One of the results of the Covid pandemic is that by now practically everyone has some knowledge of how the human immune system works to attack and destroy foreign invaders into our bodies. The microscopic warfare is almost immediate, and by now we are all familiar with the symptoms.
A few months ago an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal indicated that we also have a political or cultural immune system that works to repel foreign ideas. A lawyer with a 44 year career with a prestigious law firm attended a conference call called by the firm to discuss the implications of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. When she dared to assert that many legal scholars agreed with the Court that abortion should be left to the States, the response of her colleagues was immediate and visceral. Some even claimed that they could not breathe.
Many recent reports indicate that this visceral reaction to unwelcome ideas is prevalent today throughout our country, and most especially on college campuses where unwelcome speakers are harassed or shouted down before they can utter a word. It is obvious that most of the protestors are very left of center. They call themselves Progressives but they are actually Regressives harking back to the days of Socialism and Communism.
For most people Socialism is a political and economic system but it is also, and always has been, a cultural phenomenon. Years ago I read practically all the novels and historical works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian author of the twentieth century, whose writings contributed enormously to the downfall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
More recently, I found a tattered copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward at a library sale. It is a novel about the inmates and staff of a cancer facility in the Soviet Union of 1954. It is semi-auto biographical since the author himself had been treated for cancer after years in USSR prison camps. The story of the novel grips the reader from the start but it also turns a spotlight on the cultural revolution that resulted from the triumph of Socialism after the Revolution of 1917.*
One of the patients in the ward is Dyoma, a young man who is suffering from a deadly tumor in his leg. Here is Solzhenitsyn’s account of a significant aspect of Dyoma’s early education.
Ever since he had been in the first class, before he could read or write, Dyoma had been taught, knew for certain and fully understood that religion is a drug, a three-times reactionary dogma, of benefit only to swindlers. Because of it the working people in some places had been unable to free themselves from exploitation. But as soon as they got rid of religion they would take up arms and free themselves. And Aunt Styofa with her funny calendar, with the word ‘God’ always on her lips, with her carefree smile even in the gloomy clinic, and her pasty, was obviously a thoroughly reactionary figure. (138)
The fruits of this cultural revolution could be seen in 1954 in the plight of young Russian women like the attractive nurse Zoya in a world without religion.
Did this mean that marriage was the only alternative, that that was where happiness lay? The young men she met all danced and went for walks with the same aim in mind: to warm themselves up a bit, have their fun and then clear out. They used to say among themselves, ‘I could get married, but it never takes me more than an evening or two to find a new “friend”, so why should I bother?’
Indeed, why marry when women were so easy to get? If a great load of tomatoes suddenly arrived in the market, you couldn’t just triple the price of yours, they’d go rotten. How could you be inaccessible when everyone around you was ready to surrender?
A registry office wedding didn’t help either. Zoya had learnt this from the experience of Maria, a Ukrainian nurse she did alternate shifts with. Maria had relied on the registry office, but a week after the marriage her husband left her, went away and completely disappeared. For seven years, she brought up her child on her own, and on top of it all, she was trapped by her marriage. (172)
Solzhenitsyn wrote Cancer Ward almost seventy years ago but the fruits of the Socialist cultural revolution are very evident today in the massive problem that Russia has with orphans or just plain unwanted children.
A couple of years ago former President Trump vowed that America would never be a Socialist country, but there is no doubt that the Socialist cultural revolution has already come. Its tenets have been taught in American schools for years, and the results are more and more obvious.
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*Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cancer Ward, 1968. Penguin book edition 1971.
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