Absolutely read his books, they shed light on origins of tyranny and human nature. But, as they say history happens first as a tragedy, and again as a farce. There is a key component in our time, that wasn’t there in Solzhenitsyn’s time, the Internet, the free flow of information and ability to form communities online. I don’t believe that Stalinist tyranny is possible in the 21st century for that single reason. Some cartoon version of tyranny may happen though, it will resemble historical tyranny like twitter battles resemble the Civil War.
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I don’t understand the analogy. Show me women being dragged against their will into the PP, right?
I said “Stalinist”, not “Satanist”, the latter is a subject beyond the scope of this forum.
That’s an interesting thought, and the Internet certainly has made it more difficult to keep populations isolated, but there are more than a few factors that get in the way of the “free flow of information.”
Perhaps the most important is control. Whether it’s an internet “Kill Switch,” or a government controlled firewall, there is more than one way to block access to the internet. We know China limits information into the country, but even in the USA, we’ve seen proposals by Congress to create a means to shut down access (Joe Lieberman, et al, 2010).
Another limit to that free flow is censorship. We’re seeing corporate censorship right now with Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and others deciding who and what information gets to be on their platforms, interfaces to the internet.
Then there’s disinformation, or “fake news” which can swamp the flow of factual information. Making it nearly impossible to find the truth
It’s nice to think we enjoy the free flow of information, and we definitely have more tools at our disposal to facilitate that, but don’t be fooled into thinking it is irrevocably so. Like the quote from The Usual Suspects, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” There are forces that can halt that access to information more easily than most people are even aware.
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So far, I’ve only seen evidence to the contrary. Case in point: murder of a journalist inside Saudi embassy. Case in point: Kremlin vs. Telegram. Case in point: COVID videos out of Wuhan. They tried really hard, at the end the authorities wore egg on their faces. I think that short of truly draconian measures, turning off power to large areas of the country, having global govt take over the planet, you can’t do squat to the internet! All the congressional proposals, they are written by people with technical knowledge and intellect of AOC.
What’s left is psy ops like CNN and FB. This works exactly as Lincoln said “you can fool all people some of the time, you can fool some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all people all of the time”. That’s a question of human nature though, not technology.
It’s not what you see, it’s what you don’t see.
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