Monday evening I received this email:
“right now on lbc a white English journalist is slagging off Churchill as a racist while Indians and a Windrush descendant are calling in to defend Churchill and saying he is a patriot and that they too love this country … What on earth has happened to white British educated people???”
Good question – to which many of us here know the answer: a brainwashing in Cultural Marxism that has gone on for two generations in our schools.
On that same day there was a report on Breitbart that astronaut Scott Kelly apologised on Twitter for having tweeted a Churchill quote with which he meant to shame Republicans over the Kavanaugh nomination. It seems that thanks to social media the slagging-off of historical giants now crosses the ocean from over there to over here in no time at all – the point being that some of our ‘social justice warriors’ don’t want to look weak and feeble in the eyes of their overseas comrades when it comes to the latest fashion in virtue signalling.
But there’s more to it than just that.
There are, for example, the more and more undisguised cravings of a large group of our younger generation for undiluted socialism, with Corbyn their preferred prophet. Evidence that socialism doesn’t work simply doesn’t come into it, else the gruesome example of what happens in Venezuela might have provided some food for thought, given that ‘history’ is uncool and these kids probably only just recognise the word ‘Stalin’ but have no idea what this meant in real life.
There is also the spectacle of the lefty-Antifa demos which grace our screens at every opportunity. Just watching them shows that there are obvious ‘performers’ in the front row. The experience of our colleagues in Bath has demonstrated this, admittedly in a very small way, to my satisfaction.
But what has all that got to do with books?
A personal experience will illustrate this: like many of my generation growing up in the 1960s, I was enthralled by the seeming righteousness of socialism and communism. Yes, I was one of those described by Churchill as having a heart at that age. Well, you know where I’ve ended up now, so obviously I did find my brains eventually… not least thanks to some books.
In the early 1970s, one Soviet writer, one of his works, detonated like a bombshell over the intellectual heads of us dreamy so-called ‘socialists’, dupes that we were. It detonated all over the Western world. He was subsequently expelled from the Soviet Union. I am of course speaking of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his book “The GULAG Archipelago”. His book changed the way many Lefties across the Western world, especially the younger ones like myself, started to look at the then mighty Soviet Union, and it certainly changed the way I thought about socialism. It’s not too far-fetched to claim that it was the main impetus for the way to Perestroika and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union.
Let me note in passing that it is astonishing that this whole part of the history of the world is seemingly written out of our discourse and now totally swamped by the Russia-bashing in our MSM and governments – a bashing as bad as in the times of the Cold war. Mind you – the techniques of the then official way to daub everyone dissenting from the governments’ line of seeing a red under every bed has now been successfully adopted by the Matriarchat who sees a rapist in every man and who demands that the basic tenet of our Common Law, of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ should no longer apply to men.
It is also interesting to note that it’s now nearly impossible to get Solzhenitsyn’s books. If you have kept your original publications of nearly 40 years ago, you’ll remember that the “GULAG Archipelago” consisted of three thick volumes. You cannot get those any longer, but you can still get this abridged version:
The Gulag Archipelago [Abridged] (Harvill Press Editions) Paperback – 30 Jan 2003 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It may not have quite the impact the detailed, long-winded original has, but it is still miles better than modern attempts at rewriting this darkest chapter in humanities’ history. The access to Soviet archives may have added a few more data but it certainly lacks the immediacy of Solzhenitsyn’s work who, after all, wrote from his own experience, adding the many stories he was told by his co-prisoners. There simply is nothing like it and has not been, the many biographies form fellow sufferers notwithstanding.
So – this book matters more than most because it shows in gruesome detail not just how Stalin and indeed Lenin before him created the success of the Soviet Union on the blood and bones of millions of their peoples. Far more importantly, Solzhenitsyn documents that socialism, as created in the Soviet Union, could not have functioned without the GULAG and that this system of political slavery is inherent in socialism.
We can see this not just in the case of Venezuela where people are fleeing into the neighbouring countries – something the Cubans, being on a island, could only do under great danger – we see it in the more and more rabid utterances of certain parts of Labour, especially those engaged on social media. The same mental attitude of ‘crushing the enemy’ is deployed, so far without consequences to the freedom of those being attacked. We see it in the proliferation of ‘hate crimes’ on which the police now spends more time than on real crime.
This is something Solzhenitsyn has remarked upon: for the ‘socialists’, the soviets, the criminal classes were ‘one of us’, just misguided, needing a bit of punishment but generally deemed to be on the ‘right side of history’. The ‘politicals’, that is the dissidents, were the true enemy, their dissent worthy of death. How is that different from today where, in the minds of our brainwashed lefties thought crime is more heinous than burglary, robbery, rape and acid attacks in broad daylight on our streets?
If you can get your hands on that book – read it! And if you can actually make one of the social justice warriors in your vicinity read it (a hard task, I know) then you are on the way to help eradicate the poison that is cultural marxism.
[Picture credit: The leaflet designed by by Mikhail Makarenko; Макаренко М.Я. листовка для освещения проблемы ГУЛАГ в СССР]
Vivian, I worked in the same office in Johannesburg as a Jewish Russian woman for two years. (She’d left the USSR at the time when they started allowing Jewish people to leave.)
She told us what it was like living in the Soviet Union and explained the role of the commissar. His job was to find dissidents. He had a quota to fill. So, every month or so someone would disappear, never to be seen again. Unsurprisingly, under the circumstances, everyone was very careful about what they said, or in today’s parlance, was very politically correct. But the commissar had a quota to fill. So, if a man bought his wife a new fur coat, the Commissar’s wife got one too. If he bought a new car, the commissar got one too. I found listening to her difficult enough. Having to live like that? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
It’s because of experiences like that that I see Marxism, Socialism, Communism as synonyms for the same basic thing. Feudalism. Rule by force. I call it the ancient order. If we look past all their high-falutin’ claptrap, look through their smoke and mirrors, ignore what they say and instead just look at what they do, underneath it all, we find the same basic structure and behaviour we find in every criminal gang.
As I see it, commies are just gangsters that think big. Why rob a bank when you can rob an entire country because then you have all the banks. (Right now they seem to have their sights set on the entire world!)
The naïve struggle to understand how it can be that they can take a wealthy civilised country like Venezuela that was working well, had a high standard of living etc., and destroy it completely.
One might even hear them say it was because socialism wasn’t applied correctly or somehow just went wrong this occasion.
If gangsters bash down your front door with a four pound hammer and start taking your stuff do you think they’re going to be careful not to make a mess or damage anything they don’t want. Do you think they wouldn’t damage you?
If we see them as common thieves, it’s easier to grasp.
GANGSTERS equals WRECKERS in my book, you use the correct terminology Michael to describe enormous infamous conspiracy, whether it is cultural Marxism on a grand and ever expanding infinite scale or just the common grubby REMAIN conspiracy.
To gain any traction in the media we must learn to call SPADES spades,
The extraction of 40billion quid ransom/blackmail was the work of EU GANGSTERS.
All 3 volumes are available on amazon.
Please post the link – I couldn’t find them.
Here’s the amazon link
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=gulag+archipelago&index=aps&tag=googhydr-21&ref=pd_sl_87hqykgu84_e&adgrpid=54814478044&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=259075928333&hvpos=1t1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=467074515079256164&hvqmt=e&hvdev=t&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1007000&hvtargid=kwd-301574985055
Thanks – and when you check them out you’ll find that these are 2nd hand or remainders from the 1990s. The one Kindle ‘edition’ looks to be unreadable.
And that’s my point: no modern version, i.e. printed this century, never mind a modern electronic version, is available.
Can you see our modern youth go and buy ‘old tomes’? I can’t.
Kindle e-books:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gulag-Archipelago-Experiment-Literary-Investigation-ebook/dp/B0196A9XS4/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1539275869&sr=1-2&keywords=Gulag+archipelago
Paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gulag-Archipelago-Experiment-Literary-Investigation/dp/0061253723/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1539276055&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Gulag+archipelago+volume+2
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gulag-Archipelago-Experiment-Literary-Investigation-ebook/dp/B019E6OP7Y/ref=sr_1_23?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1539275967&sr=1-23&keywords=Gulag+archipelago
Put simply its wrong for power to lie, unaccountably, in the hands of the few. This applies to dictatorships of any kind, not just communist ones. Before we completely throw the socialist baby out with the bath water lets remember what Dickens had to say about life for many in British at the height of our empire. The Oliver Twists, Tiny Tim’s wouldn’t have minded someone speaking up for the need for fairness and a reasonable return for hard working people without the means to own their own business. One other thing. Solzhenitsyn warned about the EU showing signs of turning into another USSR just before he died. Another fact that seems to have been edited out of history.
LBC, how is it I am not surprised. That station has a load of ‘wet blankets’ for presenters these days, all pushing the Liberal left agenda. Until they recently changed the schedules, it was rather more listenable than it is now with Ian Dale at 4 pm when one was driving home. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but at least it was balanced Now we have an ultra tedious left leaning BBC reject pushing his unwanted left wing agenda at that time and an Dale has been pushed into a later slot. At least Nigel Farage is the one gleaming spot on that station at 6 pm, by which time my journey is over. That is the one slot now that I don’t have a CD on. I refuse to have my intelligence insulted.
I waded through hours of a series of uploads, intermittently available on YouTube but always available on Bitchute titled ‘Europa – The Last Battle’ and it was pretty gruesome in places and I had to look away. All documented. Sleep was hard to come by after that. I was born just after WW2 and I discovered we have been lied to and deceived all our lives. Through the MSM, even in those days, the government and education. The Globalists have been at work since the start of the last century. Not much has been said about the so many millions of Russians that died in the Bolshevik revolution (somewhere between 60 – 80 million). Those who survived the starvation died in the most horrendous ways imaginable. Those responsible were the same as own the Federal banks, our present MSM, and the film industry. The 6 million we hear so much about in WW2 were actually approx 156,000 (as reported by the Red Cross) who died from typhus and starvation. Yes, there were atrocities committed but they were on both sides. Germany’s crime was to not only turn their back on the Federal banking system but to be such a success without it, so they had to be annihilated. At the end of the war General Patton stated ‘We defeated the wrong enemy’, then suffered a fatal car crash. JFK nearly succeeded in his attempt to change the corrupt banking system but was assassinated. Coincidence? Knowing the truth for those who may be able to make changes means loss of life. For us lower down the chain who don’t have an audience it is punishable by a jail term and a criminal record. If you tell a lie long enough it becomes the perceived truth but the truth is unalterable.
We are not allowed to debate it or criticise it so what are they hiding?
The bankers decide when to go to war and who to go to war against and they are the only ones who profit from it and they are in collusion with the MSM. Expect more censorship as the Internet and social media platforms are their biggest enemy now.
I too was once a believer in Socialism – I still believe in a welfare state (to a degree) and in the NHS (again it needs tailing back) but have now of course come over to the other side! Centre right I guess. And yes, the education system has a lot to answer for!
Come on Janice “The NHS needs tailing back”
Isn`t this the apogee of Cultural Marxism in this country, a socialist concept whose cost and inefficiency (when compared with other European systems) is legendary, unable to break the mould, chained by the mantra of all the legacy parties that it is “safe in our hands”. Yes “safe” in the hands of politicians who watch each other like hawks and by their mutual antipathy ensure that it does not operate in the grass roots people they fail to represent.
Not only that State employed people are more inclined to vote Labour, the NHS is a prime attraction for continuation of mass immigration and thus is a vehicle of Diversity.
I believe it needs something more radical than “tailing back” and it is not privatisation in the multinational business sense of the word, but it has to shed its “touch me not shell” – and SOON
(PS I do know that technically the Government no longer own it)
Hello Viv,
Socialism is attractive to some youngsters because childhood is Socialist.
Free money, free lodgings, free food, free education plus free pocket money. Who wouldn’t want free this and free that for as long as possible.
If the kids study PPE at Oxford and then get elected, they can be Socialists until they retire.
MPs act like children because they have moved from one teat to another.
We are all socialists now! Lord Harcourt 1887
I remember reading Gulag Archipelago and also Cancer Ward,and the wonderful. One day in the life of Ivan Desonavitch( not sure of the spelling) plus there was a film of that one….all affected my view of the wonderful soviet utopia…..it was a living hell but useful idiots like Corbyn ignored that.
Could we get copies of those books to sell at the stalls…just to show the public what life was really like there
Ah Viv! I’m glad you posted this article, not just because I totally agree with it, I’ve despised Socialists since early childhood, it must be in my genes, but also it gives me the opportunity to post this video.
This is a video about Socialism and Agenda 2030, like you it mentions Venezuela and many other places and like your article it hits the nail on the head. Frightening stuff!
“Now Made Public—Agenda 2030 Motives They Dare Not Reveal…”
https://youtu.be/PYUlubsw_gE
From memory of reading expert historical analysis, in the Soviet Union between 1917 and the fall of the Berlin Wall getting on for 80,000,000 died as a consequence of Soviet Government action or inaction, and this ignores warfare. I reckon Stalin was worse than Hitler.