Epstein and Solzhenitsyn

“Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?”

This piece is worth reading as an explication of the, yes, civilizational issues behind Epstein. The suggested response by We the People leaves more than a bit to be desired, however.

In fact, it’s just wrong.

The author summarizes the issue at hand: How bad is this cohort and what will history say, assuming Western adults survive, against the wishes of this same cohort, to write and be aware of our history?

This can’t be our legacy to our children.

It’s evil in plain sight. Almost like they’re saying, we showed you. You saw it. And you did nothing….

That’s why the old saying matters so much right now: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

And right now, doing nothing is exactly what they’re counting on.

If we care about our children, their children, and the future of Western Civilization… of ANY civilization, we cannot continue to do “nothing.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn perhaps has written with more experience and insight into the nature of evil than anyone. He describes the consequences of doing nothing:

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

The author of the linked Substack piece quotes an embedded piece, asking the question, “How do we cope with this?” The answer, however, is wrong:

As for action, Holehouse recommends doing “exactly what we’re doing right now:” continuing to look at the evidence, sharing it, discussing it in our homes, with our neighbors, at church. “And we raise our children to recognize evil when they see it, so that the next generation doesn’t get fooled the way ours did.”

It’s always foolish to wait for some future event or wider recognition of evil. As we raise our kids to recognize the evil, the evil raise and capture more human beings at the same time… and their present evil continues.

Their power grows … until stopped.

Waiting for awareness is akin to those wanting to lose the next election, because “that’ll show ‘em.”

No. These people need to experience Solzhenitsyn’s staircase; to know that when they go out, an ambush may be awaiting their return…. ‘if only we had…’ is us; it is now. It is not waiting but striking while the irons of those tortured, murdered, cannibalized children are still hot.

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.

We have good men among us. It is these good men who have walked into fire for generations to build and preserve civilization. These are good men refusing “to do nothing,” no matter the cost.

Not continuing to do “exactly what we’re doing right now,” described as preparation, for “doing nothing is exactly what they’re counting on…”

What SHOULD we do?

I write often about self-government and our responsibilities as a self-governing people.

Who enforces the laws is less-important than that the laws are enforced.

We hire people to make the laws we desire (legislators), enforce the laws made in our name (police) and adjudicate law and assign punishment to those who break the law (courts). Policing and courts are parts of government - self-government; they are our responsibility.

To these hirelings we delegate the authority to perform these functions to keep our self-governing citizens and nation safe and prosperous. Though we delegate authority, responsibility cannot be delegated: it remains in the hands of the people of the self-governing nation: each and every one of us.

When our hirelings refuse the authority delegated to them, they put at-risk we who hired them and who retain the responsibility for these functions.

This truth is where we find ourselves today in the swirling wake of the evil documented in the Epstein files. It is responsible self-government, not vigilantism, to enforce our laws when our hirelings refuse their delegation of authority. They are our laws in our nation in our civilization… and they are our children.

Are we going to act on our responsibility to our fellows and our posterity as the self-governing people we made ourselves to be, and cleanse our society of these evildoers… or is our self-government an adolescent and naive pretense, something we brag about while patting ourselves on our keyboards?

Will we allow them, in their positions of power, to continue their evil as we good men continue to do nothing…?

Western Civilization will rise or fall based on our answer to that question.