

Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89 - ola
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7540038.stm

======
nickb
Some of my favorite quotes from the great man:

 _“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make
mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course
for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially
selfish ones.”_

 _“Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.”_

 _“When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its
attractiveness.”_

 _“The one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had
is art, literature”_

 _“I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all
circumstances -- from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably
than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its
cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons
will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no
time has this ennobled our history.”_

And finally, an excerpt from "The Gulag Archipelago"... on how to resist
fascism & tyranny. The lesson that's just as important today as it was half a
century ago.

 _"During an arrest, you think since you aren’t guilty, how can they arrest
you? Why should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all,
you’ll only make your situation worse; you’ll make it more difficult for them
to sort out the mistake. And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What
would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at
night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and
had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as
for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city,
people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every
bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had
understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the
downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers,
or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a
shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s
thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! We didn’t love freedom
enough. Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right
not to sacrifice himself."_

~~~
lupin_sansei
> And finally, an excerpt from "The Gulag Archipelago"... on how to resist
> fascism & tyranny. The lesson that's just as important today as it was half
> a century ago.

Although fascism and Communism are pretty darn close (both seek total control
of the economy and the culture), let's not forget that he was specifically
writing against a Communist system, not a fascist system.

It's shocking that the BBC link doesn't even use the word "Communism" in it
once. Can you imagine an article on someone who stood up to Hitler without
using the word Nazi once?

Perhaps Solzhenitsyn can shed some light on that?:

"For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the
West, it is still a living lion."

<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Solzhenitsyn>

"Instead of blaming Russian conditions, he blamed the teachings of Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels, arguing Marxism itself is violent. His conclusion is
Communism will always be totalitarian and violent, wherever it is practiced.
There was nothing special in the Russian conditions which affected the
outcome."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn>

I suggest we honour Solzhenitsyn's life by actually not avoiding focusing his
criticism directly at Communism and more generally at Totalitarianism.

~~~
plinkplonk
"Instead of blaming Russian conditions, he blamed the teachings of Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels, arguing Marxism itself is violent. His conclusion is
Communism will always be totalitarian and violent, wherever it is practiced.
There was nothing special in the Russian conditions which affected the
outcome."

This is an interesting quote. If you replace Marx and Engels with Mohammed,
Communism with Islam, and Russian with say Iranian you end up with "something
you can't say".

People can criticize communism in Russia _today_ , or outside Russia in the
past, but it takes real guts to do what Solshenitzyn did - criticizing
communism when he _knew_ it could result in incarceration or worse. It would
be like someone in Iran criticizing Khomeini.

~~~
mseebach
> This is an interesting quote. If you replace Marx and Engels with Mohammed,
> Communism with Islam, and Russian with say Iranian you end up with
> "something you can't say".

Which is again interesting, because it isn't true. You'll have to be pretty
blinded not to see the main difference between Marxism and Islam - namely that
the latter is a religion which can exists independently of a government, while
Marxism in it's very core is a layout for a state.

It doesn't make sense to live as a practising Marxist in a capitalism society,
but you can very well live as a practising Muslim in a Christian or secular
society.

Way too many governments are using Islam to subdue their people in a
totalitarian state, and they are helped by islamophobes in the west, who lend
them legitimacy by claiming that it's just the way Islam is.

------
blurry
I can't help but post a joke here:

A new convict arrives at a Gulag labor camp. Everyone gathers around the new
man.

\- What's your sentence?

\- Twenty years.

\- What for?

\- Nothing, I am innocent!

\- Bullsh-t. Innocent people get five.

------
ckinnan
An inspirational man. Another quote:

"If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?"

------
bmj
GetReligion.org has a take on the press coverage of Solzhenitsyn and the rocky
relationship he had with Western elites because of his faith and general
distrust of Modernity:

<http://www.getreligion.org/?p=3779>

------
babul
Wikipedia (updated moments after the news broke):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn>

------
mynameishere
I've actually read the entire "Gulag". Anyone else here...?

~~~
cousin_it
Of course. But then again, I'm Russian, and one of my great-grandfathers was a
victim.

