How does your post truth attitude account for the fact that the stories that have come out of the gulags and auschwitz by many many people seem to tell the same stories? Are these just fictional novels popping up in everyone's heads?
Shameful, I'm so angry after reading this, as someone from one of these countries who's family was affected. You should be ashamed for trying to normalise this type of society.
I also think you missed the part where the author acknowledges that it's a work of fiction and informed by real experiences but not meant to relate to reality per se. So while I value your input (of course!) I can't help but wonder if a re-read of previous comments might be in order.
Have you read at least the first few chapters of The Gulag Archipelago?
Russia is an authoritarian oligarchy and their school system presumably reflects this. I don't think this is a mark in favor of what you think it is.
> Have you read at least the first few chapters of The Gulag Archipelago?
As a teenager, yes, do you think I'm missing something crucial, specifically from the early bits?
I don't know what country you are from, but I doubt its any with experiences of death camps. Take your non historical post truth head out of your ass and realise that MILLIONS of people were killed in nazi germany, the gulags, by the chinese communists. MILLIONS others were starved to death because food was confiscated from them.
These systems don't SUCK. They were the lowest points of human history.
I'm so fucking angry with apologists like you. You have no idea what people went through.
> I don't know what country you are from, but I doubt its any with experiences of death camps.
I'm sorry that I wasn't sufficiently excoratory of the gulags. What adjective do you think would make you feel I have an acceptable level of distaste for forced labor camps?
I also don't think the gulags were death camps, weren't they "reeducation" and labor camps? Unlike a death camp, the point is to produce labor (in large part this uncompensated, essentially slave, labor was a major contributor to the USSR's ability to take on a half decade's industrialization in a fifth of the time, or so I'm led to believe).
> I'm so fucking angry with apologists like you. You have no idea what people went through.
I don't think you're in a state to have a rational conversation about politics, because it sounds like you have personal or familial experience with these institutions. I know some of my close friends have very close ties to the Trail of Tears in the USA and I also avoid talking to them about the issue - not because it's taboo, but because I don't think there's a meaningful conversation to be had there. It was an atrocity, and will never be made right. What can you say to that?
Solzhenitsyn wrote a lot and TGA seems like a melting pot of his own anticommunist beliefs, his experiences under Soviet rule, and an interest in his craft as a writer. But it's not 100% a historically accurate book.
Obviously (shouldn't have to say it but who knows these days) gulags were bad and I wouldn't want to be placed into one etc. I do however think we do ourselves a disservice when taking untrue accounts as factual, as is the case in a lot of western treatment of Soviet leaders (esp. Stalin; Lenin seems to get more of a pass).