The Opiate Of Intellectuals

"Clinton even used the 1996 State of the Union to proclaim that "the era of big government is over." 

It is worth mentioning that one important element of society never fully embraced the new economic consensus. Much of the western academia remain fixated on communism. Indeed, as the Berlin Wall fell, it became evident that Communists True Believers persisted only on its western side. In the educational establishment, Marxism lingered as the opiate of the intellectuals."

- Stephen Harper. Right Here Right Now. 

Chivalry Of A Bygone Era?

"Early on he (Moltke) tried to convince the Nazis to abide by the Geneva Convention, but Keitel dismissed it as a “notion of chivalry of a bygone era.""

(Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke, legendary military genius and Christian who plotted with Bonhoeffer for Hitler's Assination)

- Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.

What Witnesses Have Seen

"Not all the witnesses died. And soon no one will call Stalin's government anything but a government of insanity and treason."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1. 

Starved In Prison To Avoid The Good Life

"... among the pows of many nationalities only the Soviets lived like this and died like this. None were worse off than the Soviets. Even the Poles, even the Yugoslavs, existed in far more tolerable conditions; and as for the English and the Norwegians, they were inundated by the International Red Cross with parcels from home. They didn't even bother to line up for the German rations. Wherever there were Allied pows camps next door, their prisoners, out of kindness, threw our men handouts over the fence, and our prisoners jumped on these gifts like a pack of dogs on a bone. 

The Russians were carrying the whole war on their shoulders and this was the Russian lot. Why? Gradually, explanations came in from here and there: it turned out that the U.S.S.R. did not recognize as binding Russia's signature to the Hague Convention on war prisoners. That meant that the U.S.S.R. accepted no obligation at all in the treatment of war prisoners and took no steps for the protection of its own soldiers who had been captured...

We did not recognize that 1907 convention until 1955. Incidentally, in his diary for 1915, Melgunov  reports rumors that Russia would not let aid go through to its prisoners in Germany and that their living conditions were worse than those of all other Allied prisoners -  simply in order to prevent rumors about the good life of war prisons inducing our soldiers to surrender willingly. There was some sort of continuity of ideas here."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL. 1.

Salut Hitler's Sheep

"Meanwhile, Oster and Dohnanyi continued their work under the protection of Admiral Canaris. If ever anyone led a double life, Canaris did. He took morning horseback rides in Berlin’s Tiergarten with Heydrich, the piscine ghoul, and yet was at this very time using his power to undermine Heydrich and the Nazis at every turn. The gangsterism of Hitler sickened him. On a trip to Spain, while riding through the countryside in his open car, he stood and gave the Hitler salute to every herd of sheep he passed. “You never know,” he said, “whether one of the party bigwigs might be in the crowd.”"

- Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. 

How Many Shot?

"They began to Converse in a whisper, and we tried not to listen. But it was quite impossible not to overhear the newcomers whisper. It was so loud, so disquieting, so tense, and so close to a sub, that we realized it was no ordinary grief that had entered our cell. The newcomer was asking whether many were shot."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.

Two Time Canadian Migrant

 "Soon after Fastenko returned to the Motherland, he was followed by a Canadian acquaintance, a former sailor on the battleship Polemkin, one of the mutineers, in fact, who had escaped to Canada and become a well—to-do farmer there. This former Potemkin sailor sold everything he owned. his farm and cattle, and returned to his native region with his money and his new tractor to help build sacred socialism. He enlisted in one of the first agricultural communes and donated his tractor to it. The tractor was driven any which way by whoever happened along and was quickly ruined. And the former Potemkin sailor saw things turning out very differently from the way he had pictured them for twenty years. Those in charge were incompetents, issuing orders that any sensible farmer could see were wild nonsense. In addition, he became skinnier and skinnier, and his clothes wore out, and nothing was left of the Canadian dollars he had exchanged for paper rubles. He begged to be allowed to leave with his family, and he crossed the border as poor as when he fled from the Poremkin. He crossed the ocean, just as he had done then. working his way as a sailor, because he had no money for passages, and back in Canada he began life all over again as a hired hand on a farm."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL1. 

Needing Old Men With Histories Stories

"The old fellow withthe lively eyebrows - and at sixty-three he in no way bore himself like an old man - was Abatoky Ilyich Fastenko. He was a big asset to our Lubyanka cell - both as a keeper of the old Russian prison traditions and as a living history of Russian revolutions. Thanks to all that he remembered, he somehow managed to put in perspective everything that had taken place in the past and everything that was taking place in the present. Such people are valuable not only in a Cell. We badly need them in our society as a whole. 

Right there in our cell we read Fastenko's name in a book about the 1905 Revolution. He had been a Social Democrat for such a long, long time that in the end, it seemed, he had ceased to be one."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.

War And Dirty Church Decisions

"Even if Bonhoeffer could have explained that he was in fact working against Hitler, many in the Confessing Church would still have been confused, and others would have been outraged. For a pastor to be involved in a plot whose linchpin was the assassination of the head of state during a time of war, when brothers and sons and fathers were giving their lives for their country, was unthinkable. Bonhoeffer had come to a place where he was in many ways very much alone."

- Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy 

Intended Church Death

"In January 1941 Bonhoeffer traveled to Munich to see Justus Perels, the head lawyer for the Confessing Church. Perels was working hard to lobby the Reich government on its treatment of Confessing Church pastors; so many of them were being drafted and sent into battle that the Confessing Church was being decimated. This was intentional on the part of the Nazis."

- Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. 

Do Nothing To Evil

"Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of dribbling do-nothings. First we submissively allowed them to massacre us by the millions, and then we devoted concern we attended the murderers in their prosperous old age."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1

A Criminal Revolted By Murder

"What takes place beyond the Oder and the Rhine gets us all worked up. What goes on in the environs of Moscow and behind the green fences of Sochi, or the fact that the murderers of our husbands and fathers ride through our streets and we make way for them as they pass, doesn't get us worked up at all, doesn't touch us. It would be "digging up the past." ....

But in a quarter-century we have not track down anyone. We have not brought anyone to trial.....

Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not?

In the German trials an astonishing phenomenon takes place from time to time. The defendant clasps his head in his hands, refuses to make any defense, and from then on asks no concessions from the court. He says that the presentation of his crimes, revived and once again confronting him, has filled him with revulsion and he no longer wants to live. That is the ultimate height a trial can attain: when evil is so utterly condemned that even the criminal is revolted by it.....

Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of dribbling do-nothings. First we submissively allowed them to massacre us by the millions, and then we devoted concern we attended the murderers in their prosperous old age."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1

Nietzsche Predidce Millions Killed by Socalism

Nietzsche predicted that socialist experiment would cost many millions of lives. He was right.

Socialism ― or the tyranny of the meanest and the most brainless, ―that is to say, the superficial, the envious, and the mummers, brought to its zenith, ―is, as a matter of fact, the logical conclusion of “modern ideas” and their latent anarchy: but in the genial atmosphere of democratic well-being the capacity for forming resolutions or even for coming to an end at all, is paralysed. Men follow―but no longer their reason. That is why socialism is on the whole a hopelessly bitter affair: and there is nothing more amusing than to observe the discord between the poisonous and desperate faces of present-day socialists―and what wretched and nonsensical feelings does not their style reveal to us! ―and the childish lamblike happiness of their hopes and desires.


- Nietzsche

Virtue Sits In The Corner Silent

"From the most ancient times justice has been a two-part concept: virtue triumphs, and vice is punished. 

We have been fortunate enough to live in a time when virtue, though it does not triumph, is nonetheless not always tormented by attack dogs. Beaten down, sickly, virtue has now been allowed to enter in all its tatters and sit in the corner, as long as it doesn't raise its voice."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1

When Good People Run

"But weren't there also some who rose above the party - who were good in a general, human sense?
Broadly speaking, they should not have been there. The Organs avoided employing such people, eliminating them at the recruitment stage. And such people played their hand shrewdly so as to get out of it. Whoever got in by mistake either adjusted to the milieu or else was thrown out, or eased out, or even fell across the rails himself. Still were there no good people left there?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago.

I Smiled And It Made Them Angry

" ... the most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear. ...

How was I to answer them? I was forbidden to order a single word, and I would have had to explain my entire life to each and every one of them. What could I do to make them understand that I was not a spy, a saboteur? That I was their friend? That it was because of them that I was here? I smiled. Looking up at them, I smiled at them from a column of prisoners under escort! But my bared teeth seemed to them the worst kind of mockery, and they shook their fists and bellowed insults at me even more violently than before.

I smiled in pride that I had been arrested not for stealing, nor treason, nor desertion, but because I had discover through my power of reasoning the evil secrets of Stalin. I smiled at the thought that I wanted, and might still be able, to affect some small remedies and changes in our Russian way of life."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.

Trained Like Beasts

"But most of all we were afraid we wouldn't manage to stay in until the time came to graduate and receive our officers Insignia. (They sent those who failed to the Battle of Stalingrad.) And they trained us like young beasts, so as to infuriate us to the point where we would later want to take it out on someone else."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. 

Where The Wolf-tribe Comes From

"As the folks saying goes;  If you speak for the wolf, speak against him as well. 

Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our people? Does it really stem from my roots? Our own blood? 

It is our own. 

And just so we don't go around flaunting to probably the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: "If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?"

It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago.

Delusional Brilliant Marxists

"There are a lot of delusional, brilliant Marxists in the world."

- George Gilder

Power Corrupts Us All

"The passion for gain was their universal passion. After all,  in the absence of any checking up, such power was inevitably used for personal enrichment. Ine would have to be 'holy' to refrain."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago.