What effect do you imagine yourself likely to have on someone who does not start out with such sympathy?
I can only recount the emergence of my own point of view. It's 1990-something, and I'm killing a Saturday afternoon in a used-book store in Austin, somewhere near the UT campus. Wow, lots of dust on this one. I'll bet nobody's touched it for 20 years. I've heard of this Solzhenitsyn guy, wonder what it's about? Didn't he win a Nobel? I guess for $1 it's worth a shot.
And then, a few months later when I got around to reading it: Wow, I used to think that the Russians were like the Nazis or something, a bunch of inhuman demons, maybe a barbarian race that evolved from a worse sort of ape than the rest of us. But they aren't. They really aren't. They're just like us. They are us. And the stuff in this book didn't really happen because of differences in politics or religion or economics or communism versus capitalism or whatever. It happened because the Russian people allowed their political system to dominate their judicial system. The courts were their last line of defense, and when they fell, the rest was inevitable.
The best time to stop the Black Marias would have been before the first one rolled out. The next best time was just after the first one rolled out. Either way, it didn't happen, and now I see the same thing happening here in the US that led to the events described in the Gulag Archipelago: the political subversion of justice.
It seems to start with the elevation of the cult of law enforcement as a privileged class, or at least that's something that tends to happen in the early stages of metastasis (to use Solzhenitsyn's metaphor.) In Russia, the rationale was the struggle against counterrevolutionary forces and the bourgeoisie. In the US, it's the War on Terror, Drugs, and Kiddie Porn. I don't see much difference.
So, yeah, horror is an appropriate expression when you think you can see a map like this starting to unfold.
I fear we've badly misgathered one another, and I regret to say I don't really see any purpose my further involvement might serve.
I will say this: perhaps the most striking feature I observe in your analysis is that everything in it is very simple. I wish I had more often observed reality to be so.
Good. That's a start; it's a horrible business.
What effect do you imagine yourself likely to have on someone who does not start out with such sympathy?
I can only recount the emergence of my own point of view. It's 1990-something, and I'm killing a Saturday afternoon in a used-book store in Austin, somewhere near the UT campus. Wow, lots of dust on this one. I'll bet nobody's touched it for 20 years. I've heard of this Solzhenitsyn guy, wonder what it's about? Didn't he win a Nobel? I guess for $1 it's worth a shot.
And then, a few months later when I got around to reading it: Wow, I used to think that the Russians were like the Nazis or something, a bunch of inhuman demons, maybe a barbarian race that evolved from a worse sort of ape than the rest of us. But they aren't. They really aren't. They're just like us. They are us. And the stuff in this book didn't really happen because of differences in politics or religion or economics or communism versus capitalism or whatever. It happened because the Russian people allowed their political system to dominate their judicial system. The courts were their last line of defense, and when they fell, the rest was inevitable.
The best time to stop the Black Marias would have been before the first one rolled out. The next best time was just after the first one rolled out. Either way, it didn't happen, and now I see the same thing happening here in the US that led to the events described in the Gulag Archipelago: the political subversion of justice.
It seems to start with the elevation of the cult of law enforcement as a privileged class, or at least that's something that tends to happen in the early stages of metastasis (to use Solzhenitsyn's metaphor.) In Russia, the rationale was the struggle against counterrevolutionary forces and the bourgeoisie. In the US, it's the War on Terror, Drugs, and Kiddie Porn. I don't see much difference.
So, yeah, horror is an appropriate expression when you think you can see a map like this starting to unfold.