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