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The book I am talking about is "The Gulag Archipelago"
See the screenshot (marked text) first. If the book has the power to change your memories so you can't distinguish between what you experienced and what you read, isn't that basically manipulation?
I know that something similar is possible for example with altered photos of you childhood that can trick your memories of the time, for example some object that you were told to have but you didn't.
ackchually, it's not propaganda if it talks about the evuls of gommunism...because they could have happened (and if they didn't it doesn't matter)
Their TotallyTarian Propaganda: Women, men; all are welcome to liberate themselves from the yoke of imperialism, the yoke of the bourgeioisie, and we must stay united in this effort: noone can embark alone on this journey.
Other Equally Bad Evil TotallyTarian Propaganda: All Jews, all Browns, all Blacks, all lesser! Let every woman in your neighborhood become producers of the next pure Aryan nation!
Our Pure Fact Based Narratives, Funded By Our Free State (the CIA): The last two are equally bad and maybe the first one’s worse, because imagine that guy was like, Hitler, like Stalin was,
It confirms that, for the anti-communists, the historical facts are not what is actually important, it's only the "feeling" they get when thinking about socialism that matters. That they not only try to convince others but even themselves to believe that things happened which never actually did, merely because it validates their emotions.
This is indicative of cult-like social conditioning, in which you are told to reject even your own memories when they don't confirm to the cult-endorsed narrative, and replace them with the fiction the cult tells you is what you actually experienced. Unfortunately this is a common phenomenon in post-socialist countries nowadays
You will encounter people who lived through those times and who were perfectly happy at the time, but who have been so socially and psychologically pressured year after year to accept the narrative that communism was terrible and they were actually oppressed, that eventually they internalize this to a point that it changes their memories.
It's a form of mass psychological abuse.
The author's also an open and proud fascist.
This book is mandatory reading in schools in Russia since about 2010 if i recall correctly, just why :(
It is, and some other his books
The democracy of the bourgeoisie at play.
I think his ex wife also said that it's just embellished stories if not completely made up. Let me see if i can find it
Edit:
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.html
She said its "folklore" and its significance "overstated"
It's basically the Uyghur Genocide rhetoric of 20th century.
That would be the Holodomor myth.
my favorite part about the gulag archipelago is how Ernest Mandel's refutation of the gulag Archipelago mentions that several of the examples Solzhenitsyn gives of the terrible authoritarianism are actually examples of the Soviet State stepping in to PREVENT the abuse of authority
Two trials cited by Solzhenitsyn himself perfectly illustrate the basic difference between the Bolshevik revolution and the Stalinist counterrevolution.
V.V. Oldenberger, an old apolitical engineer who was chief technician of the Moscow waterworks, was persecuted by a communist cell that wanted to remove him because he was so apolitical. He was driven to suicide. Solzhenitsyn waxes indignant about the corrupt, ignoble, communist plotters in this factory. It’s not until you read to the end of Solzhenitsyn’s account that you find out that the trial he is talking about was organized by the Soviet state to defend Oldenberger, a trial organized against the communist cell that had persecuted him, a trial that ended by sentencing his persecutors, a trial that proved that the workers in the plant had been able to freely elect Oldenberger to the Soviet against the unanimous pressure of the communist cell.
The second trial involved a Tolstoyan, a determined opponent of bearing arms who was condemned to death at the height of the civil war for conscientious objection. That trial ended in an even more dramatic fashion. The soldiers assigned to guard the condemned man justifiably considered the verdict monstrous. So they organized a general assembly in the barracks and sent a motion to the city soviet demanding that the verdict be overturned. And they won!
So we hove workers who can elect an apolitical technician to the soviet despite the opposition of a communist cell composed of members who were at best ultrasectarians and at worst totally corrupted careerists. We have soldiers who revolt against the verdict of a court, organize a general assembly, interfere in the “great affairs of state,” and save the life of their prisoner. Solzhenitsyn – without realizing it – is describing the real difference between an era of revolution and an era of counterrevolution. Let him cite similar examples from the Stalin era to prove that basically it was all the same under Lenin and under Stalin!
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1974/05/solzhenitsyn-gulag.html
Using Solzhenitsyn's words against him is good and all, but the rest of this is Trot-trot-trot. It's only the most extreme Khrushchovite claims strung together in an attempt to, what? Defend the practices of the first few years to undermine the following 3 decades?
Yeah that has very much so a "this added a narrative I like to my disconnected anecdotal experiences" which makes it easier to recall, warping the original memories. Christianity does this too, adding an easy narrative to the seemingly random suffering people go through.