Re:The Priest of Abu Ghraib
by Viliam1234 on Sunday March 24, 2019 @04:52PM
(#19478700)
After reading Solzhenitsyn, I was surprised to learn that these famous words are actually taken out of context.
The full idea is something like this: There are no "purely good" people, the best we can see is part-good-part-evil, and thus improving the world requires an internal battle, but... people can actually become "purely evil", and the usual path is through ideology, when you simply decide that anything you do serves a goal that justifies the means, and then you feel free to become a cartoonish villain as long as you follow the ideology.
Re:The Priest of Abu Ghraib
by Mediterraneo10 on Friday March 22, 2019 @11:34AM
(#19463550)
Funny that you would quote Solzhenitsyn, who in the last years of his life went hard-core Russian nationalist extremist and indeed called for separating certain people from the rest of us and destroying them (only this time it would be a “Christian state” doing the destroying, and not the godless USSR, so it would all be OK).
This is exactly what I think he is trying to say - and of course he is no exception to this rule. Are you equating his behavior with him being a failure, discrediting his work? This angle is a bit too black and white / dualistic for me.
Our collective unconscious, our collective shadow: https://vimeo.com/242569435