Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, and Amerika

The correlations between Kafka and Solzhenitsyn and America may not be obvious, but they are there. Kafka’s The Trial was published after his death in 1924. It has evolved into a literary classic that is perched high on the bookshelves of many intellectual dissidents. It is a fictional account of what was really going on inside Franz Kafka’s Prague, and behind the Iron Curtain. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s was the life that Kafka’s art imitated. Solzhenitsyn’s earth-shattering book, The Gulag Archipelago, is the former Russian soldier’s account of being caught in the web of the Communist spider, which sucked the marrow from MILLIONS of innocent human beings. All the brutality, torture, rape, starvation, humiliation, degradation, et. al. was done utilizing one, primary law. Article 58 stated that any person trying to weaken the power of the State was committing a crime. If you were taken in for “questioning?” - well, less than 5% were ever released. The Patriot Act deems “enemy combatant” anyone intending to harm people while attacking the government. In America, the Police State is stepping up.

In The Trial, our protagonist is presented in Josef K. From the beginning we see the dark humor in the fact that a man’s last name, in truth, is meaningless. We are all named Josef K. Josef is summoned by the State. He is being taken to trial; however, the charges are not revealed to him. Josef meets the court system, which hardly knows that his case exists. It is a kangaroo court of connected snobs doing the bidding for higher masters. His court date keeps being reset due to the clogged system, which drives Josef K. into manic states from mental stress. In the end, he is simply exterminated. He is killed. While Kafka was not taken prisoner in the Gulag system, he must have heard stories. Eastern Europeans had to be extremely paranoid, because people were plainly disappearing. Fascism was a way of life for Kafka.

This broken-down judicial system is evident in the now Socialist country of Amerika. Our courts are clogged, as we award klutzes who spill coffee $4 or $400 million. Pedophiles go free in under five years, many times within one. Drug users who have never stolen or been violent get 20 plus years. The State is saying that they can take your property, including children, for whatever reason they cook up this hunting season. Under the Patriot Act, if you are deemed a terrorist, you have no right to the legal process. How far our government will use Homeland Security, FEMA, and the law to oppress us is anyone’s guess. A lawyer in The Trial sums up the total idiocy of what our own court system has become for the guilty and the innocent. “I forgot to ask you what sort of release you want. There are three possibilities: actual acquittal, apparent acquittal, and protraction. Actual acquittal is best of course, but I don’t have the slightest influence on that particular result. In my opinion there’s not a single person anywhere who could have an influence on an actual acquittal. In that case the defendant’s innocence alone is probably decisive. Since you’re innocent, it would actually be possible to rely on your innocence alone. But then you wouldn’t need help from me or anyone else.”

This cavalier attitude for the rule of law may have a comedic noir feel to it in Kafka’s book. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s own book, his prison biography with supplementary Russian History, shows that millions of men and women were left to rot after trials that contained no law whatsoever. The Gulag Archipelago is a recounting of the author’s time in the Soviet Gulag. It documents the Soviet courts (which never were courts, really). It documents the different “waves” of prisoners that made their way through the “sewer.” This personal memoir is, perhaps, as great a literary work as Kafka ever wrote - only this is nonfiction. The Gulag Archipelago runs the gamut of emotions. I cried for Aleksandr, for all Russians. I screamed out, “America, what were you thinking.” Instead of using our military might to crush Stalin and Communism, both exhausted from war with Hitler, we acknowledged the dictator and his iron fist. It can and has been definitively argued that Communist stooges conferred power to the Communist Soviets. Every man, woman, and child who felt the interrogator’s own fist - and worse - is owed an explanation. If America’s moral authority should have ever been wielded, it was the day Hitler surrendered. We could have then defeated the Red Russians, who had lost 20 million men in WWII, and had already been fighting for years. America lost maybe 1 million, and was still fresh, only joining in at round 10.

The horror that was the life of Solzhenitsyn is splayed out in blood and beauty, revealing the past of a nation. “Throughout the years and decades, interrogations under Article 58 were almost never undertaken to elicit the truth, but were simply an exercise in an inevitably filthy procedure: someone who had been free only a little while before, who was sometimes proud and always unprepared, was to be bent and pushed through a narrow pipe where his sides would be torn by iron hooks and where he could not breathe, so that he would finally pray to get to the other end, he would be shoved out, an already processed native of the Archipelago, already in the promised land. (The fool would keep on resisting! He even thought there was a way back out of the pipe.)”

Many Americans claim this could never happen here, in our free country. That is simply refuting history and human nature, as both Kafka and Solzhenitsyn testify. Explain freedom and the rule of law to Jose Padilla. He is wallowing in a prison cell with no trial. Yet, when Fox or CNN claim that the CIA (again, the CIA that can’t get anything right, and have admitted to experimenting on U.S. citizens in mind control experiments) knows that Padilla is guilty of trying to attack America, Donkeys and Elephants say - “Oh, yes. You see. He‘s a terrorist. He doesn‘t deserve a trial.” Sounds like Article 58 to me. In The Gulag Archipelago, we are shown how fellow-comrades, neighbors, even family members can simply turn a blind eye to the horror of the knocks on the door, the interrogation chambers, the prison languishers.

It has been an established fact that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are no longer a defense in court. Just peruse our ten original Amendments. Everyone of these has been infringed upon. We can speak, but only behind barbed-wire cages (DNC Convention, 2004). We can own guns, but not guns that could protect us from terrorist (‘95 assault rifle ban, supported by Bush). The Patriot Act and recent Supreme Court rulings claim that you no longer have a right to privacy, nor are you to be secure in your papers or person or anything else. You must ID yourself upon request by the State. Double Jeopardy is useless, now that asset forfeiture laws allow you to be tried once in criminal court, then again in civil court, by the State. Padilla has been held without a grand jury trial. If he is so guilty, shouldn’t it be easy to prosecute him? The law has allowed accused men to be tried without being able to confront their witnesses. These “witnesses” are usually criminals or intelligence agents. Excessive bail is often levied against the alleged. Finally, the Tenth Amendment is very decisive in stating that any other laws will be made by the States, and then the people. In our country’s rush to become like the enemy, States are often subjugated by the central, Federal government. Through matching funds, the States are strong-armed into passing laws that befit Washington, not Texas or California or anywhere else. Furthermore, because every facet of life is now dictated by the State, there are few individual freedoms left for the people to decide on their own.

In conclusion, I would highly recommend Kafka’s The Trial and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. In fact, I believe it should be mandatory reading in our public (government (communistic)) schools. As the adage says, we will be doomed to repeat humanity’s mistake if we are ignorant of History. In Kafka’s case, he has been demonized as an insane Jew. Remember, it was the elite who released the “Protocols of Zion” which helped lead to the German-Jewish Holocaust. In closing, the time is drawing near. Will you be like a Soviet peasant, allowing the big, bad government to seize everybody who isn’t like you? Remember who protected the peasants once the intellectuals, patriots, engineers, and honest men had been tossed into the prison system. No one. Nobody was left.

About the Author

Erik Fortman is an author and musician from Texas. His books, Webs of Power and Webs of Power 2, are now available. He welcomes comments at erikfortman@yahoo.com