In this section, Solzhenitsyn describes the work camps and the stories of the people who lived and died there. The Holocaust got the press, and rightfully so, but it's disheartening that similar atrocities were going on during the same time period, and longer, in the Soviet Union and have still not received the global denunciation and grief they deserve. This is no doubt due in large part to the fact that the anti-fascist forces chose to ally with Stalin during World War II and facing up to what our "friends" were doing behind their own borders would tarnish the legacy of the Last Good War. Also, I think, Hitler's homicidal policies were racially based, and post Civil-Rights-era America can absolutely come down on the side that racial discrimination is wrong; Stalin's equally homicidal policies, however, were motivated largely by politics, and we are still too caught up in politics ourselves to confess that discrimination based on a person's thoughts and beliefs is just as evil as that based on genetics. Somehow, because a person could change his mind and disavow his former positions, it seems to be less reprehensible to persecute them on that basis than on factors they didn't choose and can't change.
One volume to go, and I will finally "have read" The Gulag Archipelago.
No comments:
Post a Comment