https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KDXKWFrr4Do
Well Solzhenitsyn estimated the deaths in internal repression in the Soviet Union at something approximating 60 million between 1919 and 1959. Now, that doesn’t count the death toll in the Second World War, by the way. Now, people have disputed those figures, but they’re certainly in the tens of millions, and the low-end bounds are probably 20 million, and the high-end bounds are nearer what Solzhenitsyn estimated. He also estimated that the same kind of internal repression in Maoist China cost 100 million lives, and so you can imagine that the genuine historical figures, again, are subject to dispute, but somewhere between 50 and 100 million people. And one of the things that’s really surprising to me, and that I think is absolutely reprehensible, absolutely reprehensible, is the fact that this is not widespread knowledge among students in the West, any of this, and it’s because your education, your historical education, if you started to describe it as appalling, you would barely scratch the surface. These were the most important events of the 20th century, and they’re barely covered at all in standard historical curriculum. You know of something, I would presume, about World War II and about the terrible situation in Nazi Germany, and the death of 6 million gypsies and Jews and homosexuals in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, but my experience with students has been that none of them know anything about what happened as a consequence of the repression of the radical left in the 20th century, and I believe the reason for that is that the communist system had extensive networks of admirers in the West, especially among intellectuals, and still, in fact, does, which is also equally reprehensible, and I believe that one of the consequences of that is that this element of history has been under, what would you say, under examined, and certainly very little attention has been brought to it in the public school curricula, and there’s absolutely no excuse for that, it was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century, and that’s really saying something, because the 20th century was about as bad as it gets, and so, and the fact that these deaths on massive scale occurred, and the fact that we don’t know that deep inside our bones is a testament to the absolute rot of the education system, so now, you might think this is a strange thing to discuss in a personality course, but I have my reasons for doing it, and the fundamental reason is that Solzhenitsyn, you might regard as an existentialist, now he says many of the same things that Viktor Frankl says, Viktor Frankl wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning, which I would highly recommend, and it’s a description of the corruption that he saw leading into the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp systems, especially within the concentration camps itself, because Frankl was very interested in what sort of psychological catastrophe had to befall a given individual, before that person was capable of acting as an agent, say, of the Nazis in the concentration camp system, and he concentrated particularly on these people, he called, that were known as trustees within the concentration camp system, who were generally Jewish individuals who were aiding the Nazis in their death work inside the camps, now what Frankl did, because he was also existentially oriented, was attempt to draw a parallel between the individual psychology and the mass pathologies of the state, and so the reason that I believe that this is important in a personality class, is because it’s necessary to analyze the relationship between the psychological integrity of the individuals within a society, and the propensity of that society to engage in, say, acts of mass atrocity, or to go completely off the rails, and then to engage in acts of mass atrocity, and so it was Frankl’s contention, and also Solzhenitsyn’s contention, and I would say also the contention of Vaclav Havel, who was an author and playwright in Czechoslovakia, and eventually became president, that the fundamental linkage between the pathology and the state, the pathology of the state and the individual, was the individual’s propensity to deceive him or herself, and to fail to act in an authentic manner, in a genuine and authentic manner, and to become, as a consequence, either nihilistic, let’s say, or because of the incremental weakening of character that’s part and parcel of adopting an inauthentic mode of being, or to turn to ideological and totalitarian solutions as an alternative to living appropriately and with responsibility as an individual, so Solzhenitsyn in particular, laid at the feet of the Soviet citizenry, the burden of the absolute catastrophes that characterized that system, because of each individual’s propensity or proclivity within the state to lie and deceive constantly about what they thought and what they said, and to be afraid to speak, and to be afraid to think, and to be afraid to criticize, and it was no wonder, because criticism, of course, was at least, became an offense that was punishable by death, but these things start much more slowly than that, and they start with people abandoning their own identities, and adopting a pathological group identity, well, for any number of reasons, but one of them certainly is their desire to shrink from individual responsibility, and their desire for ready-made ideological solutions, and so what I’m going to do today is I’m going to read you a little bit about the Gulag Archipelago, and then I’m going to show you a sequence of videos about a recent event that I think does a very good job of illustrating how this sort of thing works, and then I’m going to read you some of what I’ve culled from the Gulag Archipelago, so that you get a sense of what the writing is like, so Solzhenitsyn basically, he committed a huge part of the Gulag Archipelago to memory, which is really something, given that it’s 2100 pages long, and printed in like 7-point font, and the book is written at an unbelievable level of emotional intensity, it’s, I remember there was a study once about how rats respond to cats, free living rats in their burrows, if they’re exposed to a cat, or even to cat odor, will run back to their burrow, and stick their nose out and scream for 48 hours, right, which is about the equivalent of you screaming for 3 months, because rats don’t only live about 2 years, and while that rat is screaming, all the other rats stay in their burrow and don’t go anywhere, and so they scream ultrasonically, so you have to record it and then slow it down in order to hear it, but they’re not very happy about that, about cats, and they actually don’t need to be exposed to cats to learn how to be afraid of their odor, they’re naturally afraid of it, anyways, Solzhenitsyn’s book, the Gulag Archipelago, is like a 2100 page scream, it’s very very intense, it’s a very difficult thing to read, but it’s absolutely crucial reading, it’s actually now part of the curriculum in Russia, in high school, which also says something about Russian high schools compared to, say, North American high schools, because I doubt if the typical North American high school student reads 2100 pages of anything during their entire education in high school, and certainly not something like the Gulag Archipelago, so I’m going to read you a little bit of background about the story, first of all, and this is a nice summary, I’ve swiped it from Wikipedia, but the Gulag Archipelago is a book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he won a Nobel Prize for that, for the book, by the way, and richly deserved it, about the Soviet forced labor camp system, the three volume book is a narrative, relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author’s own experiences, in a Gulag labor camp, written between 1958 and 1968, it was published in the West in 1973, and thereafter circulated in Samizdat, or underground publication form in the Soviet Union, until its appearance in the Russian literary journal Novy Mir in 1989, in which a third of the work was published over three issues, so the Samizdat, or the underground press, was basically photocopies, or sometimes photo stats, of banned works that people would compile and then hand from person to person, of course the punishment for being caught with something like that was extraordinarily severe, but the Samizdat was, I suppose it was a precursor to the internet, that’s one way of thinking about it, a slow precursor to the internet, Gulag, or G-U-L-A-G, or Gulag is an acronym for a Russian term, Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, the bureaucratic name of the governing board, of the Soviet labor camp system, and by metonymy the camp system itself, the word archipelago compares the system of labor camps, spread across the Soviet Union, with a vast chain of islands, known only to those who were fated to visit them, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Russian Federation, the Gulag Archipelago has been officially published and included in the high school program in Russia, as mandatory reading, structurally the text comprises seven sections, divided in most printed volumes into three, parts one to two, three and four, and five to seven, at one level the Gulag Archipelago traces the history of the system of forced labor camps, that existed in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956, starting with Lenin’s original decrees, shortly after the October Revolution, establishing the legal and practical framework, for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals, would be sentenced to forced labor, one of the things that’s quite interesting about the Gulag camps, and this is something that’s very relevant to understanding of modern Russia, is that, so ordinary criminals were put into the camps, and so were political prisoners, but the ordinary criminals, and so those would be rapists and murderers, let’s say, as well as thieves, who were engaged in theft as an occupation, those were regarded by the Soviets as socially friendly elements, and the reason for that was that they assumed that the reason that these people had turned to crime was because of the oppressive nature of the previous tsarist-slash-capitalist system, and that the only reason that these criminals existed was because they had been they were oppressed victims of that system, and so one of the convenient consequences of that absolutely insane doctrine was that the Soviets put the ordinary criminals in charge of the camps, and these were very, very seriously bad people, and so you can imagine the way that they treated the political prisoners, who were regarded as socially hostile elements, sometimes because of their own hypothetically traitorous acts, but more often merely as a consequence of their racial or ethnic identity, or the fact that they were related by birth to, say, people who had been successful under the previous system, so who had any association with nobility, or any association with what were known as the kulaks, who were the only successful class of former peasants in the Soviet Union, because they were regarded as privileged, you may have heard that word more recently, they were regarded as privileged, and therefore as enemies of the state, and it didn’t matter if it was your father, or your grandfather, or your great grandfather, who happened to be privileged, but the mere fact that you were a member of that group was sufficient reason to put you into a camp, and we’re talking hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions of people, who underwent that fate, and so the idea in the Soviet Union was just because you were the member of a class, even as a consequence of your familial association, you were immediately sufficiently guilty to be put into a camp and punished, and the terms for the camps were often 10 years, 15 years long, and if you were very fortunate, you got to have two or three of those, so the Soviets really implemented and perfected the idea of class and ethnicity-based guilt, and it’s a very bad road to walk down, and it’s something that we’re very much engaged in at the moment, because there’s discussion everywhere in North America now about the idea of, well, race-predicated guilt, for example, and ethnic-predicated guilt, and it’s a very bad idea to classify an entire group of people as guilty of anything based on their group membership.