/lit/ - Literature

https://voca.ro/1hvOP30eD6Y8

well, communism is bad

>>18010774
If you've read this book and still don't understand that communism is bad you can't be helped.

>>18010774
>What is the general consensus about this book
Among normal people? That it's a dissident fairy-tale.

I liked his 'other' book a lot more

>>18010801
>>18010802

I never claimed communism wasn't bad.

>>18010774
Solzhenitsyn was stupid neet, useless eater, fetishized by CIA to support cold war narrative, to divert attention from real historical causation (industrial revolution). show me his CV, faggots.

>>18010802
communism is very good for purging peasants from this planet. no industrial country needs 85% of peasants in population, so they had to die, everywhere where agriculture was being mechanized. machines freed many people from manual work.

>>18010805
Well that's why right wingers "wank off so hard about it". The book describes Russian Communisms in a very detailed manner, uses a lot of anecdotes to show its effect on humans & Solzhenitsyn's conclusions validates the Western (Christian) worldview, which is that mankind is evil and God surely exists.

>>18010774
It’s propaganda

>>18011032
this

>>18011070

>Solzhenitsyn's conclusions validates the Western (Christian) worldview, which is that mankind is evil and God surely exists.


yikes

I think parts of it are true, and parts of it are grossly exaggerated for literary effect.

It's obviously true that USSR had gulags and that they sucked, but most people who were in them were eventually released, unlike in a certain other country's "camps".

>>18010774
>While I agree that Soviet system was miserable for many people it just seems really short-sighted that all most take away from this book is "communism bad.
Why? Leftist IS bad.

>>18011032
Commie found

>>18010774
https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/the-gulag-archipelago-shouldnt-be-taken-seriously/

>>18010774
>listened to audiobook
Sure, you listened to 70 hours of audio and then came here to post this.

>>18011248

It was an abridged version. ~22 hours.

>>18011243
>literally just straigh up "Stalin was a good boy, he din du nothing"

>>18010800
You want some words with those mumbles?

>>18010774
I haven't read this yet (mostly because 1000+ pages of humanity's worst failures seems like a bit of a bummer) but comparing the gulags to US prisons is pretty interesting. I'll keep that in mind when I eventually get to it.

>>18010774
>I generally enjoyed the book
I wouldn't think anyone could enjoy all 3 volumes, after the first I felt pretty worn out just reading it, let alone experiencing it. My main gripe is that it's really long and feels bloated at times.

I'm not going to act like everything in the book is true, but enough of it is to paint a picture of what the general atmosphere of the camps were like. No doubt they were starved, tortured, cold, and imprisoned for no reason. Solzhenitsyn embellished a few details here and there, but otherwise it's built on solid foundation.

I hate that there are always two responses to this book:
>GOMMUNISM IS BAD :DDDD
>IT'S FAKE IT'S NOT TRUE

The man writes 3 volumes of this shit and all you spastics do is squabble over the political aspect of the book, ignoring the deeper values it has to convey (one being that cowardice is the ultimate sin, a theme prevalent in soviet literature).

>>18011074
Everything is propaganda. Your contribution has been minimal.

>>18011397

I agree with your points. I could only really bear listening for one or two hours at a time because it is kind of a bummer.

>I hate that there are always two responses to this book:...

This is more of less what I was trying to say in my original post. I just think there is a lot of nuance that more or less gets over looked.

>>18011397
>No doubt they were starved, tortured, cold, and imprisoned for no reason.
take meds schizo commie. nobody is going to feed unwanted by economy neets for free.

>>18011423
After reading TGA I understood Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita' from a different perspective which made more sense.

The whole idea of cowardice as sin has grown on me a lot. The first few chapters were probably the most impactful on me, the fact that had people been more bold, the regime could have been stopped much sooner. It's the story of human history, David Hume noted how easily the many are controlled by the few, Walter Lippmann and Bernays wrote instructions on how to focus propaganda to serve specific purposes, and Chomsky pointed out the sinister ways propaganda has evolved and functions today. Maybe that's just the way my mind swirls, due to my own particular interests, I'm not commie but I don't use Solzhenitsyn's writings to denounce communism any more than I'd use Anne Frank's to denounce Nazism.

Really the problem is that people are just easily persuaded, and will act in accordance to what will garner most approvement. It's not a new idea, yet it has many unexplored, and explored, possibilities, most of which are undesirable.

>>18011436
https://voca.ro/1nizgYpRVPOl

I'd actually recommend this book. "The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror" by Oleg Khlevniuk as an objective look at the gulag system.

It's interesting because Robert Conquest wrote the foreword (very objectively too I might add), while the book also demonstrates that many of the previous Western figures -- such as those produced by Cold War historians -- were overblown, but nonetheless the victims ran into the many hundreds of thousands.

t. communist

>>18011475
>I'm not commie but I don't use Solzhenitsyn's writings to denounce communism any more than I'd use Anne Frank's to denounce Nazism.
Personally I find the rush to "condemn" or "vindicate" past historical regimes, for whatever reason, to be a strange phenomena. This is why I mentioned the Khlevniuk book because he was no fan of Stalin and goes into the gulag as a real crime against many people, but he presents the facts in a clear and evidenced way.

I think some people, they like the idea of socialism or communism or Marxism, but pretty soon they encounter an alarming moral problem like Stalin's purges, and there's a rush to say "it's all fake" or whatever. Which is just BS, it was true, and it wasn't good. But I also think it's worth keeping in mind that the rush to condemn the entire Soviet Union and the history of it can be motivated from those who say "aw shucks, the system we have now is the best that can we ever do."

But I don't think most Russians don't view it that way. There is a lot of nostalgia for it, and most of the people who are nostalgic probably wouldn't even consider themselves communists:

https://youtu.be/avLOes3Yg90

The same system that produced the gulag also produced Yuri Gagarin. Stalin was a monster and he won the war, and that's why he remains popular there in opinion polls, and no one will ever take that from them -- and that's forever.

I think people have difficulty with these contradictions. The more you learn about the Cold War, you learn things like: More civilians were killed (200,000 maybe, I forget) in pit executions by the South Korean junta during the Korean War than were killed by the North Koreans by an order of six times. You'd think the communist would've been more brutal but that wasn't true there, and CIA officers stood there and watched, took photos of the bodies, and sent them to reporters and those were labeled as communist atrocities. This came out in the South Korean truth and reconciliation commissions in the 90s. The U.S. supplied kill lists to right-wing Indonesian death squads in the 60s who killed more people than died in Stalin's purges in 1937 and they used machetes and garrote wire to do it. These death squads raped children. This is illegal in Indonesia to talk about today.

A few years later, Neil Armstrong went to the moon. Like, does that not matter? Should Americans not be proud of the moon landing? A year after that, he visited the USSR and laid flowers at Gagarin's tomb. I dunno, it was the 20th century.

https://youtu.be/9LzDdfcNsXo?t=135

>>18010774
The right likes it on the most surface level because "communism bad," but on a deeper level Solzhenitsyn was examining his own conscience in the wake of his own horrendous suffering, and the idea of accepting personal guilt and seeking personal redemption instead of collective scapegoating is more common on the right than on the left at the moment.

>>18010774
I havent read this book and dont plan to because I am reliably informed that its stories are based on verbal accounts and therefore cannot be trusted any more than your typical pol post.

left wingers screech about it because they're butthurt that none of their propagandists have ever written a novel even as good as the rather mediocre stuff turned out by Solz. imagine the only literature your politician ideology has to defend itself is Gorky, Brecht, and genre fiction lmao pathetic.

>>18013013
A few years later, Neil Armstrong went to fuck himself.

>>18012934
victims? victims of mindless natalism, when peasants could have 10 children. Marx himself had 7 children. Shithole is where new people are defecated for personal loosh.

>>18013143
Hush, trip.

>>18010774
Prison is never nice, but people aren't put in prison in the US for questioning the government or challenging narratives. That makes it extremely different.

Leftists(communists) openly want to change that by the way. If they had their way you would go to prison for reading that book.

>>18013180
>valid point
reddit space
>strawman

i masturbated to the thoughts of the rapes of children in prussian nights

>>18013180
What is breaking a low other than questioning the government or challenging the dominant narratives?

This book makes commies seethe and cope because truth hurts. That's already enough to read and appreciate it.

>>18013180
okay, smartass.

>By 1926 the Soviets had ordered 24,600 Fordsons, and most had been delivered. The Ford Motor Company boasted in 1927 that 85 percent of the trucks and tractors in the Soviet Union were Ford-built. Whereas in 1924 there had only been about 1,000 tractors operating in all the vast Russian countryside, by 1934 there were 200,000, most of them of U.S. manufacture.

if one tractor replaces 10 peasants, making them uneducated useless to economy niggers, what do with 2mln jobless hungry legal migrants? now add to that children and support infrastructure jobs. whole world goes to revolutions, wars, "genocides", and you morons complain about communists sending people to prison, to labour camps. fucking degenerates, have you ever managed people? pure autism. true crime is producing new people in times when they kill each other by millions, fighting for lebensraum.

>>18010774
>right-wingers wank off so hard about it
We don't, it's more like pinkos throw a temper tantrum whenever it's mentioned

>>18013270
They can still work in the mines.

>>18013462
This is why socialists and communists shouldn't worry about IMO. They should reckon with the actual history among themselves, but recognize that it doesn't matter if what's in the book is true or not, it's just a weapon, which ends up devaluing it over time.

It's funny, the right has started to recognize that by calling everything communist and Marxist, that has just made people become more interested in it, so they're dropping "Cultural Marxism" now for "woke" stuff, to the point that the Wall Street Journal when it wants to knock the Communist Party of China, it has to do it by describing them as "woke," the word communist doesn't have a strong enough negative connotation anymore.

https://youtu.be/L9AF2fiYANc

>>18013224
Would you consider rape to be challenging a dominant narrative?

>>18010774
>that Solzhenitsyn's experience was terrible, h

Nah, that dude exaggerated almost everything in that book. Not to mention it’s not only his experience, but a collection of hearsays and rumors he memorized over the years. It’s a fucking garbage

>>18011032
>was stupid neet, useless eater

Seeing as that is what most modern commies aspire to be, they ought to listen up and see what's waiting for them

>>18013476
Imagine being a Western Maoist lmao fucking larper
>so they're dropping "Cultural Marxism" now for "woke" stuff
No this was dropped because the term "Cultural Marxism" is seen as unsophisticated in American (Marxist) intellectual circles

>>18013465
they could work in the mines, in offices as C++ developers, or simply as brainless shills shitposting on /pol.

>>18013476
Woke is such a slippery fucking word.

>>18013490
we all are born as neets and useless eaters, for moms and dads entertainment. some have a chance to find a place in the Machine.

>>18013229
The book causes lefty seethe & cope because it exposes the Soviet system as evil, Jewish and anti-Christian (I repeat myself)

>>18011061
>Let me free you from manual work oops you're no longer needed guess I'll have to kill you

>>18010774
>relevant to many other prison systems. I'm sure similarly horrifying things happen in the United States prison system everyday for example.
You're a fucking idiot. Even if some of the story's are overblown or fabricated it was still hell on Earth of which any of them would've picked a prison in the USA.

>>18013634
yeah, I would also pick a prison in the world currency printing country which had its industrial revolution way more earlier and already had its civil war.

>>18011061
In Britain they just hung people for vagrancy

>>18011329
>t. Confuses camp folklore for historical fact because Stalin has to be the devil

>>18013820
Let me guess none of the testimonies about the Holocaust were ever just "camp folklore".

>>18013795
Britain, France, Spain, Portugal have a luck of direct access to the ocean, so those vagrants eventually reached America where they holocausted native population. Germany, Italy had to genocide neighbors, Soviets, Chinese had to genocide natives, i.e. themselves.

>>18013822
Shut up.

>>18013826
Kek

>>18013826

>>18013825
Luck?

>>18011329
yep. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, all these people were products of those times. If not Stalin, there would be another Stalin, another Hitler. Today with idiocracy sold as democracy responsibility is nonexistent, if you don't like lockdown, vaccination, there's noone to blame.

>>18013838
Did Brits make a conscious decision to be in the Atlantic ocean? No. Luck, by definition. Suerte.

>>18013858
I mean how did they not make the conscious decision to move / invade / immigrate there? Either them, or their ancestors, of course.

>>18010774
it all boils down to one simple rhetorical question: was Solzhenitsyn an economist?

>>18013861
I mean Germany and Italy didn't have remote colonies for a reason, no extra lebensraum.

>>18010774
Because academia is dominated by far leftists who just gloss over all the crimes committed by the Communists. Therefore for most people in the West it comes as a shock when they start uncovering all the crimes committed by the Communists because they were told their entire lives on LE NAZIS did bad things.

>>18013852
the wonders of globalized democracy

I'm from Eastern Europe and every conversation I ever had with someone from North America about WW2, 20th century etc is just them ranting about the Holocaust. I'm pretty sure the majority of people in North America don't know anything more about that time period except the Holocaust.

>>18010774
>not Gulag: A History
Dropped

>>18013585
>>18011061
peasants are much better than urban wageslaves though. better culture and less work. also peasants are key to communism gaining any ground in all cases. communism sees itself in terms of urban proles and urban, modern sensibilities. it takes work to win over peasants and change their mode of life to perpetually exhausted factory worker with lung disease.

>machines freed many people from manual work.
Funny how they worked much longer and harder after the fact then. More physically straining jobs too. Workers movements were people trying to get back the reasonable workhours and leisure of their peasant forefathers.

Trannies: Dilate.

>>18013826
lol

>>18013913
wait until u find out about all the shit liberals did!

>>18014064
> better culture and less work.
Thats analysis on purely moralistic ground. But states compete with each other, sometimes even violently. Irregardless of how good or moral certain society is in your eyes, it needs to compete with other societies. Russia couldnt have defeated Nazi Germany with 85% of people being peasants and if it couldnt have defeated them, they would have perished.

Not to mention russian peasants had it pretty shit.

>>18010804
>Among normal people? That it's a dissident fairy-tale.
Since when are tankies normal people?

>>18013634
>>18013180


I agree that the context of the gulag system is uniquely brutal and authoritarian with the political prisoners, informers, denunciations, etc. I just don't think the suffering and the misery is unique. There are people rotting in prisons all over the world for a variety of reasons that could tell similar stories. Some of their misery is justified some isn't.

>>18014931
this. the cruelty of reality suddenly disappeared after invention of TV and psychopassive meds! and TV said that fascism is defeated, only terrorists with psychoactive drugs remain... up to this day. censorship is a hell of an opium for the masses.

>>18013883
Based retard

>>18016057
is potus

>>18010774
It’s a good book though the abridged version is more than sufficient for anyone who isn’t seriously studying this stuff for their profession

>>18015074
I don't give a fuck about your memes, tankies and wehraboos are as delusional as those who buy into dissident fairy-tales.

>>18011243
Ahh, yes, *squints* MLtheory dot com, surely an accurate and reliable source for unbiased information about the Soviet gulag system.

>>18010801
Does it ever give you more than this?
Oh let me guess
SUFFERING IS SAD
Thanks Dr Peterson for the 60 hour suffering and despair recommendation. Ill be sure to be demoralized by then

>>18018762
>implying Solzhenitsyn is any better

>>18013270
peasants didn't go to the gulag except as actual common criminals who got cushy treatment compared to the politicals. the political gulag prisoners were by an large members of the intelligentsia and professional-managerial class. stalin's purges were never focused at the bottom, it was the upper echelon that caught hell. that's why the lubyanka was staffed by soldiers from the sticks and the much of the NKVD hierarchy were from backgrounds well outside of moscow and st.petersburg

>>18017622
Or just take the Solzhpill and collect all his works.

>>18010774
The fact that it alone drives communist teens into such a spectacular autistic screeching makes it based in my opinion.

>>18010774
Solzhenitsyn makes a pretty good case for why camps are worse than prison. First, the camps are almost entirely comprised of innocents. The basic philosophy motivating them was different too: a prison is meant to separate the dangerous from the innocent, to punish the guilty, and finally to reform those willing to reform. The camp is meant to turn the innocents into slaves to build some canals.

I can't speak for others, but the reason I consider Gulag so great is down to his chapter on the Ascent of the Soul. It's part of my personal Bible, and I reread it frequently. It is the greatest answer ever conceived to the notion that "good" ends justify evil means. That earthly life is about the soul.

>>18018957
>intelligentsia and professional-managerial class
useless eaters, clowns. you call em leftists today, academia. I repeat: SHOW ME THEIR CVs.

>>18010774
>the book could be relevant to many other prison systems
>could be
no. They do not force prisoners in the US to work in below 0 degree weather (in the book I think he says -50 degrees) building and working for long hours. These things are only true and relevant to communist regimes, and their leaders (who were the leaders of these gulags??).

>>18019925
US prison? world currency printing country which exports debt to shitholes and sucks wealth. imagine my shock. still, Solzhenitsyn, and other non working "intelligentsia", "managers", are fucking useless eaters, and nobody would feed them for free, in time when war was upon and cannon fodder was needed. you fucking hipsters with brain damaged by Hollywood and happy endings in safe moms basements and land mooning hoax have no idea about life at the time, no semiconductors, no TV, no pharma meds, no self mutilation via gender translation.

>>18010774
I think the serious answer to this question is that very few readers, who aren't chasing a narrative, regard Solzhenitsyn's book as being stable. His entire mantra is that the brand of "Communism" adopted by the Soviet Union did little but allow evil people to overthrow "good" people, thus making society rot from the inside out. He talks on and on about how the Gulag's became overran by prisoners, and there was very little in the way of a justice system tied to the prisons themselves. There's also a very heavy emphasis on the lack of religious substructure that existed before Stalin's rise to power, which he completely destroyed. Solzhenitsyn saw this as being the biggest problem, and the root of all the other moral issues that plagued the Soviet Union.

I've heard from more than one person, and I agree from what I've read, that Varlam Sharlamov's "Kolyma Stories" is an overall better objective telling of what exactly was going on in the Soviet Gulags, simply because Sharlamov didn't try to tie any narrative to what was happening. He was simply telling stories about what was happening with little to no commentary, and allows the reader to decide how to feel about the horrors.

Right-wingers eat the book up because it appeals to their boomer Cold War depiction of why Communism is bad. And they aren't wrong, but their reasoning is slightly misguided, in my opinion.

>>18021560
Tankie apologism variant #2-b: evasive faggotry.

>>18021581
I'm sorry, I'm sure reading more than one book in your life is difficult.

>>18021594
It would be if you wrote it, since you take three paragraphs to say nothing whatsoever.

>>18021604
Thanks for that, really showed me.

>>18021614
You're welcome. In the future, try to read books rather than just figuring out the correct opinions to have about them within your political in-group from youtube videos.

>>18021621
Gotcha, thanks obviously wiser anon.

are political prisoners mixed with regular criminals in united states prison system?

not even nazi concentration camps did this

>>18021581
but you in your moms basement are way more smarter than Stalin and politburo, you know better how to rule an entire country at that time. Fucking moms genius.

Is Ivan Denisovich worth reading?

>>18021839
The projection is astounding.

>>18022625
yep, the more people scream "fucking nazis" the more antinazis they are themselves. issue is, is the reflection of projection a projection?

>>18022763
To an extent. It's an identification through signifiers. If we go down this road everything can be labelled projection.

>>18022826
it's very easy. universe is dead, only atoms and particles exchanging energy, you are absolutely alone in it. you always describe yourself.

>>18019521
>First, the camps are almost entirely comprised of innocents.
Holy cow you're deluded.

(Then again, the venerable Dindu Nuffins isn't a Russian character; OP's point about the prison experience is confirmed.)

>>18022866
Good point

>>18022304
yes, no one writes prison novels like russians

>>18019869
the irony is that your garden variety "muh stalinist genocide" posters would actively applaud the purges if they were aware of who was actually getting the gulag

>>18019925
>expected some cushy factory management job through nepotism
>forced to build your own camp in 0 degree weather because you're an incompetent piece of shit
now imagine if we'd done this to the men who put the economy in the toilet back in 2008