Dan's Day With the Zeks
After having a month of early spring here, temperatures in the 50s and sunny every day, winter decided to come back and remind us who is in charge. We are having 30 mph winds that blow snow in between every crack in your clothing and body. It is one of those days where it is so wind you fell like giving up and just walking around naked because your cloths aren't doing anything. In other words a perfect day to sit down with a bowl of fish head stew and read Anne Applebaum's GULAG: A history. I am substituting the fish head stew with a cup of dinner coffee, but still I think I am honoring the zeks. After all I thought about giving the last few drags of my cigarette to a bum I passed.
As for the book, never have I read a history book that is such an engrossing page turner. I mean Ms. Applebaum gives Umberto Eco and Dan Brown a run for their money. I took to book to work the other day and every time someone walked in I cursed under my breath because they where interrupting me. It is a book that you can read over a hundred pages of in a few hours and not even realize you missed your nephew's birthday party, or care. The difference between this and most other page turners, Tolstoy and Dolstoievsky excluded, is how profound and affecting it is. It is a book that will forever change the way you think about history, the Soviet government, any penal system, the 20th century, the western left, human nature, and your own life. I don't think that I am exaggerating. This is a great book, not in the way TAC and St. John's uses that term, but in the way War and Peace, and Hamlet, and the Iliad are great books.
Of course the book is a history and as such is full of interesting and depressing details. What is amazing is how Ms. Applebaum never pins down the moral evil underling the GULAG. I fact it seems that GULAG was the sum of all of modern man's evil tendencies. It had what Hannah Arendt called the bannality of evil, sadism, genocide, criminal neglect, and good old fashion ends justifies the means thinking behind it. The numbers that she gives are bad enough but some of the stories are so affecting that you will need to take a drink after them to calm your nerves. The introduction alone is worthy of a place in the halls of great literature. In it she faces off with the western white washing of the soviet system. Our penchant for old soviet insignia and communist periphanillia (spelling?) is a great example of this. For instance we are never offended by someone walking around with a CCCP shirt on, but could you imagine someone with a swastika shirt? After you read some of this book you are not going to let someone get away with walking around in a hammer and sickle shirt without making them truly ashamed of themselves, as they should be. The moral depravity that such periphanillia represents sickens me. Now that I am completely off topic, and I have got myself all worked up I should stop writing.
As for the book, never have I read a history book that is such an engrossing page turner. I mean Ms. Applebaum gives Umberto Eco and Dan Brown a run for their money. I took to book to work the other day and every time someone walked in I cursed under my breath because they where interrupting me. It is a book that you can read over a hundred pages of in a few hours and not even realize you missed your nephew's birthday party, or care. The difference between this and most other page turners, Tolstoy and Dolstoievsky excluded, is how profound and affecting it is. It is a book that will forever change the way you think about history, the Soviet government, any penal system, the 20th century, the western left, human nature, and your own life. I don't think that I am exaggerating. This is a great book, not in the way TAC and St. John's uses that term, but in the way War and Peace, and Hamlet, and the Iliad are great books.
Of course the book is a history and as such is full of interesting and depressing details. What is amazing is how Ms. Applebaum never pins down the moral evil underling the GULAG. I fact it seems that GULAG was the sum of all of modern man's evil tendencies. It had what Hannah Arendt called the bannality of evil, sadism, genocide, criminal neglect, and good old fashion ends justifies the means thinking behind it. The numbers that she gives are bad enough but some of the stories are so affecting that you will need to take a drink after them to calm your nerves. The introduction alone is worthy of a place in the halls of great literature. In it she faces off with the western white washing of the soviet system. Our penchant for old soviet insignia and communist periphanillia (spelling?) is a great example of this. For instance we are never offended by someone walking around with a CCCP shirt on, but could you imagine someone with a swastika shirt? After you read some of this book you are not going to let someone get away with walking around in a hammer and sickle shirt without making them truly ashamed of themselves, as they should be. The moral depravity that such periphanillia represents sickens me. Now that I am completely off topic, and I have got myself all worked up I should stop writing.