The Asphyxiation of Untruth and Refusal to Live the Lie

Further Reflections on the Insights of Solzhenitsyn about the 'Density of Evil' and on 'Crossing the Threshold of Evil', Perhaps Irrevocably

by Dr Robert Hickson(*)

While recently visiting German-speaking Switzerland, I encouraged good friends to re-read Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's chapter, entitled 'The Bluecaps' ('Die blauen Litzen') from his first volume of 'The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956' ('Der Archipel Gulag').
Solzhenitsyn's earlier far-sighted insights and sense of just proportion will help us to see current reality more clearly and 'in the longer light of history.' We must resist the falsification of historical truth and the sophistic manipulation of false proportions and 'half truths.' We must be especially attentive, therefore, to the new manifestations of 'pre-emptive psychological warfare,'which is also strategic psycho-cultural warfare.
But, what does Solzhenitsyn say, first in 'The Bluecaps'?(1) He speaks of 'the grinding of our souls' in 'the gears' of the Gulag System, 'the great Nightime Institution' (144), from which 'a surfeit of grief floods our eyes' (144), because 'our souls are pulverized and our flesh hangs down in tatters like a beggar's rags' (144); and therefore we cannot be good and detailed 'historians of our torturers' (144). 'For it is certain,' moreover, that 'they [the torturers] will never describe themselves as they actually are' (144).
For example, there is Yagoda-- an N.K.V.D. Chief-- and we are allowed to see the bitterly ironic 'nature of Yagoda's striving toward the sacred' (173), which then provokes Solzhenitsyn's own deeper inquiries about moral evil and about the ideological barriers against setting any limits to moral evil.
According to eyewitnesses in the group around the Soviet writer, Maxim Gorky, Solzhenitsyn reports that
'In the vestibule of the bathhouse on Yagoda's estate near Moscow, ikons were placed so that Yagoda and his comrades, after undressing, could use them as targets for revolver practice before going in to take their baths. Just how are we to understand that? As the act of an evildoer? What sort of behavior is it? Do such people really exist?' (173)
Moreover, 'the classic evildoers,' like Shakespeare's Macbeth or Iago (in Othello), 'recognized themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black' (173). Indeed, Iago 'very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black [i.e., corrosively jealous and envious] and born of hate [towards Othello].' But, says Solzhenitsyn, these depictions of evil seem 'somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception' (173). But, why so?
Solzhenitsyn tries to lead us, like his Russian predecessor, Dostoievsky, to the spiritual depths of things:
'That's not the way it [the operation of evil] is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good; or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law [to include the "Natural Moral Law" of "fittingness," "oughtness," and "obligation"]. Fortunately, it is in the nature [essence] of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.' (173)
Then, Solzhenitsyn sets up an important contrast for the further clarification of our minds:
'Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble [as well as being illusions]-- and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago [a very dark, malicious villain] was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short [i.e., set limits, boundaries, "Grenzen"] at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.' (173-174)
They had no manipulative and self-deluding 'dialectical ideology.' That is to say, they had no revolutionary ideology of dialectical (or historical) materialism-- or Hegelian 'dialectical idealism'-- wherein even the limiting logical and ontological 'law of contradiction' does not, purportedly, apply. And philosophical materialism itself is an irrational self-refuting proposition. (The 'processes' by which we 'arrive' at the conclusion that materialism is considered to be 'true'-- i.e., that 'mind is derivative from matter in motion'-- is not even a rational process. Logos-- intelligence -- is initially and inherently subverted -- being only 'ephiphenomenal'and 'derivative,' not 'directive' nor 'illuminating' of reality, nor freely able to 'take a measure' of a extra-mental reality.)
Especially with reference to the 'dialectic' of Hegelian idealism or of Marxist dialectical materialism, Solzhenitzen says:
'Ideology-- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification [as in the various forms of National Socialist, Bolshevist, Zionist, 'Chosen People,' or 'Master Race' ideologies] and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory [the false theory] which helps make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes [as being 'progressive'], so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.' (174)
Furthermore, and along with Solzhenitsyn's own ironic (or sarcastic) emphasis:
'Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated [sic] to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. [Is Solzhenitsyn too optimistic or na-ve here?] How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who is it who destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.'(174)
In the illuminating words of a beloved friend, the evildoers of the Gulag System constituted a new kind of 'binary weapon'-- dangerously combining their personal moral vices (distorted habits) with their distorting ideology, namely on intellectual 'para-reality' of an 'armed,' but altogether perverting, ideology ('an armed ideology').
'Ideology' thus gave further 'justifications' and delusive 'self-justifications' for doing what was thought to be 'expedient.' For example, since those 'enemies of the progressive Revolution were going to die anyway, why couldn't they be fed to the animals in the zoos and at least support the 'zoo economy' in those famine years,' (174) when even the animals had not enough food?!
Solzhenitsyn says, apropos of the illusionary liberation from limits (and the indifferent infliction of moral cruelty), that ideology undermines any sense of limit; it intrinsically subverts any moral limit:
'This is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoers could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology [especially with dialectical ideology which denies the logical law of contradiction] does cross it [the threshold, the human moral limit], and his eyes remain dry and clear [no tears and no turbidity or hesitation!].' (174)
Ideology enables such a corrupted man to cross the 'threshold magnitudes' and more easily (and perhaps irrevocably) to pursue evil without limit and without conscientious penitence or even remorse. Comparably, says Solzhenitsyn:
'Physics is aware of phenomena which occur only at threshold magnitudes, which do not exist at all until a certain threshold encoded by and known to nature has been crossed ... [For example,] when the threshold of the photoelectric effect has been crossed.' (174-175)
Applying the principle of 'thresholds' to the moral order as well as to the physical order of things, Solzhenitsyn says:
'Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude....he ["a human being"] slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again [ intellectually and morally]. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning [of conversion, of metanoia] remains, and he himself is still within our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions ... he suddenly crosses the threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.' (175)
This is, in Rabelais' words, 'a terrible thing to think upon'!
Sharply-- often sarcastically-- revealing the indifference and cynical lack of justice in the Soviet Union, where 'no one dares say a word about vice,' although virtue has been allowed to enter ['beaten down' and 'sickly'] in all its tatters and sit in the corner, as long as it doesn't raise its voice,'(175) Solzhenitisyn then also gradually considers the devastating effects of all of this upon the young.
And the cumulative effects, he implies, will not be easily corrected-- and not without much suffering, contrition of heart, and concrete reparation! What happens when the young see virtue mocked, and then are also told that 'no one was to blame for it' (175) although many millions of their fellow citizens 'did get mowed down' (175)? When some of the young then want to examine the truth of the past, they are cynically and sophistically met with the question, 'Why open old wounds?' (175).... 'That would be 'digging up the past' ' (176).
But it is very different in West Germany, Solzhenitsyn then candidly says, and by way of sharp contrast:
'In that same period [1945-1966] eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany. (Meanwhile, in East Germany, nothing of the sort is to be heard. Which means that they have been shod with new shoes, they are valued in the service of the state.) And still we choke with anger here [in the Soviet Union]....We even stay after work to attend protest meetings and vote: "Too few! Eighty-six thousand are too few. And twenty years is still too little! It must go on and on.' And during the same period, in our own country (according to the reports of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court) about ten men have been convicted....Meanwhile, if we translate 86,000 West Germans into our own terms, on the basis of comparative population figures, it would become one quarter million." ' (175-176)
Moreover, he acutely says: 'the fact that the murderers of our husbands and fathers ride through our streets [not only in Moscow or 'in the environs of Moscow'] and we make way for them as they pass, doesn't get us worked up at all, doesn't touch us' (176). Indeed, he adds, with irony:
'Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: why is Germany [West Germany] allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us [especially for the youth] if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can russia teach the world?' (176)
In contrast to the unpurged Soviet Union, which refuses any expiation or 'national reparation,' Solzhenitsyn considers the protracted humiliation of West Germany:
A country which has condemned evil 86,000 times from the rostrum of a court and irrevocably condemned it in literature and among its young people, year by year, step by step, is purged of it. (176-177)
However, even in 1974-- almost thirty years ago-- Solzhenitsyn, who himself was once a military officer, candidly and honorably spoke out against the dishonorable and craven conduct of his own people:
'What are we to do? Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of drivelling do-nothings. First we submissively allowed them to massacre us by the millions [in the Gulag System], and then with devoted concern we tended the murderers [and our persecutors] in their prosperous old age [like "the smug and stupid Molotov..., a man who...is saturated with our blood and nobly crosses the sidewalk to seat himself in his long, wide automobile." ' (176)] (177)
Attentive to the common good of his own country and to his special duty to Russia's own children, Solzhenitsyn then says:
'What are we to do if the great Russian tradition of penitence is incomprehensible and absurd to them [i.e., to our Gulag "executioners" and "murderers"]?... But let us be generous. We will not shoot them.... But for the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes.' (177)
Solzhenitsyn says,
'We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people [by way of revolutionary or racial or religious "exceptionalism"] have the right [ie.,"a claim in justice"] 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.' (177-178)
And then, with special attention to the young, Solzhenitsyn vividly concludes his memorably profound and trenchant chapter, 'The Bluecaps,' wherein he examines this matter of intractably unbounded evil and the moral necessity of justice, inasmuch as 'from the most ancient times, justice has been a two-part concept: virtue triumphs, and vice is punished.' (175) But,
'When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting [as in the case of Molotov] their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason ... that they are growing up "indifferent." Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity. It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!' (175)
It is desirable, therefore, that the Germans themselves read and re-read the trenchant analysis and candor of Solzhenitsyn's heart-- and his understanding heart-- and thereby further form their own deep, moral and spiritual resistance (Widerstand) to Sophistry and to 'the Lie.' And thus would increase their own virtuous resistance to very intelligent, and very hostile, strategic psychological warfare against their culture and way of life! They, too, must come out 'from under the rubble.' They, too, must resist manipulative Sophistry and the Lie. They, too, must resist the psychological 'binary weapon': the combination of moral corruption and a cramped, constricted ideology (i.e., false theories of 'special immunities' and 'arrogant exceptionalisms'). Even if they cannot immediately prevail and trenchantly present the whole truth of history in proper proportion, they must at least refuse their tolerance of the Lie, they must refuse their complicity with the Lie. Coming out from under the rubble and away from the asphyxiation of untruth-- and the dialectical ideologies of the Lie and the Sophistical 'half truth'-- they must take one step at a time, but refuse, no matter what, to participate in the Lie! Solzhenitsyn has so much to teach others, including me, and other Americans!

1 See Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-II (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), Chapter 4 - 'The Bluecaps,' pp. 144-178.