A Deep Dive Into Humanity's Progress Towards Freedom of Thought and True Liberty

 

A History of Freedom of Thought – J.B. Bury (1914)

            Sometimes a book magically appears to feed your mind.  This is one such book.  After absorbing the latest entry off of Sun Ra’s Reading List (The Loom of Language – Frederick Bodmer) I found this comprehensive yet succinct treatise on the history of humanity’s desire for freedom of thought, where it arose, and the many ways that our societies and governments have tolerated or crushed those seeking the right to believe and discuss what they want.  J.B. Bury’s book should be required reading in any High School history classroom.

As with many of the ideas we consider modern, the acceptance of freedom of thought and speech began in the ancient city-states that eventually coalesced into what we today call Greece.  There are several reasons why this area of the world was conducive to the exploration of ideas and the questioning of established thought.  One of the most important is that the people of Greece did not answer to an unimpeachable higher authority.  Greece did not have a “bible” that purported to be the very word of their gods.  Instead, they understood, as a culture and society, that religious thoughts and ideas are both personal and ever-changing.  The rise of Philosophy and Science (Natural Philosophy) in Greece resulted from this openness to ideas.  As the Greeks did not have to force their views and experiences to match what some holy book said, they were free to explore both the internal nature of humanity and the external natural world around them.  This freedom came at a price, for while the powerful in Greece did not punish blasphemy or heresy, they did punish anyone who they felt was “corrupting” the minds of others, especially young people.  Instead of punishing someone for blasphemy, they instead punished him or her for impiety (meaning they were rude to the religious thoughts that the State considered correct).  In this manner they railroaded Socrates.  Socrates crime was that he asked too many questions, not only about religion, but also about how religion is used by the state to enforce its own agendas.  They executed this great man for a purely bullshit crime, that of “failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges" and "introducing new deities.”  Pathetic.

Even through suppression, the ideals of Greece and freedom of thought continued in Rome, which sought to base its better qualities on the previous Greek civilization they so admired.  Rome was a different monster though.  The powerful in Rome were mostly irreligious but they would display outward signs of piety in order to rise in their respective fields.  They saw religion as mainly a means of controlling the subordinate population, who they believed too dumb to be good, moral people without the guidance of religion and priests.  Because of this, they allowed free speech and free thought, as long as it did not impede with the powerful Roman’s control of their compatriots.  The moment anyone sought to teach the so-called ignorant masses about this, they were suppressed.  A great example of this is the rise of the Christian church.

People forget that, for the first hundred or so years, the Jewish sect called Christianity was strictly an apocalyptic cult. They saw the world as ending imminently and that Jesus would be back to whup that sinner ass.  While there were many such end-times cults around the Roman Empire, the reason the Christian cult was perceived as a threat was that they were the first to proselytize widely.  While the Hebrew religion also taught that there was one god, and that other gods were false, they did not seek to spread their religion.  Hebrews were born to other Hebrews.  They did not seek to convert anyone.  This reduced the level of threat felt by the Romans, as they knew they could out-breed anyone.  However, the Christian sect that spawned off Judaism actively sought converts of all types, both Jewish and gentile.  (This is one of the reasons that Jesus was killed by the tag-team of Roman government and rabbinical leadership.  Romans did not like that Jesus preached ending subservience to the state, and the rabbis did not appreciate that Jesus taught non-Jews what was seen as purely Jewish wisdom.  Neither liked that Jesus preached that loyalty to state and family and established religion was a sin if it came between one’s loyalties to god.- RXTT)

So, Jesus was executed.  For the next few hundred years there was very little persecution of Christians, until a Roman emperor sought to make an example of them as he tried to force the old Roman religion down everyone’s throats as the officially sanctioned state religion.  Just a century later, a Roman emperor proclaimed himself a Christian, ending the persecutions, but beginning the rise of state-sanctioned Christianity, and the Holy Roman Catholic Church.  In what seems ironic, but is merely stupid, the very same Christianity became the state’s tool by which to control the populace, and bring to an almost complete halt the advancement of freethought, science, and philosophy.  For hundreds and hundreds of years, much of Europe became a stagnant, ignorant cesspool of political/religious tyranny.  Any idea or thought that seemed to contradict the supposedly correct and inviolable contents of the Bible was suppressed in the most violent manner.  Christian states and the Roman Catholic Church murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of people in the name of their religion.  The Holy Inquisition, which took place throughout Europe, even though we are taught it was a Spanish thing, brought the most gruesome and sadistic terror that the world had yet to see.  Not only were non-believers targeted but anyone who espoused Christian beliefs different from what Rome proclaimed as true was at risk.  Whole populations of people were exterminated because the local leaders had different views on the “truths” forced upon them by the Roman Catholic Church.  It was genocide on a continental level.

Luckily the Greek ideals of freethought and philosophy were kept alive in the Ottoman empire.  The modern world owes so much to the Muslims that preserved the Greek writers and continued to advance the sciences of Astronomy, Mathematics, and Philosophy.  It was their translations that made their way into Europe in the mid 1400’s and sparked up the rebirth of rationalism and enlightenment we now call the Renaissance.  The inevitable breakup of monolithic Catholicism during the Reformation helped a bit, but mainly just ushered a new era where Protestant Christians murdered and brutalized Catholic Christians, just as they had been brutalized initially.  Shit don’t change.  It stays shit.  People were now executed for being Papists.  When a Catholic took over a country, like what happened in England under Bloody Mary, the persecutions and murder of Protestants began again.

            J.B. Bury wrote this small book in the first decade of the 20^th century, ahead of the rise of fascist totalitarian states in Europe.  These states, such as Germany, had initially provided so many of the eminent thinkers that espoused freethought, and the Liberty which is to be gained by all of us for allowing all people the right to think and voice their opinions without threat of blasphemy or sedition.  J.B. Bury warned that, although Enlightenment ideals and rational thought had become the norm in Europe in the late 1800’s, it was a tentative victory, for tyrants and idiots everywhere will always seek to shut down voices and ideas they feel are detrimental to their own personal and political agendas.  I wonder how Mr. Bury, who passed away in 1927, would have reacted to the rise of totalitarian states in Germany, Spain, Italy, Romania, etc.  I believe his heart would have broken to see humanity take such a step backwards, and to see the horrors wrought by these fascist assholes upon the world.

Nothing enrages me as much as willful ignorance.  The worst type of willful ignorance is when freedom of speech is denied in order to protect a state-sanctioned religion, for this affects everyone.  For your “beliefs” to be so fragile that you must suppress opposing views shows how truly baseless your “beliefs” are.  It also shows exactly why those “beliefs” exist, namely, for use in controlling or subjugating any and every person who chooses to believe otherwise.  This is the way of the world.  It is plain to see for anyone who chooses to study history and the rise and fall of states, religious beliefs, and state-sanctioned religions.  Anyone seeking to assert the human right of Freethought is an enemy to tyrannical states. (A minor example- this very book review blog was blocked in China about 3 months into its existence.  China does not like giving their citizens freedom to read what they want - RXTT) 

I feel this book is even more valuable today as state-sanctioned totalitarianism and tyranny are on the rise in supposedly progressive and freedom-loving nations such as the UK and the USA.  Instead of a secular government set up to protect and nourish its citizenry, allowing them to choose whatever religion they feel is right for them, or no religion if they so choose, we are sliding into quasi-religious government inflicting their personal beliefs on the entire population, regardless of personal choice.  The only way to fight this is with education, which is why the ignorant tyrants seek to control state school boards all over the United States.  When beliefs instead of facts direct the path of government, we end up eroding Liberty at its core. This is the main reason freedom of thought, and everything that comes with it, is the most important human right.

(This book can be read/downloaded for free: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10684 )

Varlam Shalamov survived the Soviet Gulags, and shares the horror with us readers

Kolyma Stories: Volume One – Varlam Shalamov - Translated by Donald Rayfield (2018)

            A few years ago I read and reviewed the account of one Ferdinand Ossendowski, titled Beasts, Men, And Gods, which dealt with the author’s experiences escaping into the Russian wilderness to avoid the killing of intellectuals fermented by the Bolshevik Revolution.  That first-hand account led me to look for more books written by survivors of Russian pogroms, prison camps, and Siberian death camps.  I read and reviewed A World Apart, by Gustav Herling, an account of his time spent in a Soviet Gulag and the institutionalized insanity that was the Soviet criminal system.  It was an amazing book.  From that I moved on to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich.  Whereas the previous books are biographical accounts, this work is a work of fiction, but it carries every horror and trauma that Solzhenitsyn suffered when he himself was a prisoner at a Soviet Prison Camp.  In doing some research, I found that the book I just read, the Kolyma Stories, by Varlam Shalamov, had recently been published in an English translation. 

            Varlam Shalamov was a Gulag prisoner for 15 years, enduring 6 years as slave labor in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most inhospitable corners of Siberia.  After he was released he began writing poetry and prose, including many of the stories contained in this volume.  The harassment from the KGB never stopped, and because of this he was unable to publish his work in the Soviet Union.  At home his work was stashed away in the Russian State Archives of Literature and Arts, likely never to be seen again.  These stories were leaked/smuggled out and printed in Germany and France under a pseudonym, with Shalamov never receiving any payment.  In the late 1970’s, Shalamov disappeared into the state-run homes for the elderly, the conditions of which were “as bad as the worst institutions in the Gulag”. (Donald Rayfield – 2018).  These stories were finally published in the late 1980’s in Russia, and shared with the world Shalamov’s unvarnished and unflinching look back at his Gulag experiences.  While these are all “stories,” pretty much everything that happens in them was something witnessed or experienced by Shalamov himself.

            Many of the stories are very short.  Some are two pages long.  What they lack in length they make up for in power.  There is little moralizing in these stories.  The horror is described in plain language, much like Vonnegut did when describing the trauma of the Dresden fire bombings.The plain, insane truth of what humans are forced to do when under totalitarian control is enough to scare the shit out of anyone.  Institutional horror is the worst creation of humanity.  But, when it is backed up by a Byzantine and self-negating government structure?  That is when the human mind shrinks to its smallest, only seeking to survive another day, another hour, another minute.  There is no thought for the life of freedom.  Those that dream of freedom are the first to die.  There is no escape from the forced labor.  Those too sick to work were often treated like lame horses, as wastes of food and resources.  These tales serve as a reminder of how ugly our shared humanity can be, how little we actually care about each other when the powers that be decide to erase our humanity.

            In 1961, Shalamov wrote down a list of what he saw and understood in the prison camps.  It is a list of 45 truths.  Here are just a few of them: 

·         The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization.  A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

·         I realized friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions.  Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the mine’s pit face)

·         I realized Stalin’s “victories” were due to his killing the innocent – an organization a tenth the size would have swept Stalin away in two days.

·         I realized the feeling a man preserves longest is anger.  There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.

·         I realized that one can live on anger.

·         I realized that one can live on indifference.

·         I understood why people do not live on hope – there isn’t any hope.  Nor can they survive by means of free will – what free will is there?  They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.

·         I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards.  Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

·         I understood what power is and what a man with a rifle is.

         The stories within this volume will live on in my head for the rest of my life.  Soon there will be a second volume published.  I cannot wait to read that.  Thank goodness that people are able to share these experiences, no matter how horrible, through the power of the written word.  The written word is humanity’s greatest invention.  What an amazing writer.

(Four short stories from this book can be read here:  KOLYMA STORIES )

The Horrors of the Soviet GULAG prison-camps and the humanity that survived

A World Apart – Gustav Herling (1951)

            Horror can come in so many ways.  It could be the sudden arrival of an incomprehensible terror.  It could also be the slowly dawning realization that hope is a feeling best left dead.  In many ways, the horrors experienced by Mr. Gustav Herling while serving in a Soviet GULAG hard-labor prison run the full gamut.  For several years, the author, a Polish native who had left for the Soviet Union after Poland had been annexed by the Third Reich, experienced horrors both physical and mental, and in sharing his story he helps us understand the true evil that totalitarian government inflicts upon the entire population.

            Reading Mr. Herling’s account of his time as a prisoner brought back memories of my youth reading Animal Farm and 1984, and of wondering in indignant rage why people tolerated the obviously absurd and illogical pronouncements of the ruling parties.  As a young teen, those books filled me with a deep hate for mindless subservience and for blind allegiance to any political system, especially those of a totalitarian state.  Mr. Herling’s life in this forced-labor camp shared so much of the idiocy and stupidity that the animals on Animal Farm or the citizens in 1984 had to accept or else be destroyed by the state.

            Mr. Herling meets prisoners from all walks of life.  One is a former diva of Soviet theater who was sentenced to ten years hard labor.  Her stated crime was being a traitor to the Soviet State.  What was her actual crime?  She danced for too long with the Japanese ambassador at a gala event in Moscow.  That was it.  Several of the inmates were there merely because they were not Russian.  These were Poles who got stuck in Russia avoiding the Nazi takeover of Poland.  There were people whose jobs pre-revolution were in education and intelligentsia, and of course a totalitarian state cannot abide having anyone else be an authority on anything.  The state must the ultimate authority on anything!  How fucking horrible.  With the Soviet Union officially banning all organized religious activities, priests and nuns were also laced in these ruthless work-to-death camps.  All kinds, even those that believed themselves deeply committed to the Communist Party, found out they were worthless pieces of a machine in which they had no control.

            The life in the camp is terrible, with surreal and illogical precision running everything.  The prisoners were fed according to their crimes, and according to how much they worked daily.  Those that worked heavy labor were lucky to receive a few grams of bread and a thin barley “soup” at the end of the day.  Those that were unfit for heavy labor received solely a thin warm liquid with no meat and no vegetables.  If you were sill or injured you spent some time in an unheated “infirmary” where you received the bare minimum food portion, and minimal medical care.  If you were unable to get better enough to work, they would send you to the Mortuary, where the dying waited to die in relative peace.  Mr. Herling spent time in the Mortuary and describes the twisted sense of calm and rest combined with the foreknowledge of your impending death.  There is no comfort anywhere. The paranoia, the pain, the SMELL of countless rotting, sickly, and dying men and women, awash in their own feces, ever-seeping sores, malnutrition, night-blindness from lack of vitamins, and eventually the complete loss of their conscious ability to think all wash over the narrator, as he slides into this horror himself.  Throughout all this, Mr. Herling manages to share any and all wisdom he gained, most of it bleak, and brutally honest about what a man has to deal with when hope is gone yet life continues interminably.  It is a brutal story, and the fact that we know he managed to survive and publish this a few years later does nothing to diminish the trauma of his and all of the other prisoner’s experiences.

            Prison for actual criminals is bad enough.  When the state sets up prisons for those who do no crime other than political opposition?  Evil.  When the state punishes people pre-emptively, trying to weed out supposed traitors before they even have a chance to act?  Evil.  When the state’s own reasoning is so twisted and flawed and fucking pointless that they have to retroactively invent methods to protect their own lies?  Evil.  Under Stalin, Soviet/Russian history was turned into a pathetic joke, with whole secret government entities erasing people’s entire lives from the historical record, solely to appease the whims of the mustachioed madman controlling everything. Whole families disappeared.  Whole generations of educated people were sent to Siberia to die in labor camps.  This same shit happens in all totalitarian states, and is happening right now in Saudi Arabia (religious rule by an autocratic family of assholes), North Korea (totalitarian rule by a fat man-boy with a tiny pecker and total control of his starving population), etc.  It could happen anywhere.  It could happen in the USA.  The only thing that prevents dictators is the willingness of brave people to stand up to them, to the death.  Never expect a despot to “make sense.”

            During WWII the Germans, the Russians, and the Americans all had forced-relocation camps.  The Germans used theirs to attempt a mass genocide of European Jews, as well as anyone deemed undesirable by the Reich.  This included the homosexuals, religious leaders, Romany, mentally and physically handicapped people, and anyone else deemed as “the Other.”  Russian forced labor camps were barely any better.  Their goal was not to solely exterminate enemies.  It was to suck out as much forced labor as possible with the bare minimum of food and support, thereby killing the state’s enemies while also benefiting the state’s GDP.  In the USA, our forced-relocation camps consisted of thousands and thousands of Japanese-Americans, many of them full citizens of the nation, including children and the elderly.  They were treated as if just because they were of Japanese ancestry, they were a treasonous threat to the nation.  While they were not treated as inhumanely as those in German or Russian camps, the very existence of such places in the supposed “Land of the Free” should be enough to strike terror in the hearts of free-thinking humans anywhere.  Who knows how bad it could have gotten for the Japanese-American prisoners if the war had raged on, or if the Japanese had managed a full on attack of the USA mainland?  Totalitarianism is a slippery slope indeed.  We must be ever-vigilant against it, even if it is an unpopular stance to take.

(This book is available for download as a PDF here: https://archive.org/download/worldapart007324mbp/worldapart007324mbp.pdf )

(This book can also be purchased here:  A World Apart  )