"Many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity by mankind...This causes many to sway toward socialism, which is a false and dangerous current." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent 11 years in Soviet gulags.
(A Quick Comment: I highly recommend reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago. I think everyone should be as familiar with this chapter (as well as others) in world history as we are with the rise of The Third Reich in Nazi Germany during the 1930s.)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918, was one out of the many that were arrested under Stalin's regime. He was detained for writing a letter criticizing Stalin and was sent to the Soviet "gulag" labor camps where he spent the next 11 years of his life.
He began secretly accumulating stories of the horrendous life in the gulags. In prison for several years, he was denied paper and pen so he "composed and memorized chapters as poems." He put these stories into his his book The First Circle and then in the The Gulag Archipelago. An "archipelago" means chain of islands in the ocean. He used this metaphor to describe the chain labor camps across Russia. Same detention-style camps used by Hitler in Germany, Communist China, and North Korea.
"Solzhenitsyn's writings were smuggled out of the Soviet Union and translated." His writings became internationally popular leading to him winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, even though he was still in the U.S.S.R." International pressure led him to be expelled from Russia in 1974.
In 1975, he warned naïve American students of the realities of socialism, he stated in Washington, D.C.:
" In pre-revolutionary Russia...there were attempts on the Tsar's life...during these years about 17 persons a year were executed...The Cheka (Lenin's Secret Police)...executed, without trial, more than a thousand persons a month! At the height of Stalin's terror...more than 40,000 person were shot a month!"
In 1978, he addressed student at Harvard:
"In Soviet society...there is a multitude of prisoners in our camps who are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state by resorting to means outside the legal framework."
Solzhenitsyn also explained Stalin's use of the governmental healthcare system to purposefully hide "diagnosing" his political opponents with psychiatric problems and then given compulsory "treatments."
"Doctors are making their evening rounds...injecting people with drugs which destroy their brain..."
Towards the end of World War II at the Tehran Conference, President Roosevelt relinquished half of Europe to the U.S.S.R.(under Stalin's rule). Solzhenitsyn stated:
"Roosevelt, in Tehran, during one of his toasts, said..."I do not doubt that the three of us" (Meaning Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) " lead our peoples in accordance with their desires"...
We were astonished. We thought, "when we reach Europe, we will meet the Americans, and we will tell them."
He added:
"I was among the troops that were marching towards the Elbe (River)...A little bit more and I would have...shaken the hands of your American soldiers. But just before that...I was taken off to prison and my meeting did not take place...After a delay of 30 years, my Elbe is here today. I am here to tell you...what...we wanted to tell you then."
Reference
Feder, W. J. (2020). Socialism The Real History from Plato to the Present. Virginia Beach: Amerisearch, Inc.
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