What does tyranny resemble? Ask communist corporate media in this last quarter of the national election, and you’ll find one answer. ” New fears that Trump threatens democracy”, information CNN. ” Trump Is a Threat to Democracy”, declares New York Magazine. Rolling Stone offers” A Guide to Trump’s Fascist Rhetoric”.
Given that former president Donald Trump was previously a democratically elected president, vacated the White House, and is once more vying for an election in which his solution may be subject to a bureaucratic process led by thousands upon thousands of poll officers, there is a certain irony to this sensationalism. That certainly does n’t sound like authoritarian behavior.
Perhaps it would be useful to revisit the texture and tenor of actual authoritarianism. The Gulag Archipelago, a book by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that circulates throughout the former Soviet Union, is a significant, shocking training on how aggressive, unaccountable governments may invalidate individual freedom and flourishing.
The” Best Nonfiction Book of the Twenty-First Century” is
One of the most significant writers of the 20th century ca n’t overstate the significance of The Gulag Archipelago. During his time serving in East Prussia, Stalin became extremely uneasy with Stalin and the cruelty of the Red Army. He was once an ardent communist and agnostic who was half decorated while leading an ordnance battery during World War II. Private characters criticizing the Russian regime were uncovered, and Solzhenitsyn was convicted of “founding a hostile business” and sentenced to an eight-year expression in a work station. Through this terrible knowledge, Solzhenitsyn underwent a serious religious and political conversion.
After being freed in 1953, Solzhenitsyn began to write about his experiences growing up under the harsh brutality of Russian tyranny, and his work culminated in the three-volume Gulag Archipelago. The second volume’s print version alone sold more than 2 million files, effectively silenced Western intellectuals who had for years expressed fervent admiration for Russian communism. The text was referred to as the “best fiction book of the nineteenth era” in a review published in Time magazine.
What Solzhenitsyn Saw
Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus has been extensively analysed in graduate papers, but for our purposes below, it is sufficient to draw attention to some of its most important topics. The first of these would be the widespread use of party cleanliness tests, which was expected to show communists their unwavering support for the program. Any interpretation from the group line, no matter how excessively insignificant, could be viewed as disloyalty and risk not just one’s career but even person’s life.
In one amusing scene, Solzhenitsyn describes a hall full of party members, all applauding, everyone afraid to be the first to stop clapping for fear of being labeled a dissident. ” They could n’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks”!
A byzantine bureaucratic procedure that degraded and dehumanized its victims, regardless of whether they were real or imagined, was what awaited those dissidents. In order to eliminate all alleged threats and send a message to potential subversives, the outcome of cases brought against alleged offenders was always predetermined. It had the desired effect:” For several decades, political arrests have been distinguished in our country precisely because people have been detained who have no criminal history and are therefore unprepared to form any resistance.” There was a general impression that things were headed for destruction.
The agents of this autarchic Soviet apparatus were unaccountable, self-aggrandizing bureaucrats of middling intellectual abilities. Their power was practically uncontestable, their decisions “always right”.
Their preferred targets were frequently dispassionate professionals who were focused on carrying out their jobs and who were uninterested in revolution; for such individuals will unavoidably prioritize common sense and science over ideology and its narrowing delusions. ” If they hurried, they were hurrying for the purpose of wrecking”, writes Solzhenitsyn of the charges brought against meritocrats. ” If they moved methodically, it meant wrecking by slowing down tempos. If they were painstaking in developing some branch of industry, it was intentional delay, sabotage”.
The result, of course, was a type of societal suicide, persecuting the most competent because of their unwillingness to conform to the mindless, capricious dogmas of the elite class.
What Do You See?
It does n’t take a Ph. D. in Russian literature to perceive the overlap between Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet dystopia and America today. Party purity tests are administered by H. R. departments promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. As many people on the left have learned, the inability to perform the appropriate performative gestures in keeping with woke creeds regarding race or sexuality frequently has serious professional and social consequences.
Federal agencies then use their authority to defame the Democrat Party’s political rivals, from the Democrat Party’s patently biased scrutiny of conservative organizations to the Department of Homeland Security claiming that white nationalists pose the greatest domestic security threat to the Department of Justice by targeting pro-life groups. Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, has infamously fought the National Rifle Association and Donald Trump.
About 4.3 million people currently work for the federal government, including almost half of those who are in the military. Federal employees cast a not-unsignificant vote Democrat. This is unsurprising, given that the right for decades has been calling for a reduction in the size and influence of the administrative state — which now exercises executive, legislative, and judicial powers, as Ned Ryun argues in his new book, American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism.
According to one senior Soviet leader, Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged the potency of this threat, saying,” It is very good that the legislative and executive powers are not divided by a thick wall as they are in the West. All problems can be decided quickly“.
The victims of the managerial class and its stultifying ideology, in turn, are meritocrats, independent and creative thinkers, and ultimately our nation itself. Positive corporate and government policies undermine excellence in all of our institutions, giving racial and gender equality policies precedence over success and innovation. As Will Thibeau has recently argued, the military’s focus on merit in favor of DEI initiatives has severely compromised its readiness for the next conflict, according to Will Thibeau.
‘ Tiny Droplet]s ] of Truth ‘
Solzhenitsyn refers to “tiny droplet]s of truth” in The Gulag Archipelago, those instances where the public is exposed to the lies of our managerial class or the blatant hypocrisy of the propaganda machine, when people can perceive the world for what it is even in an oppressive setting. We have our fair share of recent examples, whether it be the confused, capricious nature of pandemic restrictions, the dramatic rise in crime following the left’s embrace of the “defund the police” movement, trans activists impressing their sexual beliefs on prepubescent children, or unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants overwhelming local municipalities.
If we fail to resist its numerous manifestations, it is these tiny droplets of truth that must serve as reminders of what totalitarianism really looks like and what our future will look like. A once prosperous people were destroyed by the effects of that deadly ideology. It might have the same impact on our nation’s once-heralded republic. However, it seems unlikely that Trump would be the change’s agent.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a columnist for The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands is his book.