How government works.

I simply cannot say it any better than this.

Dear Leader,

…we see you.

We understand how you work.

Enjoy your fun time, before your own people come to eat you. (You do realize that’s coming, right? It’s what they do. It’s all they do.)

History of the Future? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘The GULAG Archipelago’.

I first fully worked my way through The GULAG Archipelago about ten years ago now. I had long before seen references to the work, usually the famous “…and how we burned in the camps…” quote in isolation, but hadn’t gone through it any further than that.

_{Still at the Internet Archive}

It was and is, no joke and without exaggeration, one of the most utterly terrifying works I’ve ever laid eyes on.

At the same time, I cannot imagine a work that is more important for society to grapple with–seriously grapple with–at this present moment in history. A period in which (to risk oversimplification with the use of labels) the combination of “intersectional identity politics” and “cancel culture” is right now metastasizing beyond ignore-able novelty into another realm entirely, given real, actual power over people’s lives, by a de facto singularity of “legitimate” government, shadow government, and fascistic worldwide power elite (the “It’s a Big Club…and you ain’t in it” of George Carlin fame), said singularity itself conveniently facilitated by the brutally effective hard-sell of a worldwide…well, the fear of a worldwide pandemic*. Because the modern Big Club, through a depressingly effective combination of mendacious word-gaming, straight-up censorship and agitprop, and character assassination (of any serious critic, whether historical foe or long-time friend no longer sufficiently “politically reliable”), has built its cadre of useful idiots into exactly the sort of crusading mob that just might let them get away with it.

Ability, opportunity, jeopardy.

Put more bluntly: it’s really starting to seem like a critical time for the “Are we seriously gonna do this?” question. Because Solzhenitsyn covered exactly the kind of history, here, which we repeat only to our doom; it’s laid out right there for us to see, and to learn from, and for heaven’s sake, to use to apply some freakin’ brakes to our own nascent entry right into Chapter Two.

If you don’t know the work, Chapter Two is titled “The History of Our Sewage Disposal System”, and roll around in your mind, for a moment, that he ain’t talking about fish guts and banana peels here. The chapter is both a physical and psychological history of Soviet “cancel culture”, taken to its logical extreme. And it is not a stretch–let me repeat that, it is not a stretch–to look at our own recent headlines (the deplatforming, the doxxing, the twisting and disappearing of inconvenient ideas, the dehumanization and resultant ruination of careers, of businesses, of people’s lives), and realize that this is what a purge looks like. Read just that chapter–just that one within the whole giant work–and tell me where I’m wrong on this. (Please, don’t just take my word for it, either, if you haven’t read it–read it! There is nothing I could say that would be half as powerful as what you’ll read there.)

And for any who might be so inclined: spare us both any facile accusation of my somehow over-dramatizing the risk here. Either “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is valid, or it’s not, and this shit really happened; I’d have to work a whole lot harder to truly over-dramatize the risk–if that’s even possible. That we, in our own time, have not yet amassed a “statistical” body count is a matter of degree only, not in any way of principle. And that we may, indeed–via the astounding and proven resiliency of decent human beings of every shape and color around the world–limp along for many years, finding creative ways to get by, before the literal boxcars arrive, doesn’t change a damn thing either: history is clear that this way lies nothing but madness and destruction, even if nobody can predict the exact timeline of how it will play out.

For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately.

(from the front cover of the first hardcover edition)

Those inclined to dismiss the Russian’s cautionary tale as somehow over-dramatized, are invited to explain away the clear meaning and dynamic behind that statement, just for starters.

Many others have recently (and rightly) observed how reminiscent of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four our present times seem. But, prescient as he seems to have been, Orwell was still, ultimately, speculating through fiction. Solzhenitsyn, by contrast, wrote his work as a real history, and further, he gave it to a world that for the most part still had no idea what had actually happened, even years after the fact. Just imagine that last bit, for a second: something as unimaginably enormous as the willful extermination of tens of millions of human beings, not counting the battlefield, right in the middle of the twentieth century, and yet for nearly twenty years after it was done, most of the world still didn’t even know it had happened? Such a thing should not be physically possible. And yet here we are.

And now, the modern Big Club, which is in no way like the Soviet-era Organs because We Just Don’t Do That Here And Anyway All The Other Times It Wasn’t Done Properly And Anyway Shut Up, You Wrecker!, insists not only on operating with no meaningful transparency whatever, but also on being the exclusive authority on what is “true”, and on actively censoring and going after anyone who even wants to have a meaningful conversation about just WTF is going on. No no, just leave it to them, they’ll “fundamentally transform” your life…if you’ll just hand over the rest of the power they don’t already have, like, oh, say, all your remaining means of resistance, your entire behavioral history, and a continuous data feed of your whereabouts and personal behavior. After all, if you’ve nothing to hide…what, are you Standing In The Way Of Progress, You Deplorable Kulak?

Although seriously inconvenient to the Big Club’s “All your base are belong to us” narrative, The GULAG Archipelago has not (yet) been disappeared from the open Internet. You can still find it at The Internet Archive. If you haven’t yet read it–please, read it. If you haven’t yet grappled with it–please, grapple with it. And if, like me, you have a bit of uppity peasant in you somewhere, please, share the work with others who need to see it. It is at least arguably the most important historical document of our time.

Because in the end, if we don’t rein this in, we all become kulaks. That’s just the way the Organs work.

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* As to the pandemic, let’s be both honest and honorable here: whether or not the whole thing was in some way manufactured by one or more members of the current Big Club is ultimately an academic question, and one far too easily dismissed by marginalizing the idea with word games–which, you may have noticed, have recently taken the concept of mendacity to levels hardly believable before. Now, it’s pretty well established that in a historical sense, the Big Club is absolutely capable of such a level of atrocity (witness our current subject here), but even if the SARS-CoV-2 virus really was a pure-as-the-driven-snow accident, it is nonetheless obvious that the Big Club has absolutely reveled in the consequent opportunity to fear-porn the world into unprecedented consolidations of its own power–the singular story of all protection rackets in the history of man!–ever since, and yet daily the Club openly thirsts for ever more.

Best, IMHO, to stay out of the conjecture of “who started it?” (because it will almost certainly never be more than that, conjecture), and focus instead on the “what are they doing with it?” and “cui bono?” questions. Because you know that metaphorical monster in the room with us? The grinning one, calmly but relentlessly locking off the remaining exits and licking his chops in anticipation of his eventual, inevitable attack? At this point it doesn’t matter how he got there; what matters is that he exists, and that we know what he will do, if “…we d[on]’t love freedom enough.”