Akira The Don, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson - What The Hell lyrics

Aleksander Solzhenit'syn
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
Solzhenit'syn, 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 Solzhenit'syn 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 Solzhenit'syn 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?) 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 Solzhenit'syn
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 Solzhenit'syn 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 Solzhenit'syn 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