Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Solzhenitsyn Stratagem


Solzhenitsyn Stratagem
I first encountered Solzhenitsyn in March 1976 when his BBC interview was broadcast on Bill Buckley's Firing Line TV Show. I was enthralled with the courage and dynamism of the man who had been through so much. I soon after bought a copy of his book, The Gulag Archipelago. I still have it today. Dog eared, underlined, with faded highlighting it is still one of my most prized processions. It is not that it was autographed or a special edition of which it is neither, it was one of the great pieces of literature that nurtured the spirit of liberty within me as a young man . It was another "different drummer" that resonated a responsive chord of freedom within my heart as did Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience" when I was still in high school.
I have often thought that if one has not lived through tyranny, one can learn about its many faces by reading the writings of those who have survived its cruelties. As government injustices compound in our world and in our own country, we are blind and foolish if we can not learn from those who already experienced the horror and warn us of the signs of eminent tyranny.
Solzhenitsyn gives us a chilling view into what could lay before us if we don't learn from his past. Thus I give you my favorite Solzhenitsyn quote from the The Gulag Archipelago as a warning and a reminder that uncontrolled government is an evil that must be contained with whatever means is necessary to contain it.
"How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers or whatever was at hand? The organs (USSR enforcers - Ed.) would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt." ---Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
Based upon the Natural Law right to rectification, restoration, and compensation for loss of property (pursuit of happiness), liberty, or life the Solzhenitsyn Stratagem recognizes that the predominant Statist "legal" system is actually a usurper of Natural Law and Natural Rights. Statist "legal" systems aggress to obtain a monopoly on the adjudication of injury and the administration of rectification. Often, there is NO restoration or fair compensation for loss or injury due to Statist protectionism of elitist policies. Thus, Natural Law and Natural Rights are not serviced and there is NO balanced justice only a "just-us" additional injury to the people. Therefore, as the people are the authors of authority it is the Natural Right of the people to judge the “law” and the State actors if fair rectification and restoration are short-changed and out of balance. If the actor(s)/injurer(s) refuse to restore the property, liberty, or life with the transfer of their own property, liberty & life by way of indenture to the aggrieved parties then they forfeit by blood.
“When...it becomes necessary for one people ...to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them...they should declare the causes which impel them...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness....That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness....when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security." --  Declaration of Independence 1776 (edited for clarity-Ed)