Soviet Tyranny Warmed Over Is Still Tyranny
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Over at American Thinker, E. M. Cadwaladr reads The Gulag Archipelago and worries about politics in today’s America as an end-all.
“In short, the grandest and most chilling similarity between Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet Union and today’s America is this: the needs of the political narrative reign supreme. Facts have been dethroned. In our old republic, policies were usually the result of compromises. They balanced, however imperfectly, the natural interests of a competing real persons. In a totalitarian state, the collective populace is simply forced into the mold required by the needs of the ideology itself. The idea justifies both means and ends. What happens to the individual matters — and in fact is worth mentioning — only if it happens to advance the progress of the narrative. Truth, as the postmodernists have openly told us, is what authorities say it is. In such a world, you and I are nothing at all.”