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The Undoing of Pity |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Dennis O'Keeffe |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2004 |
| Size: 3,042 Words, 19,256 Characters |
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GULAG
A History
Anne Applebaum
New York: Doubleday, 2003
658 pp., $35.00
We in the Western world, raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition or in the light of its humanist residua, are mostly inclined to see pity as an integral, perhaps even instinctual aspect of the human differentia specifica. In her splendid book Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum, intentionally or at least by implication, shows that this is an error. We all have to learn pity. Furthermore, in most cases the social order must constantly revivify it. This is apparent from what happens to the imperative of pity in societies that do not encourage and endorse it.
The history of the Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerie (main camp administration), the giant prison/forced labor system of Soviet communism--better known by its acron...
. . .
...ll have a very difficult time in view of their intrinsic incoherence. Applebaum, for example, without making a formal brief of the question, demonstrates at length the essential absurdity, on every level, of the politics of communist cruelty. Books like Gulag: A History will be indispensable to the task of sorting out, in its various versions and gradations, the whole totalitarian anticulture.
(824 of 19,256 characters)
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