Any ideology that seeks to reorganize morality on an a priori basis ends up with gulags. By Tom Wolfe, via Ed Driscoll at PJ Media.
The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow [to the academic left]. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System” — in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to concentration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union.
Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had immediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.
Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis [and that includes identity politics].
Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts! …
They didn’t want to know:
Solzhenitsyn’s tour of the United States in 1975 was like an enormous funeral procession that no one wanted to see. The White House wanted no part of him. The New York Times sought to bury his two major’ speeches, and only the moral pressure of a lone Times writer, Hilton, Kramer, brought them any appreciable coverage at all. The major television networks declined to run the Solzhenitsyn interview that created such a stir in England earlier this year (it ran on some of the educational channels).
And the literary world in general ignored him completely. In the huge unseen coffin that Solzhenitsyn towed behind him were not only the souls of the zeks who died in the Archipelago. No, the heartless bastard had also chucked in one of the last great visions: the intellectual as the Stainless Steel Socialist glistening against the bone heap of capitalism in its final, brutal, fascist phase. There was a bone heap, all right, and it was grisly beyond belief, but socialism, had created it.
Since then, another generation of would-be rulers has grown up, enticing voters with visions of an equitable paradise — where, ahem, they just happen to be in charge. “Socialism done right” this time, they say.
Cancellation and censorship is how it starts, comrades. Any system that relies on them inevitably hardens into maxx-repression, because people don’t like it and if given a choice would have different leaders — hence the repression.