The Gulag Archipelago vs. Ordinary Men - The Jordan Peterson Collection | Polandball Literature 

The "replacing the swastica with the youtube symbol" practice should be followed by other history-youtubers

Never under estimate the ability of normal, "good," people to commit horrible atrocities.

"A fool is the man who, when arrested by the Secret Police, says sheepishly: 'Me? What for?'"

Not so fun fact: when long time prisoners wanted to escape from siberia gulags they would recruit fresh prisoners to be thier "helpers". What they actualy called them were "cows" and they only served on purpouse, to be eaten by the other prisoner while they run out of whatever stolen food they brought with them.

In regards to the police battalion, it brings to mind Joshua Graham's words: "Killing people is bad for one's soul. It might not seem important to you, but this is the most important lesson I can impart to you"

"More striking still, a broken man is generally deprived of everything except the ability to acknowledge and feel his position" -Lev Shestov

This is great but some men In uniform are at my door...

"We forget that the monsters of history were men and women too. Human, just like us. What makes us so special that we won't make the same rationalizations as them? Nothing."

honestly, i'm pretty happy to see the Lithuanian country balls. I can see we're not fully forgotten and at least some foreigners know the atrocities that happened to them. As a Lithuanian it reminds me of the stories my grandparents told me about my great and great great grandparents how they were deported to Siberia in the gulags and the stories how they got there and what happened there.

I think that the question of whether or not one would commit atrocities based on the orders of a superior should never be thought of as "would you have done it if it was you", as it leaves out the comrades that surround you in that situation. It should be "If you and your group of friends where ordered to do it, would you be able to refuse?". Refusing makes you an outsider unless others follow you. Scale that up to a battalion and it is very hard not to be an outsider by refusing.

Don’t think I didn’t notice the adeptus mechanicus soundtrack in the background.

There was also a story in the gullag archipellago about a worker who during the siege of stalingrad said something like "the administators fled from the city but us workers will fight the invaders" and led his co workers into a fight wich they won. After the ww2 ended he was imprisoned for treason after one of his co-workers snitchef that he insulted the administrators. He still believed in the regime and that his imprisonment was only an unhappy accident but that the system was fundamentally good

War Atrocities with 40K music. Perfect blend.

"A world apart " is also worth reading it's a journal of gulag survivor.

I met a marxist-leninist who read the Gulag Archipelago and called it propaganda. He called a lot of things committed by the soviets and other communist countries either propaganda or "not as bad as it seems". I remember showing him a video of a chinese woman describing the horror she faced under Mao's regime and he just called her "Full of shit!". I understand when far-rightists call something propaganda or fake, its usually because they are arrogant. But this guy who said that the workers should lead the world, who doesn't mind cracking a few eggs and under values human life, is beyond arrogant. They are blind. No utopia is worth it if I have to make sure certain people can't experience it.

It seems those last 2 polls were to prepare us for this, or not ezekiel?

Every human has the potential to be a great saint or a monstrous killer. I think Solzhenitsyn said it best: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an un-uprooted small corner of evil." “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Ordinary Men was one of the hardest books for me to read but also one of the best I've ever picked up. The detail it goes into can be too hard to stomach sometimes. I could usually only ready a few pages at a time then go a day or two without reading it so I could process the documented atrocities in it. Great book and I recommend it. Just make sure you have a happy book to counter it.

Never thought that i would find comparisons between literary works so interesting!

I want to put some of my quotations I found from The Gulag Archipelago so far that were interesting. I'm not finished yet though. "Oh, please forgive us reader. We have once more gone astray with this rightist opportunism: the concept of guilt, and of the guilty or innocent. It has, after all been explained to us that the heart of the matter is not personal or individual guilt, but 'social danger.'" "If a Troika is a Troika, is a court a courtette? It's not like we would know; all we got was a letter." "There is no court for 'nothing much'. For 'nothing much", there are the organs." "These Troikas (I say it plurally because, like a deity, we do not know where or in what form it exists) satisfied a persistent need that had arisen: never to allow those arrested to return to freedom." "From 1918 to 1921 there were 340 peasant revolts in 20 provinces. They were already called "Kulak" revolts by 1921 (because how could the people resist against their own power?" "And 'if this expediency should require that the avenging sword should fall on the heads of the defendants, then no verbal arguments can help.'" "My sentence is 20 years? I was imprisoned and sentenced to be shot in 2 months for my 'lack of faith in the Soviet system.' Surely even Lenin would lose his 'faith in the Soviet system' if he realized that system would still need camps 20 years from now." "This is the notion the Bluecapped guards never uttered aloud: 'You today, me tomorrow.'" "After the solemn words 'To be shot!' the judges paused for applause. But the mood in the hall was so gloomy, with the sighs and the tears of people who had no connection to the defendants, and the screams and swooning of their relatives, that no applause was to be heard even from the first two benches, where the Party members were sitting. This, indeed, was totally improper. 'Oh good Lord, what have you done?!' someone in the hall shouted at the members of the court. The wife of one of the defendants dissolved into tears. In the half darkness, the crowd began to stir. Judge Vlasov shouted at the front benches. 'C'mon you bastards, why aren't you clapping?! Some Communists you are!'" "Investigation and the process are merely juridical figaration, that can't change your destiny, which has been determined before. If it is necessary to shoot you, you'll be shot, even if you're completely innocent." "In the interrogation do not seek evidence and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first questions should be: What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused." "In the winter of 1934, the agronomists of Pskovsk oblast sowed flax on the snow - exactly as Lysenko had ordered. The seeds expanded, grew mouldy and died. The vast fields stayed empty throughout the year. Lysenko of course couldn't call the snow a kulak or himself an idiot. He accused the agronomists of being kulaks and distorting his technology. And the agronomists were sent to Siberia." "Thus the fear that 'our enemies will find out' makes us clamp our head between our own knees. Who in our Fatherland, except some bookworms, remembers now that Karakozov, who fired at the Tsar, was provided with a defense lawyer? Or that Zhelyabov and all the Narodnaya Volga group were tried in public, without any fear that 'the turks would find out?'" "There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder-boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'" "I remember our alliance with the Nazis. And all those changes in the newspaper headlines with regards to Nazis - once the meetings of our friendly sentries in this shabby Poland, and waves of sympathy for those brave soldiers, who fight against the Anglo-French bankers, and Hitler's uncut speeches over whole pages of Pravda; and then suddenly one morning the explosion of headlines, claiming the whole Europe is moaning heart-breakingly under their heel." "Oh, Western freedom-loving 'left-wing' thinkers! Oh, left-wing labourists! Oh, American, German and French progressive students! All of this is still not enough for you. The whole book has been useless for you. You will understand everything immediately, when you yourself - hands behind your back - are tossed into our Archipelago." "Fire. Fire. The branches crackled and the light wind of late Autumn blows the flame of bomb fire back and forth." "Fire. Fire. We fought the war, and looked into the bomb fire to see what kind of victory it would be. The wind wafted a glowing husk from the bomb fire. To that flame, and to you girl, I promise you: the whole wide world will read about you." "In one camp in 1940-something after the prisoners hadn't been taken into the fresh air for a whole year, they had forgotten how to walk, how to breathe, how to see in the light, the guards took them out, put them in formation, and drove them 15 miles to the "local" train station on foot. About a dozen of them died along the way, but no one is ever going to write a great novel about it (not even a whole chapter). I suppose, if you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone." "To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else, that what he is doing is a well-considered act of conformity with natural law." "A. B-- V. has told how executions were carried out at Adak - a camp on the Pechora river. They would take the "opposition members" - with their things - out of the camp compound on a prisoner transport at night. And outside the camp compound stood "the small house of the third sector." The condemned men were taken into a room one at a time, and there the camp guards sprang on them, their mouths were stuffed with something soft, and their arms were bound with cords behind their backs. Then they were led out into the courtyard, where harnessed carts were waiting. The bound prisoners were piled on the carts - five to seven at a time - and driven off to the 'Gorka': the camp cemetery. On arrival they were tipped into big pits that had already been prepared, and buried alive. Not out of brutally, no; it had been ascertained that when dragging and lifting them, it was much easier to cope with living people than with corpses. This work went on for many nights at Adak. And that is how the moral-political unity of our Party was achieved." "No one escapes Hell by dancing with the Devil." "'No, don't! Don't dig up the past! Dig up the past, and you'll lose an eye!' But the proverb goes on to say: Don't dig up the past, and you'll lose both eyes." "Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination." "'1921? Really? That far back?' In fact, it would not be fair to describe our concentration camps in 1921 as in existing in that year, In fact, they were in 'full bloom' and, can I say, 'flowering'. They were even 'coming to an end.'" "To obtain the encompassing and savage meaning [behind the camps] one [author] would have to drag out the lives of many people from the camps -- the very same in which one cannot survive even one term without some special advantage, because [the camps] were invented for destruction." "What are you worrying about? Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot." "There is no such thing as individual guilt, but 'class causation.'" "If you die in the interrogator's office, they'll tell your relatives you've been sentenced to camp 'without the right of correspondence'. And then, just let them look for you!

"left a message for all of you too" >left wing thinkers of the west No he didn't

*Bonus Reading Below - I was Just Following Orders!!!* 🥰Patreon: www.patreon.com/CallMeEzekiel ▶RU-vid Memberships: ru-vid.com/show-UCnZ1r94_Ptz_1gN5VBnE0Mgjoin ⭐SubscribeStar: www.subscribestar.com/CallMeEzekiel 🙏PayPal: www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=EAQPBZ8VHGFL6 📚Main sources: ⛓The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement: amzn.to/3Ue6ScH 👁Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland: amzn.to/3UjF72v Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Crypto: 💸 🟠BTC: bc1qj2szqj0h0rj2zz5x0zdhr8fzrh85zmatwxht26 🔵ETH: 0x0344A4aF3eCe5F8E5C0f65FC4c7eB667bf31cD60 You can also watch us on... 👀 ❤Odysee: odysee.com/@CallMeEzekiel 💚Rumble: rumble.com/CallMeEzekiel *Bonus Reading:* I put up a poll asking you guys what you’d do if you were ordered or otherwise compelled to participate in an atrocity. Those who said they’d go along with it would sometimes justify this course of action by saying that it was to protect themselves from becoming another victim. While certainly an accurate defense for perpetrators of other genocides, it actually does not apply to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. As Ordinary Men puts it: “Among the perpetrators, of course, orders have traditionally been the most frequently cited explanation for their own behavior. The authoritarian political culture of the Nazi dictatorship, savagely intolerant of overt dissent, along with the standard military necessity of obedience to orders and ruthless enforcement of discipline, created a situation in which individuals had no choice. Orders were orders, and no one in such a political climate could be expected to disobey them, they insisted. Disobedience surely meant the concentration camp if not immediate execution, possibly for their families as well. The perpetrators had found themselves in a situation of impossible “duress” and therefore could not be held responsible for their actions. Such, at least, is what defendants said in trial after trial in postwar Germany. There is a general problem with this explanation, however. Quite simply, in the past forty-five years no defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment. The punishment or censure that occasionally did result from such disobedience was never commensurate with the gravity of the crimes the men had been asked to commit.”

PRAISE THE OMNISSIAH

This kind of reminds me of a text i read about the military junta in Argentina. In the concentration camp of ESMA, a lot of the guards were composed of cadets between 14 to 18. As those were most likely to obey, and to be more open about their dissent so the marine could "remove" them if they spoke out. Meanwhile a lot of grown ups during the "death flies" would hid their discontent until trials were carried out, and they would talk out to reveal the details...

Hell yeah, another book review.

Both books are super heavy and dark. I couldn't actually finish Gulag Archipelago, it was far too depressing. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying by Sonke Neitzel is anotherbook in the vein of Ordinary Men that is equally chilling and dark.

I love how you use the Mechanicus Soundtrack in the video

This is probably one of your most important works yet. Also, holy shit Solzhenitsyn hits the feels.

You treat this horrible stuff with great respect, common sense and in an easy manner. I love this channel man

One of your best so far. Bravo. Today I lost my granny and this little dive into the human soul consoled me a bit.

In my opinion, the Gulag Archipelago is a warning, and Ordinary Men is a horror film that is our reality.

The entire full length Gulag Archipelago is on RU-vid. It's an older recording, taken from cassette tapes. Took me a good year to finally listen to it all but it was well worth it.

YES! I’ve been requesting this for some time now. And to see how simply put you made it all is glorious.

It's so abundantly clear to me that these two books should be compulsory reading for 12th graders looking to go to college.

I hope this video goes viral, so you go viral with it. You've earned it

Your channel has basically been controlling my reading list. Quality stuff, keep up the good work!

"LETS JUMP IN!" "now before a atrocitie haves a victim-"

I wasn't expecting the mechanicus music at the beginning lol. THE OMNISSIAH DEMANDS WE COMPARE THE BOOKS!

I'd personally recommend watching a Lithuanian movie "Between the shades of grey" which describes Lithuanian point of view in gulags.

This video and CHANNEL desevers more views and subs. Keep it up.

This was an amazing watch!

My boy listening to the adeptus mechanicus ost... i'm proud

A guy i met was a South African conscript in the 1970s in Angola. He readily admitted to his involvement in war crimes and atrocities. The stories he told me chilled my blood.

This was amazing Ezekiel, definitely some of the best content of youtube right now.

From what you had said, I believe that the next video will be about the Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye.

I live for these videos. Last one i actually bought the storm of steel and all quiet, reading them simultaneously.

How is the inquisition an atrocity. Comfy chairs, soft pillows, snazzy red outfits.

I love the usage of the Mechanicus Soundtrack in the video. Then again i just love the Mechanicus soundtrack anyway! So nice taste.

Nice video! Love your channel it helps me and makes me very interested in history :)

Do we have a book about pilots and crews of Chilean helicopters during Pinochet regime?

I'm in the middle of The Gulag Archipelago, and Ordinary Men is in the mail on the way. Scary stuff.

4:39 JAJAJAJAJA How could you make me laugh during such a heavy topic? Now I'm out of immersion!

How lucky we are these two juggernauts of evil never aligned with each other after Poland.

4:41 Me: German Me: *Sweats nervously*

I just realised you used the Mechanicus OST for your intro. Based Choice.

I think the movie Judgement at Nuremberg explored this, showing how a normal guy could be complicit in horrific atrocities.

Love the Mechanicus background music. May the Emperor protect you.

If your going to keep up with these book comparisons (which I enjoy), it would be a good video if you did Brave New World vs 1984

"The man who has few friends is beholden only to their own morality. Woe to those who challenge it." That is why I would be different. I would be an anti-villain. If cannot live in peace, then I will TAKE IT ALL, AND GIVE NOTHING BACK! Do what you want because a pirate is free...YOU. ARE. A. PIRATE.

One of the most underrated RU-vid r love your work sir.

I cant escape the Mechanicus OST its everywhere

Haha he replaced the bad sybol with the youtube sign lol

I wonder why this video isn’t monetised, maybe it’s all the genocide talk. It’s a shame too, this is a great video

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

WOW. I've read volume one of Gulag but clearly I need to finish the series. What a note to end it on.

This is where the fun begins

I grew up during the Ritalin epidemic, and fell victim to the mass overprescribing. My parents rationalized the use of very harmful medications under the guise of “the doctors ordered us to give you these”, despite knowing full well that the doctors were being paid for each successful prescription, effectively disregarding any ethical standards or concerns about diagnoses or treatments. If you were a 6 year old, you were very likely to be put on medication that would have very severe side effects. An ADHD diagnosis is about as common as being left-handed at this point, and is so benign that many people go years without even realizing it. It’s completely unethical to be prescribing schedule II drugs to children because you’d get kickbacks from the company who made it, and whenever the side effects got too severe to ignore, just write another, different version of the medication under a different name(which you would be financially rewarded for) bonus points for if you could prescribe two different medications that effectively cancelled each other out while keeping all the nasty side effects, and be paid twice as much.

Tip: There are free Audiobook versions of "The Gulag Archipelago" here on youtube. It takes about 50-60 hours to listen through every chapter, but it's also a 700 page book.

amazing video! keep up the great work

i would either go numb and let my brain black out so i wouldnt have to think nor remember or start crying and either miss the shot because of the blurred vision or just drop the gun and keep crying

Great video as always

"How can it be a hate crime if I loved doing it?"

Loved the addition of the Lithuanian ball in the work camp.

Love the Mechanicus music. Excellent choice.

"Man is Wolf to Man" and "Surviving Freedom" are two autobiographies by Janusz Bardach about living through the gulags as well as his freedom afterwards. Highly suggested reading.

Watching this while playing hoi4 was a mistake...

Your opening audio pleases the omnissiah

Hunger is the biggest nullifier of the human moral and consciousness -aleksandr solzhenistyn

I love youve been useing the VIC II soundtrack for basically al your videos. Still go back and review the economics guide now and then.

I read the archipelago and had to stop at one point because it depressed me too much.

Commence the rite of Peterson. May the Omnissiah bless us.

Ah yes, victoria 2 music, truly a men of culture ;)

This is the first RU-vid channel I've subscribed to for about 5 years

thank your for showing me these books please keep releasing new more of these videos

Great video man.

Last time I was this early, it was 1969 and the Soviets sent my grandfather to a uranium mine

When I first heard the Gulag Archipelago text at the end, I straight up almost cried.

Confort is a blessing for it lets us rest ,but it is also a curse that blinds us from what lies hidden from us. Disconfort is a curse for it never lets us rest, but is also a blessing that hones our strenghts so that we may face the horrors yet to be seen.

Love the use of the Children of the Omnesia at the start of the video

Nearly anyone when questioned will claim that they would not obey a lawfully given order to kill an innocent, yet history shows that most would. I feel fairly confident saying that I would be one of the rare exceptions. Since my childhood, I have long hated injustice and force being used against the innocent. To this day, I have a very strongly held sense of right and wrong, and it brings me great emotional discomfort to stray from that. I cannot abide immoral actions, and nothing infuriates me more than authority figures abusing their power. Even in my daily life, I make a willful decision to disobey unjust laws out of sheer spite that legislators and bureaucrats would exercise petty authority to punish those who do not live their lives in a way that the authority approves of. I dearly hope that politicians do not pass a law to try to ban hate speech, because I would feel a moral obligation to use offensive speech the content of which does not represent my nature as an act of protest. I don't want to fly a flag with the hooked cross on it, but if the moral authority wants to push that issue, I WILL push back, no matter the personal cost to myself.

Sincerely appreciate the 'children of the omnissiah' at the start

Will you do anything by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, and his critiques of the American prison system?

I love how RU-vidrs are using the RU-vid logo as a replacement for the Nazi swastika because RU-vid decided the swastika in historical video is a big no no

What a great birthday present

that warhammer mechanicus music so good everyone seems to use it

I read Ordinary Men in my grad program and it was haunting. We also read a relative sequel called Hitler's Furies about the women that participated in the genocide.

Underrated channel

Most men and women would do terrible things to others rather than jeopardize their own hide. Most people’s morality and nobility is barely skin deep.

I found this video very insightful. I also really appreciate the curtain patterns at 7:36

wait i came back to your channel from when you played games when did you turn your channel in a book review i kinda of like it