Thursday, February 10, 2005
Crime and Punishment
In preparation for "Hugh Cruise II," (call me a blog suck-up if you wish, but I've been to St. Petersburg -- great city!) I am currently reading "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky. TruePravda listed this week as the first of his series, "Books that Haunt."
Today, just today, I read the first chapter in Part Five of that novel. In this chapter, one of the characters gives a quite long speech. There are a lot of pontificating characters in this book. Anyway, the specific character I am referring to is "the progressive." He goes on and on all about all new ideas.
Now bear in mind, this book was written when tsarist Russia was still firmly intact. What we see hear in this character's rant is the proto-ideology that lead to the Russian revolution. Fair enough -- but it sounds amazingly like a lot of the left-wing tripe that we hear today.
Soviet communism has come and gone, a grossly failed experiment that killed literally millions of people. You would think that after all these ideas have been through in the last 150 years or so, they would at least find some new words to hide them behind!
Today, just today, I read the first chapter in Part Five of that novel. In this chapter, one of the characters gives a quite long speech. There are a lot of pontificating characters in this book. Anyway, the specific character I am referring to is "the progressive." He goes on and on all about all new ideas.
Now bear in mind, this book was written when tsarist Russia was still firmly intact. What we see hear in this character's rant is the proto-ideology that lead to the Russian revolution. Fair enough -- but it sounds amazingly like a lot of the left-wing tripe that we hear today.
Soviet communism has come and gone, a grossly failed experiment that killed literally millions of people. You would think that after all these ideas have been through in the last 150 years or so, they would at least find some new words to hide them behind!
