This series of six newspaper columns by Olavo de Carvalho was collected in this order in the book “The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot”.
“What is it, to be a socialist?” explores the negative impacts of socialism, arguing it leads to a concentration of power, economic disparities, and ultimate collapse into savage capitalism. It criticizes the blind endorsement of socialism despite its evident failures.
“Enlightening quotes” compiles quotes illustrating the violent nature of communist ideology from figures like Lenin and Marx, along with condemnations of communism for its destructive and freedom-depriving nature.
“Logic of scoundrel behavior” warns against overlooking the ongoing oppression under communism, particularly in Brazil. It stresses that the severity of communist state violence surpasses historical instances and emphasizes the need to resist its propaganda.
“Still on scoundrel behavior” highlights the atrocities committed under socialism, including genocides exceeding the casualties of world wars and natural disasters. It criticizes socialist propaganda for its deflection of attention from these realities.
“Clash of ideologies?” contends that capitalism is not an ideology but a proven economic system, while socialism relies on deceptive rhetoric. It argues the clash should be seen as an economic analysis, not an ideological battle.
“The victory of fascism” criticizes the acceptance of socialist ideology and its misrepresentation of capitalism. It points out the dangers of merging capitalism and socialism, which leads to increased state control, diminished personal liberties, and a path towards fascism.
1. Facts vs interpretations
What is it, to be a socialist?
Jornal da Tarde, October 28, 1999
Socialism has killed over 100 million dissidents and spread terror, misery, and hunger over a quarter of the Earth’s surface. All the earthquakes, hurricanes, epidemics, tyrannies, and wars of the last four centuries combined have not produced such devastating results. This is a pure and simple fact, accessible to anyone capable of consulting The Black Book of Communism and making a basic calculation.
However, since our beliefs are determined not by facts but by interpretations, the devout socialist always has the recourse of explaining this formidable succession of calamities as the effect of fortuitous accidents unrelated to the essence of socialist doctrine. Thus, the beauty and dignity of a higher ideal are claimed to remain immune to all the misery caused by its realizations.
To what extent is this claim intellectually respectable and morally admissible?
The socialist ideal is essentially the attenuation or elimination of economic power differences through political power. But no one can effectively arbitrate differences between the most powerful and the least powerful without being more powerful than both: socialism must concentrate a power capable not only of imposing itself on the poor but also of successfully confronting the entirety of the wealthy. Therefore, it cannot level economic differences without creating even greater disparities of political power. And since the structure of political power does not sustain itself in the air but costs money, it is not clear how political power could subjugate economic power without absorbing it, taking the wealth of the rich and managing it directly. Hence, in socialism, exactly the opposite of what happens in capitalism occurs: there is no difference between political power and control over wealth. The higher the position of an individual and a group in the political hierarchy, the more wealth they will have at their complete and direct disposal: there will be no class wealthier than the rulers. Consequently, economic disparities will not only have necessarily increased but, consolidated by the unity of political and economic power, will have become impossible to eliminate except through the complete destruction of the socialist system. And even this destruction will no longer solve the problem because, with no wealthy class outside the nomenklatura, the latter will retain economic power, simply changing their legal legitimacy and self-designating themselves as the bourgeoisie. The socialist experience, when not frozen in a bureaucratic oligarchy, dissolves into savage capitalism. Tertium non datur. Socialism consists of the promise to obtain a result through means that necessarily produce the opposite result.
Understanding this is enough to realize immediately that the appearance of a bureaucratic elite endowed with tyrannical political power and opulent wealth is not an accidental occurrence but the logical and inevitable consequence of the very principle of socialist idea.
This reasoning is within the reach of any moderately endowed person, but given a certain propensity of weaker minds to believe in desires rather than reason, one could still forgive those creatures for succumbing to the temptation of “taking a chance” in the lottery of reality, betting on chance against logical necessity.
Although immensely foolish, this is human. What is not human at all is to reject at once both the lesson of logic that shows us the self-contradiction of a project and the lesson of an experience that, to rediscover what logic had already taught, caused the death of 100 million people.
No intellectually sane human being has the right to cling so stubbornly to an idea to the point of demanding that humanity sacrifice not only rational intelligence but also the very instinct of survival on the altar of its promises.
Such incapacity or refusal to learn betrays, in the mind of the socialist, a voluntary and perverse lowering of intelligence to an infra-human level, a conscious renunciation of that basic discernment capacity that is the very condition of man’s humanity. To be a socialist is to refuse, out of pride, to assume the responsibilities of human consciousness.
Enlightening quotes
Heitordepaola.com, February 12, 2009
Like all major newspapers, magazines, TV channels, and universities in this country, they make it a matter of honor not only to treat communists as good people but also insist on hiring dozens of them, paying them high salaries to adorn communism and its history with the colors of the highest moral and theological virtues. I found it opportune to reproduce here some typical declarations of communist thought so that readers who are still unaware of it will finally know what it’s all about:
“We must hate. Hatred is the basis of communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not communists.” (V. I. Lenin)
“We are in favor of organized terror - this must be admitted frankly.” (V. I. Lenin)
“Communism is not love. It is the hammer with which we crush our enemies.” (Mao Tse-tung)
“The unyielding hatred of the enemy, which impels the revolutionary beyond the natural limitations of the human being and turns him into an effective, selective, and cold killing machine: our soldiers must be like this.” (Che Guevara)
“So far, the peasants have not been mobilized, but through terrorism and intimidation, we will conquer them.” (Che Guevara)
“To the sentimental slogans of fraternity, we oppose the hatred of the Russians, which is the main revolutionary passion of the Germans. We will only secure the revolution through the firmest campaign of terror against the Slavic peoples.” (Friedrich Engels)
“The main mission of the other peoples (except the Germans, the Hungarians, and the Poles) is to perish in the revolutionary Holocaust… This ethnic trash will continue to be, until its complete extermination or denationalization, the most fanatical carrier of counter-revolution.” (Karl Marx) 1
Given the deeds of these creatures, not all observers drew sympathetic conclusions as those that are daily presented to our public as gospel truths by the journalistic and educational establishment. Here are some examples:
“If all the moral and mental rubbish in all brains could be swept and gathered and with it, a gigantic figure could be formed, it would be the figure of communism, the supreme enemy of freedom and humanity.” (Fernando Pessoa)
“A communist is like a crocodile: when he opens his mouth, you don’t know if he’s smiling or getting ready to devour you.” (Winston S. Churchill)
“No one can be a communist and preserve an iota of personal integrity.” (Milovan Djilas)
“Communism is barbarism.” (James Russell Lowell)
“They (the communists) didn’t need to refute opposing arguments; they preferred methods that ended in death rather than persuasion, methods that spread terror rather than conviction.” (Hannah Arendt)
“The gnostic politics (Nazism and communism) is self-destructive insofar as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous war: the chain of wars can only end in two ways: either it will result in horrible physical destruction and concomitant revolutionary changes in social order, or, with the natural succession of generations, it will lead to the abandonment of the gnostic dream before the worst happens.” (Eric Voegelin)
“In my study of communist societies, I have come to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade, nor to convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and, therefore, less truth was better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity… A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.” (Theodore Dalrymple)
“We have reached the extreme limit of horrors with communism, socialism, and nihilism, terrible deformities of civil society and almost its ruin.” (Pope Leo XIII)
“Communism deprives man of his freedom, robs him of his personality and dignity, and removes all moral restraints that prevent outbursts of blind instinct.” (Pope Pius XI)
Logic of scoundrel behavior
O Globo, March 31, 2001
When someone tells me that communism is a thing of the past and that warning against it is flogging a dead horse, I sometimes have a certain suspicion of talking to a scoundrel. Not that the person necessarily is one. But, strictly speaking, only a scoundrel would dismiss 1.2 billion people who still live under communist tyranny as a negligible quantity, an infinitesimal in the infinite. Only a scoundrel would disregard the forty monthly shootings of Chinese women (and their doctors) who refuse to perform abortions as irrelevant. Only a scoundrel would be persuaded that, just because a handful of American firms are making money in Beijing (as if they hadn’t made a good deal in Lenin’s Russia), communism has become as harmless as a stuffed rhinoceros. Only a scoundrel would pretend to ignore that, after the dissolution of the USSR, no KGB tormentor was fired, let alone punished, and that the largest machinery of espionage, political police, state terrorism, and institutionalized torture ever to exist in the universe, with a budget greater than that of all Western secret services combined, continues to function as if nothing had happened.
Only a scoundrel would induce the people to ignore these things so that when the revolution being prepared in Brazil with drug money takes power 2, no one will realize that they are reliving the tragedy of Russia, China, and Cuba.
There’s no need to go abroad. Just look at Brazil itself to see the monstrous force that the communist movement, whatever name it may go by—because throughout history, it has changed its name many times, according to its momentary interests—has been acquiring with each passing day. Just to give an example, the dissemination of communist ideas in schools, of which many Brazilians are still unaware, and which others deliberately ignore (including the Minister of Education),3 has already gone beyond the stage of simple “indoctrination” to that of direct and open rape of consciences. In thousands of official schools, teachers paid with public money use their influence and power not only to instill the worship of genocidal leaders and the myth of socialist democracy but also to intimidate and punish any child who refuses to repeat their magisterial discourse. The slightest dissent, sometimes just a simple doubt, subjects the student to embarrassment in front of their peers, instilling in them fear for the future of their school and professional careers. My own children have gone through this, and I receive dozens of emails every month with similar situations. To call this “propaganda,” “indoctrination,” is terminological mildness for those who do not want to see the seriousness of what is happening. And what is happening is that psychological terrorism has already imposed its dominion over childish hearts, preparing them to accept, as normal, inevitable, and even good, a government of murderers and psychopaths, like the one that still prevails in Cuba and already prevails in regions under the control of the FARC.
In the face of this, Brazilians react… by covering up facts with words, dulling the consciousness of danger with soporific clichés, displaying that air of feigned calm that betrays fear, the dread of facing reality. Shall I say that this is naivety? No. Naivety does not possess the verbal astuteness required for such self-deception.
A reader, all puffed up with false knowledge, writes to me that communism was no more violent than religious wars, the Holy Office, witch burnings, or the St. Bartholomew’s Night. With that know-it-all air of a high school teacher, he cites Montaigne’s horror at the cruelty of the civil wars of his time and concludes that “violence has always been present in different phases of history.” Nothing like a ready-made phrase for a Brazilian to shine while talking about what they don’t know. Nothing like a beautiful cliché to equalize, in a uniform verbal mass, the most prodigious differences. The Spanish Inquisition, the cruelest tribunal ever known before the 20th century, killed 20,000 people over four centuries. The Leninist government accomplished the same figure in a few weeks. Moreover, almost all examples of mass cruelty observed throughout history occurred during wars, whether between states, tribes, or religious groups. Soviet repression was the first case of permanent state violence against unarmed citizens during peacetime. The example spread. When the Germans began sending Jews to Auschwitz, 20 million Russians had already been killed by the Soviet government. Even at the end of its macabre work, in 1945, Nazism, with its entire genocidal machinery set up for this purpose, had not managed to match the productivity of the Soviet death industry.
From any angle one examines it, socialism is by no means a decent idea that can be calmly discussed as a viable alternative for a country, or that can be instilled in children in schools without intellectual pedophilia. It is a heinous, macabre doctrine, no better than the Nazi ideology, and which, to cap it all, still dares to speak in the name of morality when condemning the far smaller excesses and violence committed by its adversaries in their attempt to stop its homicidal march devouring peoples and continents.
As soon as we accept the infernal logic of its propaganda, we obscure our intelligence, lose the sense of truth, and lose the sense of proportion. We even lose the sense of before and after. They instill in us, for example, the notion that the Brazilian guerrilla was the only way left for them after the repressive government, which on March 31, 1964, closed all doors to legal opposition. But how could it have been like that, if the guerrilla began in 1961, always directed and financed from Cuba? They tell us that the “Operation Condor” was an international conspiracy among dictatorships to stifle peaceful and democratic movements. But how could it have been like that, if the operation only appeared late, in response to the armed tricontinental movement, directed from Havana and financed with Soviet money? By following the lessons of socialist masters, we unlearn even the instinctive sense of the temporal order of events.
To believe in these people, even for a short time, is to dismantle one’s own brain, to destroy in our souls the capacity for the most elementary and self-evident distinctions. That’s why I no longer have patience with people who consent to their children being subjected to this kind of stupefaction. For a while, I thought they were just idiots, cowards, or lazy. But idiocy, cowardice, and laziness have limits: beyond a certain point, they become the most exquisite and subtle form of villainy.
2. Socialism vs capitalism
Still on scoundrel behavior
O Globo, April 7, 2001
When we talk about the 100 million victims of socialism, we refer to people intentionally murdered by the orders of rulers during peacetime. They are “class enemies” liquidated through shootings, hangings, beatings, various tortures, and forced starvation. They are victims of deliberate genocide. The number does not include soldiers killed in combat, civilian casualties of war or common crimes, let alone infant mortality rates or calculations of decreased life expectancy due to the economic inefficiency of socialism. If it did, the total, in the most modest of hypotheses, would double. But even without that, 100 million is enough to make socialism, from a purely quantitative standpoint, a scourge deadlier than two world wars combined, plus all the epidemics and earthquakes of this and several centuries.
When the socialist propagandist, with no argument against the brutal reality of these data, tries to mitigate the bad impression by diverting the public’s attention to the “horrors of capitalism,” he finds nothing comparable. No Gulag,4 no mass shootings, no purges, no Red Guards removing professors from their chairs to beat them to death. What recourse remains for him then, except to resort to double standards to adjust the calculation result to his premeditated propaganda effect? He will then blame Western democracies for wars initiated by totalitarian governments, morally equate premeditated genocide with the unforeseen effects of economic policies, make the Washington government the intentional author of the deaths of the hungry in countries subjected to statist and socialist regimes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where capitalism barely entered, and finally, he will attribute to capitalist governments all the deeds of robbers, rapists, serial killers, and criminals in general.
After all these cuts, grafts, and sutures, no reality can withstand it. The image of capitalism remains as bad as socialism, if not slightly worse.
But any word milder than scoundrelism, which I might employ to qualify this kind of discourse, would make me unworthy of the condition of a writer; unworthy, strictly speaking, of the mere functional identity of a journalist. For, if there is one elementary obligation of a journalist, it is to give to the phenomena he describes the just proportion they have in reality. And there is not a single treatise on the art of argumentation, from Aristotle and Quintilian to Schopenhauer and Chaim Perelman, that does not exclude from rhetorical art, the mother of journalism, the use of such malicious expedients, relegating them to the trash of eristics, the art of deceiving the public, the prostituted rhetoric of swindlers and scoundrels.
Calling them scoundrels is not, by any means, the expression of a personal feeling. It is the fair and accurate application of a judgment consecrated among the masters of the art of argumentation. It is the objective recognition of the intrusion of fraudulent language that, if it cannot be eliminated from the harangues of rioters and demagogues, must be banned, without complacency, from any debate that aims to be intellectually respectable.
This is a preliminary requirement, independent, even, of the merits of the issues under dispute. But, in the present case, if there is anything comparable to the vileness of the argumentative procedures used to equate the unequal, it is the moral ugliness of the cause to which those who lend themselves to it sacrifice their intellectual integrity.
The dimensions of the evil they seek to conceal are so colossal, they surpass so much the measures of human conceivability, that the Church, in papal sentences pronounced ex cathedra, defined the phenomenon as intrinsically diabolical, condemning to automatic excommunication any Catholic who, by words, actions, or omissions, collaborated with the monstrous undertaking.
However, there is no shortage of those who are scandalized by this papal sentence more than by the immensity of the crime it condemns. “How can they demonize people like that?” they will say. Ugly, in the mind of those who speak like this, is not to kill 100 million human beings. Ugly is to alleviate, out of pity, the guilt of criminals by attributing the authorship of their deeds to the devil. Ugly is not Pol-Pot, not Stalin, not Mao, not Fidel. Ugly is the Pope who, seeing them led by the devil like puppets, throws their blame on the tempter and implores God to forgive them because they do not know what they are doing.
This is how, in the imagination of those who consider themselves well-intentioned, crime becomes merit, and forgiveness becomes a crime.
I admit that the vision of evil, in the proportions it emerges in the socialist phenomenon, is itself astounding—enough to make the vacillating soul, before it, difficultly resist the temptation to deny reality, just as the eyes of the poet, before the “sangre derramada” of his friend Ignacio Sanchez, cried out desperately: “No! Yo no quiero verla!”
I admit that human weakness, to instinctively defend itself from the hypnotic allure of evil, prefers to deny it.
But willful ignorance is already the victory of evil.
Clash of ideologies?
Época, March 24, 2001
If you want to assess the extent of the hypnotic domination that Marxist clichés still exert on the neural system of people who consider themselves immune to any contamination of Marxism, just see that when they argue in favor of capitalism, they admit to sticking the label of defenders of a certain “ideology” on their foreheads.
An ideology is, by definition, a simulacrum of scientific theory. It is, in Marx’s own correct expression, a “cloak of ideas” that conceals interests or desires. By accepting to define themselves in the language of their adversary, the modern liberal assumes the role imposed on him: he confesses to be the spokesperson for the interests of the rich. The fact that the confession is false does not make it any less effective. Transferred from the objective confrontation of doctrines to the realm of competing interests, the struggle seems to pit the exploited against the exploiter. No matter how elegant the argumentation of the latter may be, he will always be condemned to personify the villain in history.
To describe the confrontation between capitalism and socialism as a “struggle of ideologies” is to accept a rigged game, in which one side dictates the rules, deals the cards, and predetermines the outcome.
Capitalism is not an ideology. It is an economic system that has existed and proven its virtues for two centuries before anyone thought to formulate it in words. And the first to outline this formulation, Adam Smith, is by no means an ideologue, an inventor of rhetorical symbols to build castles in the air in favor of certain class ambitions. He is a scientist in the full sense of the term, sketching hypotheses to describe and explain an existing reality. Socialism, on the other hand, even millennia before it existed as a concrete political strategy, already had its ideologues, its beautifiers of deceit, its stylists of resentful and ambitious group interests. That’s why the confrontation between socialists and liberals does not oppose ideology to ideology: the defense of socialism is always the self-attribution of the ideological merits of a possible future; that of capitalism is always the scientific analysis of existing economic processes and the objective means of increasing their efficiency. Despite all that can be argued against it from other aspects (and I myself have not failed to argue), capitalism not only generated incalculable wealth but also set in motion the practical means of distributing it to the people and created institutions such as parliamentary democracy, freedom of the press, and human rights, while socialism has done nothing so far but promise a better future while reintroducing the slave labor banned by capitalism, suppressing all known civil and political rights, reducing over a billion people to distressing misery, and resorting to means of almost unimaginable cruelty to sustain power, such as impalement and flaying of prisoners—a method widely used during Lenin’s government.
Capitalism is not an ideology—it is a reality continually perfected by science. Ideology is socialism—the cloak of ideas that conceals the sociopathic ambitions5 of semi-intellectuals eager for power.
Another proof that this is the case may be given by possible socialist reactions to this article, which, like all challenges to my previous articles, will not succeed—and indeed will not even attempt—to challenge the truth of any of their statements but will be limited to expressing dissatisfaction and revolt against their publication.
The victory of fascism
O Globo, July 26, 2003
Tom Jobim used to say that in Brazil, success is a personal insult. Unintentionally, he explained the wide acceptance of socialist ideology among us. For the normal citizen of a democracy, the success of anyone is the result of talent and luck. For frustrated and envious individuals intoxicated with socialist mythology, it is the effect of a malicious plan by the ruling classes, the diabolical product of a social exclusion machine invented and controlled by cunning bourgeois social engineers.
In the socialist imagination, capitalists do nothing but meet in secret to premeditate the ruin of the poor. For this, they create an entire ideological apparatus for “reproducing” existing social patterns, hiring intellectuals and technicians to study means of preventing anyone else from getting ahead in life.
Capitalism, in this sense, is an administered society, a rational mechanism calculated in its minutest details to block social progress.
However, after describing and accusing this machine with corrosive analysis, the socialist, in the next instant, condemns the “anarchy of the market” and advocates planned economy as the solution to all problems…
I have wondered how it is possible for someone to change their discourse so radically, without even realizing they contradict themselves. Is it cynicism or unconsciousness? Machiavellianism or stupidity?
Observe the rigidity of discipline in the PT or the MST, and you will get the answer. The socialist or communist militant sacrifices everything to party hierarchy, even morality, even the most intimate demands of personal conscience. It is natural that they project this conduct onto the enemy, conceiving it in their own image and likeness. But every projective fantasy is necessarily paradoxical; it is both direct and inverse at the same time. On one hand, capitalism will appear, in the eyes of the socialist, as a mechanical hierarchy analogous to that of his party, only with an opposite ideological sign. On the other hand, the party atmosphere, with its unanimity that gives each militant a vivid feeling of participation, mutual protection, and “supportive community,” is experienced as the embryo of an ideal society, in contrast to which the reality of capitalism will appear as pure confusion and the law of the jungle.
Simply look at capitalism directly, without the projective bias of socialist discipline, to see that it is neither one nor the other, but merely the integration of various partial premeditations—the calculations of various private interests—in a loosely bound general environment by the rules of democratic coexistence.
But the idea of “rule” itself has a different meaning for socialists and capitalists. In a capitalist democracy, the rules of the game are fixed, while the general purposes of social effort change according to the inclinations of public opinion at each moment. In a socialist society—or in parties fighting for it—it is the opposite: the purposes are constant, crystallized in the utopian symbol of the “ideal,” and the rules of the game change according to the strategic and tactical conveniences envisioned by the leaders at each stage of the struggle.
That is why it is so difficult for a socialist to understand capitalism, just as it is for a man raised in the rules of capitalism to understand the socialist mentality. The latter will try to explain socialist behavior through the rationality of economic interests, believing that certain advantages obtained along the way will appease the hatred and ambitions of the enraged militants. The second will perceive capitalism through a grid of macabre projective fantasies and will end up accusing the bourgeoisie of being both a rationalized masonry to plunder the world and a chaotic agglomeration of selfishness unable to organize itself.
It is not surprising that any attempt to merge capitalism and socialism results in an even deeper contradiction: when socialists give up full nationalization of the means of production and capitalists accept the principle of state control, the result, today, is called the “third way.” But it is, without adding or subtracting, fascist economics. On one side, increasingly wealthy bourgeoisie but—as Hitler said—“kneeling before the State.” On the other, a people increasingly guaranteed in terms of food, health, housing, etc., but rigidly enslaved to state control of private life.
It is also not surprising that socialists, not understanding capitalism, try to describe it with the hideous face of fascism, which, by affinity, they understand perfectly well. And it is even less surprising that, abhorring capitalism as a kind of fascism, they always end up fighting for economic and political reforms that will turn it into exactly that. As integral socialist economy is unviable, as it is never achieved, and as on the other hand, bourgeois rarely have the fortitude to resist the socialist onslaught against liberal-capitalism, the result is always the same: the victory of fascism.
The only difference between the fascist economies of the 1930s and today is that the former were on a national scale and, to assert themselves, very logically resorted to a discourse steeped in patriotic and racist mythology. Today’s economy is global and must therefore use symbolic pretexts that, conversely, serve to dissolve national identities and the moral and religious values associated with them. Hence pacifism, feminism, multiculturalism, civilian disarmament, gay marriage, etc.
Ideology, as the old Karl Marx defined it, is a “cloak of ideas” around objectives that have nothing to do with ideas. Hitler privately confessed not believing in the racist nonsense he used to instill in Germans a feeling of hatred disguised as love for justice. The leaders of progressive globalism also do not believe in the politically correct nonsense they inject into the masses of idiotized militants. Just like communism and old-style fascism, today’s “democratic socialism” or “third way” is a compact of bad feelings in beautiful words.
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Editor’s Note: Moreover, “The classes and races, too weak to dominate the new conditions of life, must perish.” (Karl Marx, New York Daily Tribune, May 22, 1853). “We have no compassion and we ask for none. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror” (Karl Marx, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May 19, 1849).↩
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Editor’s Note: Note that the text is from 2001, more than a year and a half before Lula was elected president for the first time.↩
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Editor’s Note: The Minister of Education in 2001—when this article was published—was Paulo Renato Souza, who held the position from January 1995 to January 2003.↩
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Editor’s Note: Gulag is a Russian acronym for “Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies,” a symbol of Stalin’s tyranny in the Soviet Union. It was a system of forced labor camps for common prisoners and especially political prisoners, including any citizen opposing the country’s communist regime. For a harrowing account by a survivor of the gulags, see Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” Bertrand Bookstore, 1975.↩
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Editor’s Note: The author uses the term “sociopath” (and its variations) with the same meaning as “psychopath” (and its corresponding variations).↩
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