The book I am talking about is “The Gulag Archipelago”
See the screenshot (marked text) first. If the book has the power to change your memories so you can’t distinguish between what you experienced and what you read, isn’t that basically manipulation?
I know that something similar is possible for example with altered photos of you childhood that can trick your memories of the time, for example some object that you were told to have but you didn’t.
It confirms that, for the anti-communists, the historical facts are not what is actually important, it’s only the “feeling” they get when thinking about socialism that matters. That they not only try to convince others but even themselves to believe that things happened which never actually did, merely because it validates their emotions.
This is indicative of cult-like social conditioning, in which you are told to reject even your own memories when they don’t confirm to the cult-endorsed narrative, and replace them with the fiction the cult tells you is what you actually experienced. Unfortunately this is a common phenomenon in post-socialist countries nowadays
You will encounter people who lived through those times and who were perfectly happy at the time, but who have been so socially and psychologically pressured year after year to accept the narrative that communism was terrible and they were actually oppressed, that eventually they internalize this to a point that it changes their memories.
It’s a form of mass psychological abuse.
The author’s also an open and proud fascist.
I think his ex wife also said that it’s just embellished stories if not completely made up. Let me see if i can find it
Edit:
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.html
She said its “folklore” and its significance “overstated”
It’s basically the Uyghur Genocide rhetoric of 20th century.
That would be the Holodomor myth.
This book is mandatory reading in schools in Russia since about 2010 if i recall correctly, just why :(
The democracy of the bourgeoisie at play.
It is, and some other his books
my favorite part about the gulag archipelago is how Ernest Mandel’s refutation of the gulag Archipelago mentions that several of the examples Solzhenitsyn gives of the terrible authoritarianism are actually examples of the Soviet State stepping in to PREVENT the abuse of authority
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1974/05/solzhenitsyn-gulag.html
Using Solzhenitsyn’s words against him is good and all, but the rest of this is Trot-trot-trot. It’s only the most extreme Khrushchovite claims strung together in an attempt to, what? Defend the practices of the first few years to undermine the following 3 decades?
Who cares if he says some trotskyite anti stalin shit when the tl;dr is “Solzhenitsyn literally undermines his own point by giving examples that counter his own claims in his own book of lies”
Stalin and the latter decades of the USSR aren’t on trial here, Solzhenitsyn’s lies are
There are better ways to debunk Solzhenitsyn than to say “everything was fine under Lenin, it’s actually under Stalin that things became bad”.
You do far more damage to the communist cause when you say nonsense like “Stalinist counterrevolution” than you undo by pointing out a few inconsistencies in a work of anti-communist propaganda fiction.
In drawing a false distinction between the “good Lenin” and the “bad Stalin”, in denying the continuity of the revolution and socialist construction between the two periods, this text implicitly gives credence to everything Solzhenitsyn writes about the Stalin era Gulag system.
ah yes showing a book to be made up of lies and contradictions which prove the opposite point actually only strengthens the book if you make a concession to liberals of “sure stalin bad” because that totally makes sense
i don’t think i’ll ever meet another poster who understands how propaganda works and how to counter it
The problem is that you’re not actually “showing a book to be made up of lies”, what you’re actually doing is saying that a few parts in the book are lies while implying the rest is true.
If, in the process of pointing out what is false in the claims about the Lenin period, you are explicitly contrasting it with what came after to say that the bad things actually only started to happen later, you are validating false narratives which are in essence no different to those that are used to discredit the Lenin period.
Making the concession “sure, Stalin bad” is the first step to conceding that Lenin himself was bad, because it is very easy to show that there was continuity. Stalin was a student of Lenin who continued the process of socialist construction that was started under Lenin.
I’m afraid you don’t understand how anti-communist propaganda works. The point is to get you to concede that at least some of what they say is true, which they can then use to say “see even the communists admit socialism was tyrannical”, which is then used to get a foot in the door to push for more and more concessions until you end up denouncing all socialism. The next thing you know you’re constantly correcting people about how you’re a “democratic socialist”, not one of those evil tankies who support “authoritarian regimes”.
There is no reason whatsoever to throw one of the most important and successful periods in socialist history under the bus just to ingratiate yourself with liberals. That is pure opportunism. It is perfectly possible to make the exact same point about how Solzhenitsyn is full of shit and peddles lies without conceding to anti-communist propaganda.
ackchually, it’s not propaganda if it talks about the evuls of gommunism…because they could have happened (and if they didn’t it doesn’t matter)
Their TotallyTarian Propaganda: Women, men; all are welcome to liberate themselves from the yoke of imperialism, the yoke of the bourgeioisie, and we must stay united in this effort: noone can embark alone on this journey.
Other Equally Bad Evil TotallyTarian Propaganda: All Jews, all Browns, all Blacks, all lesser! Let every woman in your neighborhood become producers of the next pure Aryan nation!
Our Pure Fact Based Narratives, Funded By Our Free State (the CIA): The last two are equally bad and maybe the first one’s worse, because imagine that guy was like, Hitler, like Stalin was,
Yeah that has very much so a “this added a narrative I like to my disconnected anecdotal experiences” which makes it easier to recall, warping the original memories. Christianity does this too, adding an easy narrative to the seemingly random suffering people go through.
