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?"

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)

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

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