I’ve been staring at the blank white here, slowly filling with that limited means of description we call the written word… and I’ve been trying to figure out why some countries and peoples and times see a horror and disruption, while others continue in their ways from generation to generation.
Of course, my present reading is influencing my thoughts. I’ve finally cracked into the first hundred pages of The Gulag Archipelago, finally understanding my own ignorance against the vast scope of history and reality that I have not and in most ways cannot experience. Let’s put it to the thoughts we have in this simple way: In my life, I’ve known, directly and personally, probably less than a dozen people who have died. In the Vietnam War, about 50,000 American soldiers died. During the Civil War, something like 300,000, if I remember right. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. During the Second World War, about 20 million Russians died as a result of enemy actions. In contrast, it is estimated that in the Stalinist purges, including deportation, imprisonment, and exile which resulted in death, it is estimated that 15-30 million people were killed. It would be somewhat like one out of every ten Americans right now being either shot right away or scooped out of sight, never to be heard of again as they died from malnutrition, exhaustion, cold, or sickness in a world of torture and hard labor. And that action, across several decades in the middle of the last century, was a government action. It is enough for me to be rapidly satisfied with our incumbent system. And it is enough to make me furious at comparisons between either fascist or soviet system and our present presidential administration - more angry for the injustice to the history of the unknown dead that are treated as fear-mongering misrepresentation than about how inaccurate it is to compare an American president or government as a whole to other real political entities that have… done what we can’t even imagine.
That Gulag prisoner was right - good and evil pass through every human heart.
No more, for now. I’ve spent my intellectual anguish with tense facial muscles, and less with tense finger muscles. I want my Goldberry to come over so I can feel that the world isn’t and always has been teetering on the edge of mindless, unending horror.
I hope Sartre wasn’t right.