"The real 19th century prophet was Dostoyevsky, not Karl Marx." wrote Albert Camus, who understood his century as one that “tried to live without transcendence.”
"The real 19th century prophet was Dostoyevsky, not Karl Marx." wrote Albert Camus, who understood his century as one that “tried to live without transcendence.”
Many… greeted the twentieth, as a century of elevated reason, in no way imagining the cannibalistic horrors that it would bring. Only Dostoevsky, it seems, foresaw the coming of totalitarianism."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"They will divide history into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God... to the transformation of the earth." Kirillov in The Possessed (The Demons), Dostoevsky.
“I started out with 6he idea of unrestricted freedom and ended up with the idea of unrestricted despotism.”
Shigalov, The Possessed
Anna Geifman in her book "Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia" :
“Converting concrete grievance into messianic aspirations and practical purposes into holy causes, they operate within distinctive parameters of a theology of Armageddon, a final battle between good and evil in which at stake is no less than universal salvation.”
“They call me a psychologist; this is not true,” Dostoevsky wrote. “I am merely a realist in the higher sense, that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul.”
“In my novel The Possessed I made the attempt to depict the manifold and heterogeneous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the naïve of people to take part in the perpetration of so monstrous a villainy. The horror lies precisely in the fact that in our midst the filthiest and most villainous act may be committed by one who is not a villain at all! . . . This is the most pathological and saddest trait our present time – the possibility of considering oneself not as a villain, and sometimes almost not being one, while perpetrating a patent and incontestable villainy - therein is our present-day calamity!”
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
Dostoevsky from The Brothers Karamazov : ‘Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted.’
“For Dostoevsky . . . human order . . . depends upon an idea of the ultimate meaning or purpose of existence {the living faith made possible by belief in Christ} – an idea which is not consciously perceived as ‘idea’ but is simply and unquestioningly accepted as ‘reality’ itself. In the ordered human being this fundamental, though largely implicit, idea of life seeks and finds outward expression in the concrete world. The human need for order is thus a two-fold need for an ideal of the ultimate meaning of life, and a way of living out one’s daily life in accord with this idea.”*
...Here Father Zossima (Brothers Karamazov)is implicitly referring to Ivan, whose internal love of mankind and justice founders without God. Having lost the idea that bound him to others, Ivan’s experience of reality is marred by doubt and contradiction. Zossima describes the torment of such thus:
“Unable to love . . . they live upon their vindictive pride . . . they are never satisfied, and they refuse forgiveness, they curse God who calls them. They cannot behold the living God without hatred, and they cry out that the God of life should be annihilated, that God should destroy Himself and his own creation. And they will burn in the fire of their own wrath forever and yearn for death and annihilation”
*Bruce Ward, Dostoevsky’s Critique of the West
Arrest of a Revolutionary Propagandist' by Ilya Repin
“Just as the movement of rebellion led to the point of ‘All or Nothing” and just as metaphysical rebellion demanded the unity of the world, the twentieth century revolutionary movements, when it arrived at the most obvious conclusions of its logic, insisted with threats of force on arrogating to itself the whole of history . . . Now that God is dead, the world must be changed and organized by the forces at man’s disposal.”
Albert Camus
. Are Peter Verkhovensky’s terrorist ideas really so improbable?—they are apt to strike us today as prophetic. He speaks, for instance, with approval, of Shigalov’s scheme for the transformation of society (“I started out with the idea of unrestricted freedom and ended up with the idea of unrestricted despotism”), which will necessitate a complex spy system in which everyone spies on everyone else. He explains disjointedly, hurrying after his hero Stavrogin who wants only to escape him:
“Each belongs to all and all belong to each. All are slaves and equal in their slavery...
All we have to do is organize obedience—that’s the weak point in this world of ours…. Everything must be reduced to the common denominator of complete equality. . . . But they need to be shaken up too and we, the rulers, will take care of that. Because slaves must always have rulers. There’ll be total obedience and total depersonalization. . . . “ from Joyce Carol Oates article on The Demons (The Possessed)
https://celestialtimepiece.com/2015/01/28/tragic-rites-in-dostoyevskys-the-possessed/
“The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrificed God to civilization.
The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world–immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline.
A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time—but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule.
Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.” (Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 1987)
“In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” -- Leon Trotsky
“Even when it emerged victorious, the Soviet state continued to wage war against the society it had brought into being, as though the process of transformation and subjugation was never complete." Laura Englestein, Russia in Flames 1914-1921
“From the time of the revolution, the Bolsheviks knew that they were a minority in Ukraine. To subjugate the majority, they used not only extreme violence, but also virulent and angry forms of propaganda. The Holodomor was preceded by a decade of what we would now call polarizing “hate speech,” language designating some people as “loyal” Soviet citizens and others as “enemy” kulaks, a privileged class that would have to be destroyed to make way for the people’s revolution. That ideological language justified the behaviour of the men and women who facilitated the famine, the people who confiscated food from starving families, the policemen who arrested and killed their fellow citizens. It also provided them with a sense of moral and political justification. Very few of those who organized the famine felt guilty about having done so: they had been persuaded that the dying peasants were “enemies of the people,” dangerous criminals who had to be eliminated in the name of progress.”
Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine
“Philosophers, psychologists, medical men, and writers could have observed in our camps...the special process of the narrowing of the intellectual and spiritual horizons of a human being, the reduction of the human being to an animal and the process of dying alive.” Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn
“If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.”
Solzhenitsyn
Consider Solzhenitsyn’s chapter on how prisoners were transported to camps. Typically, they were loaded into cattle cars—unheated in winter, unventilated in summer—packed as densely as possible, meaning that sometimes there was so little space that some prisoners hung between others without their legs reaching the floor. They were barely fed—or fed on salt herring, and not given water. Some days they weren’t fed at all. Soon the prisoners “started to die off—and the guards hauled the corpses out from under their feet. (Not right away, true, only on the second day.) In this way a trip from Moscow to Petropavlovsk took three weeks.”
With his trademark irony, Solzhenitsyn repeats that none of this was done to torture the prisoners! What he means, we soon understand, is that such treatment was so routine it did not count as torture.
Drawings and words by Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia, a former Gulag prisoner:
“The arrival at the corrective labor camp turned out to be the culmination of the humiliation. First we were made to strip naked and were shoved into some roofless enclosures made out of planks. Above our heads the stars twinkled; below our bare feet lay frozen excrement. An enclosure measured 3 square feet. Each held three to four naked, shivering, and frightened men and women. Then these ’kennel cages’ were opened one after the other and the naked people were led across a courtyard‘the camp version of a foyer‘into a special building where our documents were ’formulated’ and our things were ’searched.’
The goal of the search was to leave us with rags, and to take the good things ’sweaters, mittens, socks, scarves, vests, and good shoes’for themselves. Ten thieves shamelessly fleeced these destitute and barely alive people.
‘Corrective‘ is something that should make you better, and ‘labor‘ ennobles you. But ‘camp‘? A camp wasn‘t a jail. So then what on earth was going on? ”
“The night search, the most degrading procedure, was frequently repeated. “Get up! Get undressed! Hands up! Out into the hall! Line up against the wall.” Naked we were especially frightened. “Among the blind, the one-eyed is king,” and next to them I was still a hero—for the time being. Our hair was undone. What were they looking for? What more could they take away from us? There was something, however: they pulled out all the ties that had been holding up the nuns' skirts and our underwear.”
Courtesy of Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia Foundation, Moscow. Translation by Deborah Hoffman.
“The very intellectuals who had once defended Solzhenitsyn condemned him when they discovered he did not share some of their views. They could not entertain the possibility that they had something to learn from a very different set of experiences. No, no, it was only his experience that was eccentric, while theirs reflected the way things really are! Foolishly, this survivor of Communist slave labor camps revealed himself “to be an enemy of socialism.” Solzhenitsyn recalls a Canadian TV commentator who “lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my own limited Soviet and prison-camp experience. Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited that is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!”
What most disturbed Solzhenitsyn was a “surprising uniformity of opinion” that life was about individual happiness—what else could it be about?—and that it was somehow impolite to refer without irony to “evil.” Still worse, Solzhenitsyn traced this trivializing of human existence to “the notion that man is the center of all that exists, and that there is no Higher Power above him. And these roots of irreligious humanism are common to the current Western world and to Communism, and that is what has led the Western intelligentsia to such strong and dogged sympathy for Communism.” After the Gulag, such ostensibly sophisticated sympathy seemed at best the most hopeless naïveté.”
Gary Saul Merson
New Criterion article...
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/9/how-the-great-truth-dawned
Shigalov in the Possessed (The Demons): “I started out with the idea of unrestricted freedom and ended with the idea of unrestricted despotism.” Dostoevsky
THE MURDER OF TRUTH (MURDER MOST FOUL)
"I was a loyal Soviet citizen until the age of 20. What it meant to be a loyal citizen was to say what you were supposed to say, to read what you were permitted to read, to vote the way you were told to vote and, at the same time, to know that it was all a lie."
Natan Sharansky
"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."
Blaise Pascal
If, as postmoderns say, “truth” is merely the compliment we pay to claims and ideas that we agree with, then “lies” are only the insult we level at claims and ideas that differ from our own. Seen that way, there are only relativities to counter relativities, supposed lies to counter supposed lies, and of course power to counter power. (Marcos Palomas)
Fyodor Dostoevsky foresaw this problem in the nineteenth century. In The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zossima warns, “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and others.”
“Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”
― Czesław Miłosz
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
― Theodore Dalrymple
“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity…in the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
Antonio Gramsci
Frederick Wilhelmsen (1923-1996):
“We see a world wherein science, liberated from traditional life, has been permitted to go its own way and build a new universe which is intolerable to the very psychic structure of man. We see a world wherein art, divorced from the living culture of the people, has fashioned an esoteric dream foreign to the faith and aspirations of Western man. We see a world wherein the state, freed from the religious convictions of the nation, has pushed its own nature to the limits of totalitarian slavery. We see a world compounded of abstraction and violence."
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| Guernica, Picasso (1937) |
https://www.deviantart.com/irenhorrors/gallery
Four Horseman of the Apocalypse
"He (Herbert Marcuse) seems to provide a philosophical basis for a tendency already present in our civilization, which aims at destroying that civilization from within for the sake of an apocalypse of the New World of Happiness of which, in the nature of things, no description can be given."
Lescek Kolakowski
“Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teaching and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior—thereby precluding a prior rational evaluation of the alternatives.”
Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance
We now have an intelligentsia which, though very small, is very useful to the cause of Hell.” -C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Toast_CSL.pdf
...They warned, as Dostoevsky had in The Possessed, that to the extent that a society’s educated class comes to resemble an intelligentsia in the Russian sense, it is headed for what we now call totalitarianism—unless others muster the strength to resist it.
One sometimes hears that “the pendulum is bound to swing back.” But how does one know there is a pendulum at all, rather than—let us say—a snowball accelerating downhill? It is unwise to comfort oneself with metaphors. When a party is willing to push its power as far as it can go, it will keep going until it meets sufficient opposition. In the French Revolution, terror was eventually stopped by “Thermidor,” and then by Napoleon. But in Russia, Stalin proclaimed “the intensification of the class struggle” after the Revolution, entailing an unending series of arrests, executions, and sentences to the Gulag. What meets no resistance does not stop.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals
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