Sunday, May 06, 2007

Prisoners of Ignorance

Billy Beck has two recent posts which I’ve been contemplating the past couple of days as I rooted around in the soil surrounding my house.  The first post is titled Philosophical Detection and the second post is titled Living Defaultery.

Both of Billy’s posts bring to mind, for myself at least, what I would consider the free pass given to the evils of socialim, especially when you consider how those evils consumed innocent individuals, of many Eastern European nationalities, like so much chaff scattered to the wind, within the former Soviet Union.

In both of Billy’s posts he rightly scoffs at the notion of Anne Applebaum’s tome, Gulag, being the evident academic standard for educational purposes, rather than Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s first person account as put down in The Gulag Archipelago, and The Gulag Archipelago Two.

The larger question Billy’s posts should bring to mind, though, is why the evils of socialism do not resound in individual’s minds with the same clarity that the evils of facism resound, as so chillingly personified in the Holocaust?

Oh, I have a few ideas why this is so, but I think Solzhenitsyn stated quite clearly why this is so in his speech, linked by Billy, to the Havard graduating class of 1978.  Solzhenitsyn’s speech is titled A World Split Apart, and I’ve culled a few specifics from Solzhenitsyn’s speech for your own consideration, though the whole speech should be read.  Bear in mind as you read Solzhenitsyn’s speech that references to the Soviet Union can be substituted with other countries names.

Anguish about our divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity; neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too, and this is hardly desirable.

And this.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.

More.

It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world a way to successful economic development, even though in the past years it has been strongly disturbed by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of not being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. A number of such critics turn to socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.

Don’t be a prisoner of ignorance.  Recognize that the social policies America’s politicos attempt to legislate into existence are forays into the socialist world, lack of gulags notwithstanding.

Posted by John Venlet on 05/06 at 10:05 AM
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