“The function of ideology is to stabilize and perpetuate dominance through masking or illusion,” is a definition Alexander Solzhenitsyn probably would have agreed with, although he might have substituted the word “lying” for “masking or illusion.”

C-SPAN recently aired a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of “The Gulag Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn’s book about the evils of ideology he experienced as a prisoner in one of the work and death camps the Soviets operated to provide slave labor for their industrial projects and to silence their critics.

In Gulag, Solzhenitsyn discussed dehumanizing people as a prelude to exterminating them, like the Nazis dehumanized the Jews before the Holocaust and Israel dehumanized the Palestinians before, during and after “mowing the lawn,” as some called their periodic bombing of Gaza.

Whenever I hear that another illegal Jewish settler shot another unarmed West Bank farmer, I remember the German concentration-camp commander casually shooting Jewish prisoners in “Schindler’s List.” (An early mention of concentration camps, or “fenced cities,” is in Joshua 10:20.) Some religions dehumanize people too, calling them pagans, heretics, infidels and heathens.

Solzhenitsyn also wrote about gulag inmates he met who’d maintained their personal integrity despite all the dehumanizing, demoralizing weapons Big Brother threw at them. Let’s hope there’s more of their kind in the future than the kind that gets so taken in by an ideology — I’m thinking now of religious, “woke,” and MAGA extremists — that they can’t tell or don’t care that they’re headed off the dehumanizing deep end.

Melodie Greene
Calais

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