Friday, August 08, 2008

A Mental Gulag

Reflecting on the death of Solzhenitsyn, Lileks has no patience for the Oppressed Americans who imagine they are brave dissenters in Bush's dictatorship:

Naturally, I was in the perfect mood to read the entire Gulag Archipelago. I got all three volumes from the drugstore – which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore – and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.


Indeed. The Bushtatorship is not out to repress you. And organic bakeries are not part of a system of safe houses where you can read the latest tract from Alec Baldwin smuggled into America in orifices you don't want to know about.

In France there was not much of a Resistance movement to fight an actual Nazi occupation. In America, there isn't a fascist regime to fight yet the Resistance movement is huge.