Peterson's foreword to 'Gulag Archipelago'--excerpts

Peterson's foreword  to 'Gulag Archipelago'--excerpts

 “I am indeed thrown arbitrarily into history....' [I would say Providentially]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

'It is a matter of pure historical fact that The Gulag Archipelago played a primary role in bringing the Soviet Empire to its knees. Although economically unsustainable, ruled in the most corrupt manner imaginable, and reliant on the slavery and enforced deceit of its citizens, the Soviet system managed to stumble forward through far too many decades before being cut to the quick. The courageous leaders of the labor unions in Poland, the great Pope JohnPaul II and the American President Ronald Reagan, with his blunt insistence that the West faced an evil empire, all played their role in its defeat and collapse. It was Solzhenitsyn, however,...'

'For Marx, man was a member of a class, an economic class, a group—that, and little more—and history nothing but the battleground of classes, of groups.'

'The first question you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. '

'It is much more preferable, instead—and much more likely to preserve us all from metastasizing hells—to state forthrightly: “I am indeed thrown arbitrarily into history....' (read the rest of the paragraph)

'Is this not a or even the essential point of difference between the West, for all its faults, and the brutal, terrible “egalitarian” systems generated by the pathological Communist doctrine?'

' “Heaven is worth any price”—but who pays? Christianity solved that problem by insisting on the sacrifice of the self;...But it was and is the opinion of the materialist utopians that someone else be sacrificed,...'

AND MORE

https://quillette.com/2018/11/01/the-gulag-archipelago-a-new-foreword-by-jordan-b-peterson/