Hey Trump! Stalin also thought Failure to Applaud was Treason

in #trump7 years ago

Trump didn't like the Democrats not applauding him during his recent State of the Union address. So much so, in a recent speech he said this:

“It’s very selfish. And it got to a point where I really didn’t even want to look too much during the speech over to that side because honestly, it was bad energy. It was bad energy. You’re up there, you’ve got half the room going totally crazy wild, they loved everything, they want to do something great for our country. And you have the other side, even on positive news, really positive news, like that, they were like — death, and un-American. Un-American,” he said.“Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess, why not. Can we call that treason? Why not,” he said, throwing up one of his hands. “I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”

In the his book The Gulag Archipelago Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described a surreal scene that happen just after Stalin finished a speech (as described here):


The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly…Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.”

At last, after eleven minutes of non-stop clapping, the director of a paper factory finally decided enough was enough. He stopped clapping and sat down—a miracle!

“To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” Solzhenitsyn says.

That same night, the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years. Authorities came up with some official reason for his sentence, but during his interrogation, he was told: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

Draw your own conclusions.

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