Hot, smoking conscience
From "
How the Great Truth Dawned":
Many, including Solzhenitsyn, took the next step and accepted God. Why not remain an atheist who believes in an absolute moral law? Here again we must understand the thought-shaping power of Russian literature, particularly Russia’s specialty, the great realist fiction of ideas. Great novels test ideas not by their logical coherence, as in academic philosophy, but by the consequences of believing them.
* * *
Thinking novelistically, Solzhenitsyn asks: how well does morality without God pass the test of Soviet experience? Every camp prisoner sooner or later faced a choice: whether or not to resolve to survive at any price. Do you take the food or shoes of a weaker prisoner? “This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. . . . If you go to the right—you lose your life; and if you go to the left—you lose your conscience.” Memoirist after memoirist, including atheists like Evgeniya Ginzburg, report that those who denied anything beyond the material world were the first to choose survival. They may have insisted that high moral ideals do not require belief in God, but when it came down to it, morals grounded in nothing but one’s own conviction and reasoning, however cogent, proved woefully inadequate under experiential, rather than logical, pressure.
9 comments:
It is of course possible to believe in no God and have a high moral code. We have all known people who fit that description at least somewhat. We have friends or relatives who will do the right thing, even when it costs them something. Yet the question posed here is the real one. Is it possible to sustain such a code under intense pressure?
It may be. I don't know everyone's story. But none are coming to mind, and the stories out of deep oppression echo what is written here.
Pretty awesome post there, thank you.
Wow, that may be the single best essay I have ever read. I am also ashamed to admit that I've never read any of the Russian literary canon, but had it ever been explained to me in such a way before, I would have surely sought it out sooner. Thank you for posting this.
I bookmarked the essay. I will probably use part of it when I talk about _Gualg Archipelago_ in class next spring.
LittleRed1
Thanks. Amazing essay. Too bad the ones who could learn the most from it won't read it, or understand it if they could.
https://tarbaby.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/
Solzhenitsyn quote:
“We cannot state that all Jews are Bolsheviks. But without Jews, there would never have been Bolshevism. For a Jew, nothing is more insulting than the truth. The blood madndened Jewish terrorists have murdered sixty-six million in Russia from 1918 to 1957.”
Some parts of his novel were censored when translated to the West. I find it quaint that even Western civilization's supposedly wise authors and figures... have been corrupted and contaminated by a mere translation and slippage in what got "covered" (in main media pillow case).
Makes me wonder what else the intelligensia "left out" in their translations.
Challenging it was as unthinkable as simultaneously renouncing one’s education and all one’s friends and relatives.
Which is why it is better to purge them all sooner, rather than wait until things get into a civil war... as they have.
Of course the former may not be practical on this plane of existence. Even still, if the tsars had purged all the Bolsheviks, they might have avoided their fate. Or they might not. Hard to tell with your human shenanigans going on contaminating this Earth.
Humanity is like a mold growing in dark places. Sometimes it is penicillin and can be used for good. Other times it is botulism or some other nerve/toxin... hard to tell with you humans growing like locusts and ants on this Earth.
One of the reasons why Bush II's decision for Afghanistan and Iraq made sense to me is that a first strike and purification strategy is one that I have always favored, even before this mortal life.
What difference does it make? It makes all the difference. Assume that souls have memories that transgress the physical life or lives. Thus losing their life does not mean they cease to exist. They can be born again. Why else would the Hebrews mistake Jesus as Elijah? Wouldn't elijah, if he came back, be called Elijah and why would he be born a clueless babe?
Thus the longer the conflict pursues itself, the more hate and fear is created, which saturates the soul consciousness to the point where it becomes trapped in the cycle of violence. Not a cycle of human cycle, but of a celestial nature, one that does not decay. There are no wars in heaven, that we do here on Earth instead.
(The Wars amongst the planets and stars, that's still under the Heavens)
Thus if we had to purge the Soviets, that would require a war that would cost untold millions of lives, and untold number of suffering.
The most merciful, the most pragmatic, the most realistic, and the most ruthless option, straight out of Aries and Mars itself, is to kill them all, now, and before, rather than later.
Kill them when they were merely the Iranian "exiles" in France, running from the Shah's secret police. Kill them all, leave none alive, when it was just Che and Castro buying prostitutes while on the run from the Cuban government security. Kill them all, now, leave none alive and none of their ideology in survivable condition, when the Tsars had the bolsheviks in arrest or exile.
Kill them all. And let them remake their lives later on, when they can let their evil stupidities go.
In a sense, it is like countering ideology with ideology. If you don't believe in any of this, then you would perceive this as "warmongering". He wants a "war". He doesn't know what a "war means". We can deal with this peacefully without a first strike.
If so... show us, human. Many of my collective group would prefer not to have to purge this place once again and start all over from the age of... stone.
Some may be thinking "but we are fighting, we are doing as much as our rules of engagement allow, what more can be feasible given the problems of today"?
Well, fighting is not what I am talking about. Fighting is what happens when you get into a prolonged quagmire and have to become the enemy to beat the enemy.
Annihilating the enemy is completely different methodology strategically speaking.
It can be done one of two ways. the Easiest way is a war to the knife. The second way is much harder. It is convert the evil to the good.
Good converts to evil. Look at conservatives fighting Leftists. What have they had to sacrifice to become more like ALinsky to beat Alinsky? Not Worth it.
The South fought so hard for so many decades against Northern abolitionists, carpet baggers, all for the promises of Demoncrat white plantation slave masters... and now they have become the Republican enemy that are fighting the Demoncrats. Sighs. It is POINTLESS, this fighting of yours, humanity. It means nothing. It accomplishes nothing. It cannot break the Eternal cycle. The Celestial soul taint. Or the Cycle of Violence. Not even in purely human affairs.
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