Hello and welcome back to hardcore literature.

Today we're talking about Alexander Soljanitsyn's, the Gulag Archipelago.

We're talking about the book that is surely the book I found the most difficult to do a podcast on.

Most difficult because I already tried and recorded a podcast.

I'll tell you briefly about my history with Soljitzen's book

and then we'll get into it. Get into the, I don't know if you could say good stuff, because it's not

good stuff. Get into the dark stuff. Get into the illumination of human nature. Get into the ever

relevant rules that we should abide by as human beings, regardless of when we

find ourselves situated in history. History does repeat itself. The slippery slope argument does

have merit and we can see today everywhere in the world just tweak the circumstances, tweak the details. We can see the same

situation being played out again in real time. And it frustrates me that people do read books

like the Gulag Archipelago. People are reading Animal Farm. Schools think they're edgy. Oh,

we're reading a banned book. We're reading a censored book.

You're clearly not reading it because it keeps happening. And you can have a conversation today with

somebody who's read Orwell thoroughly. And you can tell they have not read him properly. They've

not understood him. And the Gulag Archipelago

is actually mandatory reading in Russia. I think they made it mandatory. They put it on the school

syllabus in 2008 or 2009. So recently, actually, that might sound like a long way off and, you know,

it's been a, it's been a bit of a hard year or two recently,

hasn't it? So a decade ago, seems like a while now. But, hey, that took too long to happen.

Are people really heeding the warning in the Gulag Archipelago? Perhaps they are in Russia.

Perhaps they are. Let's talk about my history with the Gulag Archipelago? Perhaps they are in Russia. Perhaps they are. Let's talk about my history with the

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