Finally, I am reading the Gulag Archipelago.

Institutional misandry in 2020 and Marxism-Leninism in 1954 are in fact the same issue. Corrupt ideologues who undermine the decent, gentle political movement that was Victorian socialism and transform it into a vile, heartless doctrine whose only function is to provide an outlet for sadism and psychotic inefficient micro-management.

Right now, we decent liberals (who would probably be called socialists in 1890) are, as an aggregate, normally contaminated with mindless, reflexive contempt for half of humanity. Those who dare to speak against institutionalized misandry know full well that they are henceforth "enemies of the people". Those who profess this doctrine of dehumanization are lauded for supposed "compassion" and "forthrightness", despite being just another gang of hate-addled bigots who use a brutally simple good-people-versus-evil-enemies conflict theory to relieve themselves of any responsibility to maintain a sense of moral culpability for their deeds.

It was a horrible perversion of left-wing impulses when the Bolsheviks began their grand massacres of innocents in early 1918 (despite later pretending that the USSR had been blameless until the purges of 1937, a lie Solzhenitsyn demolishes in the book, and a lie that you can see repeated today in countless subreddits, which continue to repeat the fantasy that the waves of murders and enslavements did not happen until halfway through Stalin's career). The current metastasis of the theology of hatred has not yet become bloody. Most of the dead have been driven to suicide. But as we know, this cancer keeps returning, and may be like the flu: something humanity needs to learn to live with forever.

So far, the writers who expose the lies have been relatively dry academics like Steven Pinker and Helen Pluckrose, and their work is extremely important and necessary. But we need a writer with true poetry in his or her heart to take up Aleksandr's torch, and dissolve the shadows of lies.

In 1973, when the book exploded into the Western consciousness, the corrupt fanatics who carried water for the despots of Moscow and Peking smeared this exposé as right-wing. And today, without doubt, there will be those who deride my evocation of Solzhenitsyn as the workings of a fifth-column crypto-capitalist. Let us hope that those who do so are met with the torrent of contempt they deserve.