Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
On the Topic of
Russia
“I have seen the future, and it works.”
-Lincoln Steffens
Letter to Marie Howe, 3 Apr.
1919, quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
The problem is that Mr. Steffens saw only what the
Soviets wanted him to see, not the reality of censorship, oppression, forced
labor, and millions of Russians, not to mention their victims, dead through genocide
– the Holodomor in Ukraine comes to mind – wars of conquest, mass starvation, mass
imprisonment, disease, and 70 years of economic collapse.
And let us hear everything about Stalin’s pact with his
student Hitler, how the Soviets fed, armed, and supported Hitler’s armies and
Hitler’s ambitions for years until Hitler, like Capone, decided his buddy was
disposable.
Yes, millions of Russians died in Hitler’s invasion of
the Soviet Union, but that invasion was possibly only because of Stalin’s economic
and technological support and through his collusion with Hitler in the conquest
and division of Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Nazis committed genocide in the nations
they conquered, and the Communists committed genocide in all of those lands and
within Russia.
The Soviet Union lasted seventy years by floating on a
sea of its own people’s blood. The last
Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, is wrongly remembered as a liberalizer, but he
granted limited freedoms only in order to maintain the Soviet Union, not to
free the Russian people. President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, St. John
Paul II, a number of uppity Polish shipyard workers, and a few young Germans
young gave the several pushes that brought down the rotten construct.
From 1905 until 1918 Russia was a constitutional monarchy
and then for a few months a democracy before the Bolsheviks infected everything.
After seven decades of horror Russia was in 1989 positioned to form a
functional representative government and rejoin civilization. Russian families,
business people, workers, scientists, artists, engineers, musicians, writers, manufacturers,
dancers, film-makers, and the Russian Orthodox faithful would be free to
determine their own lives and the life of Russia.
But after some sputtering attempts at self-government
Russia is again ruled by a degenerate madman whose concept of parliamentary
procedure is having people who even appear to disagree with him murdered. Lots
of people.
The 21st century could have been the Russian
Century, for Russia, even with the loss of its subject states, is still a huge
land with great wealth in precious metals, oil, gas, coal, agricultural land, a
rich cultural heritage which remains a witness to the world, and a diverse and industrious
population which could out-work and out-produce any other people in the world if
only they were free to do so, free to keep the profits from their own labors, and
free of corrupt central and local administrations, false judges, and grasping
oligarchs.
But thousands of the best young Russian men and women have
been killed in insane colonial wars, thousands are in the new gulags for
presuming to think for themselves, and yet more thousands have fled, taking
their talents and their youthful energy with them to enrich their host nations.
Yes, this could have been the Russian century, but
neither Mr. P nor his oligarchs nor his jingling generalissimos appear ever to
have read Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov with
fictional Fr. Zosima’s most famous words: “Don’t lie. Above all, don’t lie to
yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point
where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him…”
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