I haven't read this book...

.


I haven't read this book. The reason I'm posting it is I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War. And perhaps the Cold War thing I heard most often was that the great difference between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was that in the U.S. you were allowed to protest as much as you wanted but in the Soviet Union protesting got you sent to the gulag (as I believe is described in this book.) I know the Cold War ended a while ago, and differences between the two systems (now both "capitalist") are no longer held up as having any meaning. But with the current hype around "Alligator Alcatraz" - which I'm sure is just one of hundreds of such "prisons" the U.S. is about to build - I can't help but feel this is the final endpoint of the Cold War, the real race to the bottom, where instead of people in the former Soviet Union now having the right to protest, people in the U.S. who effectively protest will be sent to gulags in great number. The existence of the Soviet Union in some aspects kept domestic U.S. policy on its best behaviour. Now, with any threat of communism in the past, the U.S. will finally do at home what their foreign policy has imposted on so many other countries over the last hundred years.

*

"Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart - and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956