gulag

With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's death yesterday, I'm reminded of his book, The Gulag Archipelago, which I read a long time ago. It seems to be one of those books that people used to like to pretend to have read, but recently seems to have become a book that people have forgotten. And that's a shame, as it is very relevant to current times. I have been musing on it, and, while I certainly don't have anything formally supportable in debate, here are some preliminary thoughts.

Certainly, at the time I read Gulag, in my twenties, it had a very striking effect on me. For one thing, I was very glad to know that the US did not take such an approach for dealing with "undesirables." Certainly, there had been past mistakes, and would likely be future ones, but everyone who had had civics in junior high (and who hadn't?) knew that our system of government was morally above that of the Soviets.

naïvité—(noun) the quality or state of being deficient in worldly wisdom or informed judgment. (see http://www.merriam-webster.com)

Some will say that comparing the operations of the US government in Guantánamo to the Soviet Gulag is overstating the case, and possibly it is. I do not claim to have done any serious research on this; nevertheless, there are some interesting points of comparison on the face of it.

The most cogent ones have to do with sham detention and trial systems perpetrated on prisoners in both systems. In both cases, forms are used in violation of the respective constitutions of the nation-states involved. In both cases, the system is justified as a means of dealing with the those who are of greatest danger to the society in question, without the recognition that the prison system itself—and the government supporting it—is a greater danger.

If you find this disturbing as I do, well, then, where do go with this? I don't know.