Terror with a Human Face

Anthony Mitchell Siewers Terror With a Human Face Xianlin Ji’s The Cowshed as a Study of Maoism as a Political Religion Xianlin Ji watched in horror as the Maoist Red Guards destroyed his home, smashing cupboards and forcing their way through. Left powerless to stop them, Ji was forced to submit and join the Chinese… Continue reading Xianlin Ji’s The Cowshed as a Study of Maoism as a Political Religion

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was left so despondent that he thanked the Soviet prison complex that had nearly been his demise. Xianlin Ji found solace in the wooden placards beating into his neck because that is what a continual existence in a totalitarian system does to a human. Individuals are left to grasp at the proverbial straws… Continue reading Suppression of the Individual

Xianlin Ji’s The Cowshed as a Study of Maoism as a Political Religion The very prospect of speech vanished from Xianlin Ji as he inadequately burrowed into the familial walls of his home, the Maoist Red Guards demolishing his sense of identity and safety. Safety for an intellectual had become little more than a myth.… Continue reading First Two Essay Paragraphs

Graham Greene manages to evoke a complete mental image in few words, saying so much with so little. The threat of religious persecution that hangs over the story is one such example. The unnamed priest, for all of his faults, only seeks the freedom to practice his religion and procure a bottle of wine for… Continue reading The Threat of Persecution in The Power and the Glory

Perhaps Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn commands a tip of the cap. While Solzhenitsyn did not coin the term, his experiences and book The Gulag Archipelago are something of a study in cancel culture at its most extreme. At the heart of the cancel culture movement, poisoning the American ideal of free speech, is censorship. Through the institution… Continue reading Solzhenitsyn and Cancel Culture

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells of a woman at the theater, lost in a cinematic world, only to find herself thrust back to reality via the Gulag. What was her crime, you ask? Simply existing in a Stalinist regime dominated by the quotas necessary to stay in power through a state of constant fear. The element of… Continue reading Presumed Guilt in the Gulag

Matryosha’s delusions establish a nihilistic framework for the censored chapter “At Tikhon’s” in Demons. Exhibiting signs of disturbance that even Nikolai realizes – although who is he to comment on the deranged ravings of another soul – Matryosha forces Nikolai to ponder the existence of a God figure. For someone who struggled with his standing… Continue reading Nikolai’s Religious Nihilism

Terror with a Human Face preliminary materials There is an inherent duality to the sense of sight. Whereas the eye serves as a vessel with which to view the world, the interpretation of those mental images is of equal importance. Ji Xianlin experiences this duality firsthand through his experiences as a forced participant in the… Continue reading Essay Preliminary Materials

With a single stroke of pen to paper, George Orwell committed the revolutionary act. Of the numerous terms to enter the cultural zeitgeist as a result of Orwell’s masterpiece 1984, “newspeak”, “thoughtcrime” and the like, perhaps none captures the imagination and wonder of readers quite like “doublethink”. The dangers of the thought process or rather… Continue reading I (Double)think, therefore I am

In the Pearl Jam fan favorite “Rearviewmirror”, lead singer Eddie Vedder discusses the psychological torment of abuse, offering the line “It wasn’t my surface most defiled.” In a different arena, Ji Xianlin echoes those sentiments in a harrowingly-descriptive account of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the physical toll endured by countless struggle sessions was immense.… Continue reading The Hidden Toll of Totalitarianism