Those Who Never Knew The Past Are Condemned To Say Stupid Things About It

The title, an addition George Santayana may or may not have accepted, came to mind as I read this tribute to Alexander Solzhenitsyn upon the occasion of his death. A few months back, I wrote a post in which I highlighted an excellent, if chilling, article profiling a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, and his tale of his time during that particular nightmare. While I did so in order to bring the article to the attention of readers, I also did so to highlight a glaring, almost obscene, gap between much of the rhetoric of the American right regarding the Obama Administration. Specifically, I contrasted the very real horrors of life under tyranny with the still-on-going attempt to portray Obama as a budding tyrant.

The First of the Month piece includes a snippet from a Stalin-era show trial. On the stand is revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin, being questioned by prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky (who managed, through his long career, to demonstrate both viciousness and a willingness to do what is necessary to survive). Pay particular attention to the point Vyshinsky makes concerning "counter-revolutionary" acts:

“Is it true that every opposition to the Party is a struggle against the party?” “In general it is, factually it is.”

“And that means in the end, given the existence of oppositionist beliefs, any foul deeds whatever might be perpetrated against the Party…?”
“But, wait a minute, none were actually committed.”

“But they could have been?”
“Well theoretically speaking.”

“So you see, only a fine distinction separates us. We are required to concretize the eventuality: in the interest of discrediting for the future any idea of opposition, we are required to accept as having taken place what could only theoretically have taken place. After all, it could have, couldn’t it?”
“It could have.”

“And so it is necessary to accept as actual what was possible; that’s all. It’s a small philosophical transition. Are we in agreement?”(italics added)

That phrase, "a fine distinction", hides horrors. Insanity. It is the excuse for the butchering not just of our understanding of reality - a horrible enough thought - but of millions of human lives.

Reading Solzhenitsyn is a wonderful cure for those who get lost in the mire of our current political debates. The never-ending parade of nonsense, the portrayals of Obama as little different from Vyshinsky's mentor Stalin, or Hitler, or Pol Pot is a kind of rape of reality. We have record enough of the horrors of modern and contemporary tyrannies, the reality-distorting insistence that human life be subservient to the powerful's attempt to make it bend to their will, to take to task those who claim our current Administration is no different from these. Those who continue to claim that our freedoms are disappearing, our nation becoming unrecognizable, our culture bereft of spiritual or moral uplift all because of our current President not only display their ignorance; they do violence to the memory of those who managed to survive very real tyranny and tell their stories in order to keep others from having to live through the experience.