https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/soviet_tyranny_warmed_over_is_still_tyranny.html
A colleague recommended I read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a long and deep look into the abyss of Soviet communist oppression in the first half of the 20th century. In her opinion, “everyone should read this book.” I must agree — the world would probably be a better place if the book was required reading in universities, especially in the West. It should also be taught in high schools, at least in excerpts. Sadly, in the age of the tweet, Solzhenitsyn’s 700-odd agonized pages are probably doomed to general neglect. More’s the pity.
Mark Twain said long ago: “The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” The Gulag Archipelago, though intended by its author as a forlorn memoir to the hundreds he saw ground up by the Soviet state, is also the most powerful of warnings. Communism is still with us. Its central themes have never been extinguished. Its salespeople are still out on the street. The seductive lies of dead ideologues have never lost their power to persuade. They have changed a little, adapted to new cultures, new eras, and new technologies — but in the end, the Devil’s siren song still rhymes.
One hardly knows where to begin. Let’s start with the political usefulness of the common criminals — people Solzhenitsyn summarizes as “thieves.” In Soviet prisons and labor camps, the truly antisocial elements were made the jailers of the rest. They could torture, rape, and sometimes kill their fellow prisoners with near impunity. “Thieves” were officially designated as a victim group, a people wronged by capitalist oppression. They were not to blame for their own actions. They were, in the terminology of communism, “socially friendly elements.” The people whom the state didn’t like, on the other hand, the people who had lingering ideas of individual rights and freedoms, or who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were the peoples’ enemies — the socially undesirable.
This exaltation of the criminal classes was not merely a feature of the penal system, but permeated the judicial system as well. Sentences for property crimes and violent crimes tended to be light. When ideology dictates that bad is good and good is bad, the results are predictable. Crime, fear, and suffering flourish.
When we see the knee-jerk movement to “end mass incarceration,” to “abolish the police,” and then watch as the mob terrorizes and loots city after city — we can only assume that the current revolution is progressing nicely. The left has begun to release the pent up power it has long been nurturing in our prisons, leavening it with a hefty dose of race-hatred to increase its ferocity and garnishing it with a dollop of class envy for the sake of old-time Marxist nostalgia. You cannot say the Marxist narrative hasn’t kept up with the times, but the core doctrine remains unaltered: thou shalt terrify and cow the populace with such sociopathic operatives as come to hand. Nor is such doctrine in any way unique to Soviet communism. Other socialists have played variations of this tune. The Fascists had their black shirts and the Nazis had their brown shirts in the early stages of their development. We now have BLM. A thug is a thug is a thug. His color is irrelevant. By any other name, a fist is a fist, and a burning bottle of gasoline smells as sweet.
