12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

1968, when the Soviets violently suppressed the Czechoslovakians during the
Prague Spring.
Not long after came the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The
Gulag Archipelago, which we have discussed rather extensively in previous
chapters. As noted (and is worth noting again), this book utterly demolished
communism’s moral credibility—first in the West, and then in the Soviet
System itself. It circulated in underground samizdat format. Russians had
twenty-four hours to read their rare copy before handing it to the next waiting
mind. A Russian-language reading was broadcast into the Soviet Union by
Radio Liberty.
Solzhenitsyn argued that the Soviet system could have never survived
without tyranny and slave labour; that the seeds of its worst excesses were
definitively sowed in the time of Lenin (for whom the Western communists
still served as apologists); and that it was propped up by endless lies, both
individual and public. Its sins could not be blamed on a simple cult of
personality, as its supporters continued to claim. Solzhenitsyn documented
the Soviet Union’s extensive mistreatment of political prisoners, its corrupt
legal system, and its mass murders, and showed in painstaking detail how
these were not aberrations but direct expressions of the underlying
communist philosophy. No one could stand up for communism after The
Gulag Archipelago—not even the communists themselves.
This did not mean that the fascination Marxist ideas had for intellectuals—
particularly French intellectuals—disappeared. It merely transformed. Some
refused outright to learn. Sartre denounced Solzhenitsyn as a “dangerous
element.” Derrida, more subtle, substituted the idea of power for the idea of
money, and continued on his merry way. Such linguistic sleight-of-hand gave
all the barely repentant Marxists still inhabiting the intellectual pinnacles of
the West the means to retain their world-view. Society was no longer
repression of the poor by the rich. It was oppression of everyone by the
powerful.
According to Derrida, hierarchical structures emerged only to include (the
beneficiaries of that structure) and to exclude (everyone else, who were
therefore oppressed). Even that claim wasn’t sufficiently radical. Derrida
claimed that divisiveness and oppression were built right into language—
built into the very categories we use to pragmatically simplify and negotiate
the world. There are “women” only because men gain by excluding them.