What The Hell

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, you may or you may not know was a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag concentration camp system
That by his report at least, killed 60 million people
Solzhenitsyn, he had a pretty nasty life, I mean, first of all, he's on the Russian front, which was a nasty place to be
Then he was captured by the Germans, and they didn't like Russians
So, they put them in separate prisoners of war camp
Partly because Stalin who is too constantly paranoid wouldn't sign the Geneva convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, so the Germans set up extra, POW camps for the Russians, and they starved generally so badly that if other POW's were in the vicinity, they throw food packages over the wire, even though they themselves weren't particularly well fed
So, the war ends, and the Russians win, and Solzhenitsyn goes back to Russia, right?
And what happens? He's thinking, you know, "Wow, this is over. We help defend the fatherland we're going to get, if not a hero's welcome, at least some welcome," but Stalin figured, "No, no”
These Russians who'd been to the west, they were contaminated by their exposure to the Western economic system, and as a consequence of that, they posed a threat to the integrity of the Soviet state, so he just threw them all in concentration camps
So fine, so Solzhenitsyn is sitting in there in this concentration camp on a coal pile
A coal pile which contained this kind of clay that his compatriots would eat because they were so damn hungry that it was better to have the clay in their stomach than nothing at all
And he thought, "All right”
“What the hell did I do to get here?"

[Chorus]
What the hell did I do to get here? (What did I do?)
What did I do to get here?
To get here
What the hell did I do to get here? (What did I do?)
What the hell did I do?
To get here
To get here

Which is really a remarkable thing to think, right?
Because like through was the second World War and doubt calmly couldn't be in pinned directly on him
And then there's Stalin who was, you know, really one of the world's worst monsters
And then there's the concentration camp, the POW camp
A lot of things happened to Solzhenitsyn, but he said he had nothing but time to think in this concentration camp, and he wasn't really that happy with the way things turned out, so he made a vow in the camp
And the vow was this, that he is gonna go back over his whole life, whole life, right from day one
And try to remember every time he ever did something, he thought was wrong
He thought, right?
Not someone else, but that did his conscious a pack
And he said, "Well, since I don't have anything better to do, I'm gonna spend like the next 10 years seeing if I can undo all those little knots in my soul that I tied."
And the consequences of that was that he wrote a book called "The Gulag Archipelago." Three volume book, 1900 pages long
He memorized it because there wasn't any paper, and pencil available for him in prison
Then it circulated in the underground in the Soviet Union for years before it got published in the West, published in 1975
Definitely, one of the literary events that brought down the Soviet Union
Definitely, that's kind of interesting, isn't it? To think this one guy, right?
Got numbers tattooed on his arm
He's skinny as a rail
He's three quarters dead
He's been beat to death in 15 different ways
He decides under completely unreasonable circumstances that he's gonna take personal responsibility for the position that he happens to find himself in
The consequences of that, 25 years later is that Solzhenitsyn is still around, and that the Soviet Union isn't

[Chorus]
What the hell did I do to get here?
(What did I do to get here?)
(To get here)
What the hell did I do to get here?
(What the hell did I do?)
(To get here)
(To get here)

And you think, "Well, that can't be the way the world works now, can it?”
But then you think, "This too, like, do we really know how the world works?"
We've had a pretty nasty century in the last 100 years
Right, we had the Nazis
We had Mao Zedong
We had the recent tragedies in Africa
We don't seem to learn anything about genocide
Somebody like Solzhenitsyn says, "Well, you know, might be your fault."
Might be your fault
Why, what are you ignoring?
Good question
Can you make peace with your own family?
It's not so easy, right?
It's probably no easier than making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians