Posted on 03/06/2009 5:21:14 AM PST by ihatedemocrats
The death last year of Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminded westerners of the ideological disturbances that wracked the just completed century, the greatest of which Solzhenitsyn himself had documented in The Gulag Archipelago and in his novelistic cycle The Red Wheel. The literature of the Communist tyranny in Russia, of its internal and exported violence, bulks large, even when one considers it only in terms of English translations. In addition to Solzhenitsyn, we have Gulag memoirs by Yevgeniya Ginsburg and Lev Rozgan, biographies of victims by their survivors such as Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two books about the persecution and imprisonment of her husband Ossip, and generically difficult-to-assign items like Testimony, the conversations of composer Dmitri Shostakovich with Solomon Volkov. One might easily count hundreds of titles crying out to be read.
One such book, Letters from Russia (1921) by Peter Damian Ouspensky (1878-1947), while almost unknown nevertheless boasts the twin virtues of its brevity (less than sixty pages) and its moment of composition, the year 1919, during the fantastic and homicidal tumult of Russia’s Civil War. Ouspensky – a mathematician, journalist, philosopher, and mystic, who for a short time in the 1920s associated himself with the eccentric guru George Gurdjieff – fled St. Petersburg when the Communist coup d’état erupted but could not find his way free of embattled territories until 1920, when he transited through Novorossiysk, a refugee corridor under British control, to Turkey. Ouspensky wrote the five letters in Ekaterinodar and contrived to smuggle them past the frontiers to a British reporter, C. E. Bechhofer, who arranged for their publication in London once their author was safely out of danger.
(Excerpt) Read more at brusselsjournal.com ...
Fascinating article. I was familiar with Ouspensky’s other writings, but I had never heard of these letters before.
Just this morning, I was wondering what will happen when Barry brings on the collapse of our institutions and economic structure that he is trying to achieve; how will we respond? This all seemed so remote and unthinkable less than a year ago that it’s still hard for me to comprehend it.
Thanks for the link:
Thought this particularly relevant:
I would say that “hate crime” and “hate speech” laws represent a trial balloon of totalitarian methods. Such methods are barbarous. They betray the basic decency of the Western achievement. They take root in “the worst forces,” as Ouspensky says, “underlying our life.” Now “ought” is a counterfactual word.
But it strikes me that if history taught only one lesson to the civilized it would be that as soon as any visibly power-hungry group succeeds in an agenda of intimidation, no matter how minor, sensible people dedicated to their own freedom ought to respond with all necessary resistance until the aggressors have themselves been intimidated into a retreat.
Better indeed to quash such attempts before their first success, but that is a more difficult proposition. Ouspensky’s book explains what happens when timidity rather than vigor is the keynote of response to internal barbarism.
Our Republican politicians should probably pick up a copy.
I don’t know if we can respond. Look at the new head of the National Intelligence Council! I just think of the Black Hundreds who tried to respond to the Bolsheviks. What came of that? Lenin wrote in a then-secret memo:
“It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy, not stopping [short of] crushing any resistance. It is precisely now and only now that the enormous majority of the peasant mass will be for us or at any rate will not be in a condition to support in any decisive way that handful of Black Hundred clergy and reactionary urban petty bourgeoisie who can and want to attempt a policy of violent resistance to the Soviet decree.
We must, come what may, carry out the confiscation of church valuables in the most decisive and rapid manner, so as to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (one must recall the gigantic wealth of the monasteries and abbeys). Without this fund, no government work in general, no economic construction in particular, and no defense of our position in Genoa [the diplomatic conference, not the city] especially is even conceivable. No matter what happens, we must lay our hands on a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several billion). And this can be done successfully only now. All considerations indicate that later we will be unable to do this, because no other moment except that of desperate hunger will give us a mood among the broad peasant masses that will guarantee us the sympathy of these masses or at least their neutrality, in the sense that victory in the struggle for the confiscation of the valuables will be indisputable and entirely ours.”
And so it was.
As Sam Francis wrote, we are all Southerners now.
I am old, but not “Toothless”.
And I am not alone.
This must and will stop.
I was under the impression that Ouspensky was a main apologist for Gurdjieff, not someone who stopped in for a short time as indicated in the article.
Ouspensky’s “The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin” is one of my favorite books, the basis of the movie Groundhog Day, and very Gurdjieffian in tone. P.D. wrote many books about Gurdjieff and the work:
The words of administration critics such as Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santelli and others who publicly expose the agenda and policies of our country's ruling marxists will be labeled as "hate crimes" within three years and critics such as they will be punished.
Individual citizens are presently being singled out by name and attacked by the marxist White House through press conferences and presidential statements, something that has never been done before with such obsession and evil intent.
The obvious will come about with record speed.
Leni
Don't "go bubba" and start shootin' feds.
As much as I can see, Zero and his pals do seem to be attempting a ‘quiet’ revolution. That is, instead of open revolt (which the Bolsheviks did), he and his cronies seem to be doing things in such a way that, when the time comes (after they’ve sufficiently bollixed up the economy so badly that nothing can fix it), the people will (so they think) have no other choice than to follow him and do as he says. The end result: a complete takeover of every part of life in this country, just like the Soviets.
Granted...there are those who think that a good number of people will rise up before that can happen and stop this madness. Yes, I do acknowledge there’s a ton of people out there who have the capability of resisting (read: “armed”) and who do not like what’s happening now (read: “pissed off”). But, there is the greater number of people who either do not care or actually WANT Zero and his friends to succeed.
What will it take to wake up the American people? Given how the vast majority seem “anesthetized” and unable to comprehend what exactly is happening, it will have to be ‘something’ of such magnitude that will cause the American people to finally take a look and see exactly who they put in office. Also, whatever this wake-up call will be cannot happen over a drawn-out period of time. It must be a short, sharp shock...otherwise, it could be ignored.
(A short aside: The Bolshevik Revolution officially started when the crew of the Imperial Russian battleship ‘Aurora’ mutinied and used her guns to fire on the Czar’s troops. You don’t suppose...?)
Have never advocated that and never will. But if a confrontation comes....
Enough of that for now, this is still Texas.
Kinda weird little offshoot article, well worth reading, especially if you’ve ever turned the corner on that well civilized street leading to that ramshackled building that housed the stranger vendor in his tweed-smokysmell jacket who gave you your first Ouspensky experience.
From the article
In any case, shooting summed up Bolshevism, which, having “no constructive program,” could only destroy and did so prodigiously and gleefully.
Of course, you are right.
At this point, it may be better to move to a *real* Communist country if one knows a requisite language and has some skills that interest them, if only to avoid the inevitable nuclear invasion and literal enslavement.
Some of the Whites in the Russian Civil War switched sides and were welcomed by Lenin, who always appreciated talent and willingness. Kim Il Sung was not kind to Americans (perhaps for racial reasons), but did let deserters live in North Korea and marry North Koreans after heavy indoctrination. White and Jewish Americans have joined the Chinese Communist Party.
We, as individuals, should not act at this time, or the “great fedgov” will turn us into crispy critters, and I have no desire to be a martyr.
However, working through our state legislatures, when the feds decide to use force to enforce their will,
we can back the state LEOs and the nat’l guard.
As I said before, This is still Texas.
I do not fear my friends & neighbors.
That concerns me, too. The speed with which he has moved to consolidate things is incredible, and I think that if some melt-down occurs right now, he will use it simply to seize what little power and money that remains that he hasn't already appropriated. And I don't think people will react quickly enough to oppose him.
In fact, if 60% of the people think he's doing a great job (according to the surveys), I think it's highly likely that instead you will simply see a vicious repression of the relatively small group that is starting to ask questions. Many people on FR are convinced that Americans won't let a dictatorship happen here, but I, for one, am not convinced in the least.
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