Demagogues, Solzhenitsyn reminds us, are stunted and shallow people. "Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty," he writes.
"The overall life of society comes down to the fact that traitors were advanced and mediocrities triumphed, while everything that was best and most honest was trampled underfoot," he observes. Ersatz intellectuals, surrogates "for those who had been destroyed, or dispersed," took the place of real intellectuals.
"After all," Solzhenitsyn writes, "we have gotten used to regarding as valor only valor in war (or the kind that's needed for flying in outer space), the kind which jingle-jangles with medals. We have forgotten another concept of valor -- civil valor. And that's all our society needs, just that, just that, just that!"
This kind of valor, he knew as a combat veteran, requires a moral courage that is more difficult than the physical courage encountered on the battlefield.
"This unanimous quiet defiance of a power which never forgave, this obstinate, painfully protracted insubordination, was somehow more frightening than running and yelling as the bullets fly," he says.
The coming arrests mean that a wide range of Americans will experience the violations that poor people of color have long endured. Self-interest alone should have generated sweeping protest, should have made the nation as a whole more conscious. We should have understood: Once rights become privileges that the state can revoke, they will eventually be taken away from everyone. Now those who had been spared will get a taste of what complicity in oppression means.
"The traditional image of arrest is also what happens afterward, when the poor victim has been taken away," Solzhenitsyn writes. "It is an alien, brutal, and crushing force totally dominating the apartment for hours on end, a breaking, ripping one, pulling from the walls, emptying things from wardrobes and desks onto the floor, shaking, dumping out, and ripping apart -- piling up mountains of litter on the floor -- and the crunch of things being trampled beneath jackboots. And nothing is sacred in a search! During the arrest of locomotive engineer Inoshin, a tiny coffin stood in his room containing his newly dead child. The 'jurists' dumped the child's body out of the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people out of their sickbeds, and they unwind bandages to search beneath them.
"Resistance," he writes, "should have begun right there, at the moment of the arrest itself. But it did not begin." And so the mass arrests were easy.
And what at that point constitutes victory?
"From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you," he writes. "At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: 'My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die -- now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.'
"Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble," Solzhenitsyn writes. "Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory."
The last volume of Solzhenitsyn's trilogy chronicles camp uprisings and revolts. These revolts were impossible to foresee.
"So many deep historians have written so many clever books and still they have not learned how to predict those mysterious conflagrations of the human spirit, to detect the mysterious springs of a social explosion, not even to explain them in retrospect," Solzhenitsyn writes. "Sometimes you can stuff bundle after bundle of burning tow under the logs, and they will not take. Yet up above, a solitary little spark flies out of the chimney and the whole village is reduced to ashes."
How do we prepare? Solzhenitsyn, after eight years in the gulag, answers this too.
"Do not pursue what is illusory -- property and position; all is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life -- don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, and if both ears can hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -- and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!"
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