because the soldiers refused to fire on their own people, when the Communists ordered it
Strictly speaking, soldiers didn't fire because they preferred to take orders from the government, not the communists, and then through proper channels. They had no obligation to participate in a coup.
The Soviet rulers by then had no faith in communism and no reason to spill blood in the cause, and in the way, their predecessors had. They had no old blood on their hands and no reason to spill more.
The people came into the streets because they preferred their government to the communist party. They had got the government because the nomenklatura had fragmented under various reforms and Gorbachev further undermined it. The realization was a long process and had some false starts - eg Prague Spring. Had the people come into the streets ten years sooner, it's very likely they would have been mowed down. (As the citizens of Iraq certainly would have been and as the those of N Korea very likely would be). The citizens of the satellite countries went into the streets because they saw the external guarantor of their tyrannical rulers was collapsing - previous to that there was no way such an event would have been successful, and when it happened the Russian army etc put it down.
When the Iraq Kurds and Shiites thought they saw (an externally caused)weakness in their oppressors in 91 they came into the streets and were crushed - their massed graves are still being uncovered.
Your smug judgement that it's merely the choice of the N Koreans, or previously the Iraqis, that they live or not under their tyranny is flawed. The parallel between them and the Soviets is mistaken: the rulers of Korea have not, and and former rulers of Iraq had not, given up the will to kill as many of their subjects as necessary to maintain their position and they have and had the means to do it.
You think the citizens of these countries are supposed to gamble on the good will of men in armies controlled by evil people dedicated only to themselves. Say "give me liberty or give me death" to Saddam or the Korean thug and they'll say "you got it baby." Your own words show the difficulty:
because the soldiers refused to fire on their own people, when the Communists ordered it. And because the People, in their millions, came out into the streets and said "I will no longer obey. Give me liberty or give me death
So what odds would you have given the Iraqi Shiites if they had revolted in 2002 and gone into the streets, that the army would not have mowed them down? It's high time you read the history of Basra 1991 to 2002 or even Eastern Europe 1950 - 1970. Or paid serious attention to the well-founded utter terror the Kurds had with regard to Saddam's chem warfare capability.
In this same vein what odds do you give the Shiite minority in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia if they revolt against the terrorism practised against them?
Going into the streets against a regime can work once it has picked up certain aspects of modernity - that's what happened with the Soviets. It's not going to happen in Korea and it wasn't going to happen in Iraq. It possibly could happen in Iran and it certainly can work for the Palestinians against the Israelis, except their rulers, Arafat and cronies, don't want to be modern, despise the idea of peace, and are generally, archaic fuckwits who dedicatedly destroy, or drive out, those in their population who have overt modern tendencies.
The heavily armed subjects of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Hussein and Kim are not the citizens of modern states or the colonial subjects of modern states. They are the terrorized subjects of police states in which all (including the military, especially the military) are spied on, in which everyone is not only encouraged but forced to inform on all others, in which children inform on their parents, in which no one can be trusted not to betray, in which careless humour can earn jail, torture or death, in which family members, friends and neighbours mysteriously disappear, in which jail, torture and death are meted for impure thoughts - or just the possibility of impure thoughts, in which jail, torture and death are meted because family, friends and neighbours have impure thoughts....
In this kind of state, the "Principle of Responsibility", as you so airily formulate it, is indeed operative: rebellion is a once in a lifetime thing for you, your family , your friends, your suburb, and indeed, your generation. Your estimation of success better be accurate because the crushing reponse failure brings means folk probably won't be able to go against the tyranny for another ten or twenty years. Whole tribes, villages, cities and even all the best of a generation may be lost, to no good end. "It's a Choice, and they are Responsible for their Choice." Yes, indeed, they are.
This is the modern world, Jacob, these are not modern regimes and do not deserve to exist to terrorize their citizens and neighbours. There is no ethical reason to permit their continued existence and great ethical and practical reason for extrirpating them.
Something to ponder:
How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it ? but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they?ve never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands.
Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.
And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.
Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: ?You are under arrest.?
If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?
But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life?s experience, can gasp out only: ?Me? What for??
And this is a question, which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.
Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another.
We have been happily born ? 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 or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous number of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all?
That?s what arrest is: it?s a blinding flash and a blow, which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.
Credit: Excerpted from Chapter 1 of The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation I-II by Alesandr. I. Solzhenitsyn. English language translation copyright © 1973, 1974 by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.
I should point out to you that Gulag Archipelago excerpts were first published in Russia in 1989 in Novy Mir. The people came into the streets after that. They came into the streets when the old terrorist regime was already a walking corpse trying to make a comeback. Remember also the army was the former prisoner of the old regime and that it finally was free and saw no reason to do its bidding. Your parallel between the Soviet Union of the 1980s and Saddam's Iraq or Kim's Korea is an error. |
