Gulag. That one word is enough to bring terrible, horrific images to mind for those aware of its meaning. It's interesting that even today the word is synonymous with "the most awful kind of prison imaginable", and even modern-day examples such as our own Guantanamo Bay get compared to the conditions of the harsh Gulag prisons. It's easy to slip into the thinking that we're far beyond this now, that we've become too "civilized" to enact such atrocities, but it does still happen. Solzhenitsyn's novel really had me asking myself one big question in particular: have we really come all that far? Is it truly okay to impose unthinkable prison conditions on other humans simply because they believe something other than what we do?
Of course not. We're civilized now.
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