Is any of the American media trustworthy?

A lesson in irony from Soviet history...

In February 1945, two days after fighting his unit out of a Nazi encirclement and being recommended for an award for combat valor, Captain Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, was arrested by the NKVD for anti-Soviet propaganda. His crime? He was accused of criticizing Stalin in his personal journal, which he kept in his map case.

With no trial and no due process, he was sentenced to 10 years in a slave labor camp under Article 58 of the Soviet Code for political crimes against the state.

Such was “free speech“ under the one-party system of the Soviet Union. In 1953, he was sentenced to an additional three years of exile in the homeland. “Exiled” prisoners were transported deep into the wilderness, somewhere between modern Russia and Siberia, and released to fend for themselves. About 15 million people sent into home exile died. Solzhenitsyn survived.

In 1956, following Stalin’s death, under Krushchev’s “DeStalinization Program,” Solzhenitsyn was released from captivity and published his masterpiece “The Gulag Archipelago,” detailing the injustice of the Soviet system, as seen through the eyes of a political prisoner.

When Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s accounts of life in the state jails, slave labor camps, and exile were read by members of the Soviet press, they were considered electrifying.

The Soviet press began covering his accounts. But no one trusted the press…

“When former zeks (prisoners) heard this fanfare from all the newspapers in unison, learned that some sort of story about the camps had come out and that the journalists were slavering over it, their unanimous conclusion was: 'More lying nonsense! Nothing’s safe from those crafty liars!” That our newspapers, with their habitual immoderation, might suddenly start falling over each other to praise the truth was something no one could possibly imagine!” - Excerpt from “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

People refused to believe the press when it produced “truth,“ because the steady diet they fed their people had been propaganda for so long.

But in this case, the Soviet press, ironically, was applauding a critical account of the very system that kept “the Soviet system“ in power. And the people who experienced imprisonment, when the realities of that imprisonment were finally exposed, cast doubt on the veracity of the press reporting on it.

Sound familiar?

How many of us, not lulled into psychological complacency by the American media, trust our news sources anymore?

Why should the average American trust the so-called “mainstream media” after the coverages of 9-11, Benghazi, Covid, the jabs, the treatment protocols, the Middle East wars, the Clinton’s’ body trail, the sexualization of our kids, masking and distancing our kids, the 2020 election, J6, the Afghan withdrawal, George Floyd, the LA riots, the burning of Maui, the CA fires, global warming, institutionalized DEI - and the list goes on.

Is it any wonder we cast doubt on the actions of the various branches of our government in the current Iran crisis, and the reports we receive from the media?

How many of us will EVER trust the media - even local “conservative” media - again?

For that matter, how many of us actually trust our political “parties,” filled with so many con-artists whose expertise is largely based on gaslighting the voters? Is it any wonder voter turnout is so abysmally low?

Will the day soon come when we no longer trust our neighbors? Our families? Ourselves?

In the former Soviet Union, people were arrested without due process and tortured until they gave a name. It didn’t matter whether the person they named had done anything wrong. A name was enough to be arrested and tortured for another name. And who did the torturing? Neighbors. And was there ever any hope of release? No.

The key to the exploitation of neighbors by neighbors, and family members by family members, was a toxic cocktail of fear, propaganda, and ignorance spread by a centrally controlled media, and bolstered by the realization that the man who lived next door was taken last night, and was being tortured for a name. And the name he gave might be yours.

An estimated 45 million Soviet citizens perished in the slave labor camps, prisons, and homeland exile imposed by a single-party system, with a government-controlled press. Most were imprisoned under Article 58 of the Soviet Code, a body of law eerily similar to America’s own Patriot Act.

Is it any wonder that thinking Americans despise the concept of the uni-party and the power it wields behind closed doors?

Ronald Reagan read “The Gulag Archipelago,“ and decided the evil empire of the former Soviet Union had to be brought down. And he did it.

The process of emerging from the darkness of the old Soviet communist system has been a decades-long undertaking. But the people of Russia are coming out of it.

Today, the post-Soviet Russian Federation requires every school child to read “The Gulag Archipelago” before completing high school. It’s over 1,000 pages long. It’s required reading lest the next generation forget what a people turned against one another in the name of political “unity” will do to themselves.

All across America, we graduate high school students who cannot read at the third-grade level. Of those who can read at grade level, relatively few understand the blessings we enjoy because we value freedom, nor can they articulate the process by which that freedom was won, let alone the process by which that freedom must be preserved.

Yet, the American media serves up a daily diatribe against those of us who hold that what happened in Soviet Russia must NEVER happen here, that is to say, American conservatives are intentionally marginalized in the press as “right wing extremists,” and even the “new Nazis.” Such media accusations are historically and politically clueless, but dangerous nonetheless, because gullible people believe them.

The most important concept built into the American system of government is respect for God. The second is the necessity of dynamic tension between competing ideas of the American people, and between the enumerated powers of our equal but separate branches of government. It is a risky proposition because it demands discomfort, and human nature loves comfort.

“The battle line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes or races or creeds, nor between political parties, either - but right through every human heart.”

- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Our system of government demands that good overcome evil, knowing that evil will always raise its head to try to overcome good. As Lincoln put it, we are “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” People who do nothing to govern themselves will have nothing for a government, save the cry of “unite!” When that happens, evil wins.

This, of course, is the only cry allowed under totalitarianism, and an untrustworthy press always leads the parade.

We must learn and apply the lessons from those unfortunate modern nations that have fallen to totalitarianism. The concept of “unity in the name of being unified“ is a cliff at the bottom of which are the sharp, jagged, ravenous rocks of despotism; it really doesn’t matter which “side of the aisle” you’re on - when “Unity!” becomes your clarion call, the evils of totalitarianism eagerly wait to swalow you up.

“Unity” is not an American virtue; it contradicts the very nature of freedom. The struggle for what is good, is the hallmark of Americanism. We must remain the beacon of freedom for the rest of the planet, recognizing the grim reality that the greatest threat to our own freedom is a complacent us. A central role of the American press is to preserve the free exchange of competing, uncomfortable ideas, always in the name of preserving freedom. It is by that practice alone that the press earns and maintains the necessarily fragile trust of the people it serves.