Once he got famous enough, it would have been even more embarrassing to kill him.
I love this argument: “Look, the Soviets weren’t so bad! They didn’t KILL Solzhenitsyn! The just locked him up for years! And he deserved it … for criticizing the Soviet state.”
The minor level of criticism you’ve leveled at the United States in this thread would have been sufficient to get you shipped off the the gulag if uttered about the Soviet government in its darkest days. And yet no one is coming knocking at your door. Communism is such a fragile hot-house flower that it can’t endure direct and open public criticism of its principles or actions.
To the best of my knowledge, he wast not one of those. Everything I have come across over the years indicates that he was in still fighting at the time, but got nicked by the censors for writing a letters to a friend that were critical of Stalin. Here are some cites that support this. The first one is out of the horse’s mouth. The second is from the usually reputable BBC. The third is from Russia’s primary funded broadcaster. The fourth is good old Wiki, where I expect such a historical difference would show up.
Yes. And the conditons were so often severe that there was a significantly higher death rate than the general public, despite the need to keep the prisoners alive to work on public projects.
I don’t get the single-minded determination to have a one party state (with all the problems that entails). Why not have a multi-party system but require that all the parties must be communist in nature?
You could have a hard left party, an ultra hard left party and so on and they could fight out elections every few years in the normal way. This would at least remove the obvious danger of some lunatic coming to power and then gathering a cadres around him so that he cannot be removed without a revolution.
The only justification you’ve given so far is this:
Fine, so have only socialist parties. Problem solved. You can still have elections though to get rid of the specific people in power even if you just replace them with different people with similar ideas.
Hmmm… Alright, I guess I could accept that setup. As long as no right-wingers can come to power and screw things up for everybody else, I would acquiesce to a multi-party democracy. The chief difficulty would be screening out unsuitable parties and individual candidates (i.e. those only masquerading as socialists), but that should be doable.
Doable, yeah, you’ll do them all right – right up against the wall.
Look, either you have a democracy – rule by the people – or you do not. You cannot have a democracy if you only permit one narrow party to participate in the electoral process. Taking one narrow party and dividing it into a few subsets while still outlawing all other parties is really no different, and is not a democracy at all. If you have a democracy, either your comminist party will get elected in elections against other parties, or it will not. It really is that simple.
Tell that to the prisoners of Magadan (Eastern Siberia)-they were fed just enough rations to allow them to work for 9-12 months-they died after a year, so as to free up space for MORE political prisoners.
Solzhynitsyn detailed this in his “Gulag Archipelago”.
So, by this logic, you admit that the US is not a democracy? After all, your two parties are just “subsets” of a narrow capitalistic philosophy. Your system is set up in such a way (including but not limited to a winner-take-all election process, media coverage rules, and federal funding regulations) as to make it functionally impossible for a third party to win. Hence, people are deprived of their right to elect an actual left party.
How do you justify this, given your professed love of democracy? Wait, let me guess: it is alright for capitalists to do it, but not for us socialists…
Of course, it goes without saying that Solzhenitsyn, who made his fame and fortune criticizing socialism, was a perfectly neutral and trustworthy source of information regarding Soviet labor camps. And, naturally, the fact that he held no political power and had no access to anything but anecdotal information regarding said labor camps, does not preclude him from being an expert in the field.
This is akin to saying, “Obama is definitely a Muslim Communist that was born in Kenya. It is all detailed in a prominent tea-party spokesman’s manuscript.”
First, it is not my system. I am Canadian. We have a parliamentary system, and coverage of the political spectrum through many parties, including Rhinos, Communists, and Yogic Flyers.
Second, there is nothing in the USA to stand in the way of a party rising in popularity and coming into power. All it has to do is put forward a platform that is more appealing to the public. Popular support, and donations to fund the effort, flow out of that.
So there you are, with your platform of:
Lose your right to vote;
Lose your right to free speech;
Lose your economic well being;
Stand up against the wall and get shot.
Sorry, Commissar, but I don’t think you are going to get many votes. You will lose, not because of barriers to entry for new political parties in the USA, but because what you offer has been tested repeatedly in other nations, and failed miserably.
I don’t think anyone would seriously claim that Solzhenitsyn is a perfectly neutral and trustworthy source, for the good and sufficient reason that no such source exists. However, it’s a matter of historical record that Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in the gulag system, and his accounts of it jive with those of others who were incarcerated there. This gives his claims regarding the gulag a high (though not perfect) degree of credibility.
I agree that Comissar is way out there - with his support of the Burmese junta in particular - but he has taken pains to emphasize that he supports freedom of speech, even speech (like Solzhenitsyn’s) that he detests. He may not be sincere in this - his tolerance of the junta, for one, calls his sincerity into question - but it’s not correct to say that the abolition of free speech is part of his publicly stated platform.
You don’t accept the accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Robert Conquest, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Anne Applebaum, Adam Hochschild, George Bien, Michael Solomon, Ayyub Baghirov, Varlam Shalamov, Vyacheslav Palman, Vadim Kozin, and Nikolai Getman?
You don’t accept the conclusion of historian Roy Medvedev that the conditions in Kolyma were comparable to Auschwitz?
You don’t accept the rationale behind the Russian government erecting the Mask of Sorrow monument in Magadan?
You do a great dishonour to the half a million or more people who died in the Kolyma slave labour camps near Magadan. Shame on you.
He stated that traitors should be shot. Then he stated that Solzhenitsyn was a traitor. That publicly established his platform on free speech in no uncertain terms.
It was only when you called him on it that he backpeddled.
Which platform should I believe? The one that he came to the table with, or the one that he was pushed into during the discussion? The platform that he freely put forward, rather than the one he was manoeuvred into making, is the one that I believe is more truly reflective.
What typically happens in the United States is that if a third party gets large enough to threaten the dominance of the major parties, the Democrats or Republicans will shift their platform to recapture those votes. If the progressives in the U.S. got strong enough, the Democrats would move left out of self-preservation.