“We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers … we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I pulled that quote off InformationClearingHouse.com today. I think it sums up where the U.S. is headed.
I don’t say that lightly. We are, it seems, doomed to repeat the stages that the old Soviet Union went through. And I mean that, all the way back to the tsarist days, but how far into them, I do not know.
We have an incredibly privileged class in the U.S., one so far above the rest of us that we have no concept of them. The Russian Empire had that, too. And it didn’t take long before the supposedly super-egalitarian Soviet state had its own dacha owning über class. And while 99% of the USSR’s people lived meager lives with essentially no material comforts, that class had them all, right up until the end in 1991.
Will we have gulags, though? That is the real question. I believe it is likely we will have some form of them. It will just be too easy for the übers to create those to keep the rabble down, to keep dissension under control. That was the very reason, by the way, that Adolf Hitler had the Dachau concentration camp built. It only took him six weeks to begin Dachau. How long it took Stalin to begin the gulags, I do not know. American currently has 1.25% of its population in prisons, the highest in the world, so we are becoming experts on running penal institutions and it would not take us long to expand them, if the powers that be decide on it.
Feet2TheFire and his bloggie thingie 