Losing Freedom
Neil Holm
In my last post I reflected on the bikie laws. I am now reading Gulag Archipelago. Right from the beginning Solzhenitsyn challenges us. Chapter 1 is called arrest and he writes about the psychology of the arrest.
On p. 15 of my edition (Book Club Associates, 1974), he writes
Yekaterina Olitskaya didn’t consider herself worthy of being imprisoned in 1924. After all, Russia’s best people had served time and she ws still young and had not yet done anything for Russia. But freedom itself was expelling her. And so both of them went to prison–with pride and happiness.
“Resistance! Why didn’t you resist?” Today those who have continued to live on in comfort scold those who have suffered.
Yes, resistance should have begun right there, at the moment of the arrest itself.
But it did not begin.
He goes on a few lines later
You aren’t gagged. You really can and you really ought to cry out–to cry out that you are being arrested! That villians in disguise are trapping people! . . . That millions are being subjected to silent reprisals! If many such outcries had been heard all over the city in the course of a day, would not our fellow citizens perhaps begun to bristle? And would arrests perhaps no longer have been so easy?
I’m not being arrested, you are not being arrested, but freedom is going to prison. We sit silently, submissively, suberviently, supinely, sheepishly, and selfishly allowing it to happen.
Earlier in the chapter (p. 4), he writes
We have been happily borne — or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way — down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick concrete, iron railings. We have never given a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to penetrate them with our vision and understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us.
We let things pass by or we pass right by them. We ignore them. There are so many “walls and fences” that we ignore because they don’t fall on us: refugee injustice, Hicks in Guantanamo, bikie laws and other discriminatory laws, rigid bail laws, injustice to the mentally ill, and more. No one cries out and so no one bristles.