Jordan Peterson and the Return of Solzhenitsyn

“The world was on this brink of this fiery hell when Jordan Peterson read Solzhenitsyn and began to turn from despair toward hope.”

“…It was Solzhenitsyn who most crucially made the case that the terrible excesses of Communism could not be conveniently blamed on the corruption of the Soviet leadership, the ‘cult of personality’ surrounding Stalin, or the failure to put the otherwise stellar and admirable utopian principles of Marxism into proper practice. It was Solzhenitsyn who demonstrated that the death of millions and the devastation of many more were, instead, a direct causal consequence of the philosophy (worse, perhaps: the theology) driving the Communist system. The hypothetically egalitarian, universalist doctrines of Karl Marx contained hidden within them sufficient hatred, resentment, envy and denial of individual culpability and responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death when manifested in the world…”

– An excerpt from Jordan Peterson’s foreword to the 50th Anniversary edition of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago

Make no mistake, them’s fightin’ words. This fierce sermon about the gospel written by one of mankind’s greatest uncanonized saints, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was an impetus for naming my biography of Dr. Peterson Savage Messiah. Under the guise of a mild-mannered college professor, Peterson preached the scripture of the prophets: bloody, accusatory, inflammatory, unflinching writings revolting to non-believers but manna to the faithful.

In Solzhenitsyn, Peterson found an eyewitness to the prophecy that hell on earth would reign in the 20th century as prophesied by Friedrich Nietzsche, another tormented and unsung saint of the Peterson catechism. When Nietzsche proclaimed “God is Dead” in 1882, he actually wrote:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us.  What water is there for us to clean ourselves?”