I'm surprised you see this. I see it differently. Excuse my language, but I see a horse-shit sandwich. Have you read any Noam Chomsky? This is a great example of 'Manufacturing Consent' - through these feel good propaganda manufactured stories. Yes, I do think he believed his struggle was holy and justified. Yes, I am aware that this sounds harsh.
Wow I did not read the whole article. But's it's actually pretty moving... Ok fuck it. I'm going to do a pluralist 'both/and'. It's both a horse-shit sandwich and a story of conscience.
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
After reading Solzhenitsyn, I was surprised to learn that these famous words are actually taken out of context.
The full idea is something like this: There are no "purely good" people, the best we can see is part-good-part-evil, and thus improving the world requires an internal battle, but... people can actually become "purely evil", and the usual path is through ideology, when you simply decide that anything you do serves a goal that justifies the means, and then you feel free to become a cartoonish villain as long as you follow the ideology.
Funny that you would quote Solzhenitsyn, who in the last years of his life went hard-core Russian nationalist extremist and indeed called for separating certain people from the rest of us and destroying them (only this time it would be a “Christian state” doing the destroying, and not the godless USSR, so it would all be OK).
This is exactly what I think he is trying to say - and of course he is no exception to this rule. Are you equating his behavior with him being a failure, discrediting his work? This angle is a bit too black and white / dualistic for me.
