As One With The Holy Spirit
Accolades, reminiscences, hushed and admiration-filled obituaries in the wake of the natural death of one of humankind's resisters of oppression. A well-earned respect for the restively indomitable spirit of a man dedicated to the ineluctable presence (along with the dire necessity to tame the beast of humankind) residing in humankind through the infallibility of the Holy Spirit.Without the grace of God's presence, humankind is destined to remain the imperfect and disappointing experiment of nature unfulfilled. This was his firm, unalloyed conviction. This was what Alexander Solzhenitsyn's truth to the world was based upon. His introduction to the baseness of the communist leadership of Russia awoke him to the reality of its brutalization of his country and his compatriots.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn elected himself witness to the truth, to the depraved corruption of a tyranny so vile that it was capable of commanding forces to enable it to rid the world of millions of human beings it considered expendable to an experiment in human social conditioning. Landowners, academics, leaders of competing ideologies, and starving peasants were grave fodder.
Their sacrifice was expedient to the larger purpose at hand; to re-structure society, to re-frame its reference points, its prevailing values, to emerge as an ideological success writ large. Since it represented a totally new ideology, completely secular, and since it required a clean sweep to socialize society, it brooked no competition from religion.
An already brutalized existence of feudal serfdom rendered far more tenuous, utterly dependent on the mood swings of a world-class tyrant whose very word was taken to represent the infallible interpretation of the supreme authority of Marxist theology. Regimentation, obedience to the call of the State, sacrifice from the people to profit the collective.
Solzhenitsyn most definitely did not think kindly of Josef Stalin. Who returned the compliment by enrolling his critic into the Gulag Archipelago and leaving him there to rot, along with all the other dissenters, those who were not summarily executed. Who was he and who did any others who sought to criticize that noble experiment and its chief enabler think they were, in any event?
Communism, the great leveller of society, of culture, of caste, of capacity, intelligence and capability. All for one and one for all. The distinctions between people blurred and obliterated; to each would come what each required. And from each would be expected whatever the human psyche and physical tolerance could produce in tandem with its neighbour in an unbroken link of promise and delivery.
Communism was a panacea to those of the world whom the divide between the rich and the poor, opportunity and lack of it, happenstance of birth and geography, offended.
Communism, the social eradication of class and distinctness, the evening up of society; the radical theory that human beings could be socialized to depress their individuality and accept complete co-dependency, was, in the final analysis, economically inefficient, socially disruptive, a political failure.
But it was not evil, as many would have it. It represented an ideal, and a perhaps honourable one. That in its idealism, sought to forfeit - as though a pen and instruction could do it - the most basic instincts of humanity, the genetic emotional inheritance of human beings. While we are capable of transcending base instinctual reaction, it cannot be legislated, it must be a voluntary search for self improvement.
State dictates, an ideological fundamentalism that sought to completely up-end peoples' natural character traits, to formalize self-abnegation, voluntary personal sacrifice could only lead, ultimately, to social collapse. And it did. But not before communist rule administered by cold-hearted, inefficient, arbitrarily controlling and determinedly brutal tyrants brought the duress of chaos and misery to Russia and its satellites.
The implacable tyrants who felt complacent about sacrificing a singular portion of humanity to achieve their ends. Who felt completely and righteously secure in the control they forced upon society. And who, one by one, surrendered their own smug and well-remunerated existence when their infallible leader saw no further use for their unctuous flattery and swift assent to his orders.
This was the tyrant who felt no compunction, no guilt, no responsibility for the truncation of human liberty, opportunities and life itself.
It was not communism, the ideological theory that was evil in and of itself. It was its ardent and utterly committed administrators. Who themselves saw no need to personally sacrifice anything, but to direct in the most forceful manner possible, others to do their bidding to uphold and enrich the ideal.
It failed for a simple enough reason. Forcing people into a narrow frame of endeavor, of effort and expectation that belied all the characteristics of human self-awareness and personal aspiration. It proved a failed experiment through its simplistic universal demand that human beings become state slaves in the name of the party, for the good of the country.
Its failure was the predictable result of a hypothesis that claimed it could perform the social miracle of transforming greed and self-serving imperatives into a collective of permanent empathy and willing self-sacrifice to empower the community. Whereas it truly succeeded in empowering its hierarchy to assume huge powers of rigid authority, benefiting themselves personally and making misery of the lives of their underlings and dependents.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn endeared himself to the West, the capitalist, democratic societies that scorned the very idea of that mode of social engineering, knowing full well that their version of societal values were more consonant with empowering people to become good citizens through the support of capitalist acquisition and consumerism.
The trade-off was freedom to produce and to consume, and to enjoy the fruits of one's personal labour.
Which did nothing whatever to reduce the division between the haves and the have-nots. But for the odd social program here and there instituted as a guilt-damping measure to alleviate the worst strains on the poverty-stricken in society as opposed to offering full, unearned economic equality, a true impracticability in a capitalist society.
And that capitalist society, the democracy that gave Alexander Solzhenitsyn haven in his exile from his beloved country did not endear itself as an alternative to communism to him. He saw around him the result of an effete religion that filled the empty spaces in peoples' souls, but did not demand of them what they were not willing to surrender.
Corruption and greed and acquisitiveness well beyond need surrounded him, living in a free democracy. People had possessions and the comfort of liberty, the freedom to do as they wished, but he perceived that they lacked depth of vision, commitment to God on high. And he rejected the social mores and religious relaxation as he did anti-religious communism that enslaved people.
This hero of anti-communism and brutal tyranny knew that people responded well emotionally to another kind of tyranny, the soul-soothing emotionally fulfilling gentle tyranny of religion. To him, one system represented a deadness of the spirit and no freedom; the other the freedom to acquire in a materialistic, nonspiritual society.
The freedom he took possession of for the time he lived in the United States grated on his sensibilities. He had no time nor patience for "enlightenment", for "humanism" for neither led to godliness. Neither system, as far as he was concerned, reflected well upon and for humankind.
Communism failed humanity completely; the capitalist democracy he came to know so intimately failed, he charged, to challenge humankind to aspire to greatness.
Labels: Heroes and Villains, Human Fallibility, Societal Failures
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, August 05, 2008
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