zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — that one is a many among many, and how many does that make? ]
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There are many, many distinctions that can be drawn at the group level, political, financial, religious, tribal, on the right side of the line in the diagram below — but every one of them in constituted of individuals, for each of whom the considerations on the left side would, to a greater or lesser extent, apply:

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How is this multiplied?

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Nice words, nice indeed. Bobby Kennedy‘s words.

But did the darker aspects of “the complex compound of pure and impure impulses” — in every individual, every “tiny ripple” — get lost in the niceness of the words?

I ask because for optimists it so often does, and that’s the great weakness of positive movements. And because for the cynical, so often, no glimpse of the positive aspects can make it through their fog.

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Consider this, for each individual:

As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions . .. There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider’s web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses; trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence…. Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads.

That’s not somebody writing about Cambridge Analytica or FaceBook — that’s Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in Cancer Ward, 1968, courtesy Bruce Schneier.

I may add further one and many instances and illuminations in the comments section as I find them — you are invited to do the same..

SOLZHENITSYN AND HIS BATTLE FOR RUSSIA’S SOUL

Der Spiegel recently had an interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ( hat tip to M. Gemmill). At 88, Solzhenitsyn has lost neither his mental acuity nor his uncompromising vision of Russia that made him the most feared of dissidents by Soviet leaders, until his expulsion from the USSR in 1974, four years after being awarded the Nobel Prize. Some excerpts of Solzhenitsyn’s answers from the interview:

“The prize in 1990 was proposed not by Gorbachev, but by the Council of Ministers of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, then a part of the USSR. The prize was to be for “The Gulag Archipelago.” I declined the proposal, since I could not accept an award for a book written in the blood of millions.

…I have grown used to the fact that, throughout the world, public repentance is the most unacceptable option for the modern politician.

….Vladimir Putin — yes, he was an officer of the intelligence services, but he was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the gulag. As for service in foreign intelligence, that is not a negative in any country — sometimes it even draws praise.

….Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality. Lenin and Trotsky were exceptionally nimble and vigorous politicians who managed in a short period of time to use the weakness of Kerensky’s government. But allow me to correct you: the “October Revolution” is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.

….However, when you say “there is nearly no opposition,” you probably mean the democratic parties of the 1990s. But if you take an unbiased look at the situation: there was a rapid decline of living standards in the 1990s, which affected three quarters of Russian families, and all under the “democratic banner.” Small wonder, then, that the population does not rally to this banner anymore. And now the leaders of these parties cannot even agree on how to share portfolios in an illusory shadow government.”

Solzhenitsyn has never been a voice of liberalism or even Russian nationalism in the traditional pan-Slavic, imperial and chauvinistic sense the term is usually meant. Rather he has propagated Russophilism, even to the extent of using archaic Russian words without modern foreign antecedents, when possible, in his writings. Solzhenitsyn’s emphasis on the unique cultural and spiritual traditions of old Russia is one that excludes other peoples – including those like Jews and Ukrainians- who have been deeply intertwined with or innately part of Russian history.

Part of Solzhenitsyn’s thunderous moral denunciation of the monstrosities of the Soviet system were because of the ruin of the old Russian patrimony under the profoundly alien doctrines of Communism, a Western import. I would not be surprised if Solzhenitsyn traced the origin of Russia’s sad history to Peter the Great as much as to Vladimir Lenin.