Luxembourg to Solzhenitsyn

From Foucault

This is the exact opposite of Rosa Luxemburg’s approach.

We could call this Solzhenitsyn's principle, which amounts to saying: maybe if everyone knew, the capitalist regime would not last twenty-four hours, but, Solzhenitsyn says, if the socialist regimes stand firm it is precisely because everyone knows. It is not because the governed do not know what is happening, or it is not because some of them know but others do not, it is rather because they know and it is to the extent that they know, to the extent that everyone is actually aware of the evidence of what is happening, it is precisely to that extent that things do not change. This is, precisely, the principle of terror. Terror is not an art of government the aims, motives, and mechanisms of which are hidden.

Terror is precisely governmentality in the naked, cynical, obscene state.

Before and after Covid comes the question of the two thinkers. Rosa said if we only knew this evil system would end. Solzhenitsyn's darker view is we do.

Many dark actors are on the global stage and the anti-hero Putin seems to wear golden armor as he rattles his atomic weapons to thundering applause. Audiences for many years now admire the anti-hero. A champion of virtue stepping out of the history of the USSR's KGB. And so the heroic or anti heroic theater is written and the winner is not freedom but terror.