Tuesday, February 14, 2006
New Blog - Intergalactic Source of Truth
Please go here and see this site. This is a rarity among all in the blogsphere. I especially like the bit he did about the USSR and the Gulags. Not many in the press here in the west even dare to report on the tens of millions slaughtered from 1917 to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bravo IST! I hope many go to your site.
Many thanks, Mr. Mountjoy. I appreciate the link (reciprocated, natch) and your generous comments.
Yes, I've been fascinated by the Soviet, Chinese, and Cambodian gulags ever since reading Solzhenitsyn in 1974. I almost flunked a bar exam because I couldn't put the darn book down.
As you have ably pointed out about war reporting since Tet '68 in Vietnam, there is a form of willful blindness about the crimes of communism. The comedian Gallagher tellingly refers to the History Channel on the cable as the "Hitler Channel."
No truer observation could be made. If Solzhenitsyn's estimate of 60,000,000 deaths caused by Stalin is accurate, give or take a million or two, that is more than 10 times the number who perished in the Holocaust. Yet it is the very limited Holocaust that is featured incessantly on this major medium with hardly a mention of the 94,000,000 other people who died at the hands of communists.
The cold bloodedness of the Holocaust marks the Nazi version as especially horrific. But is there a significant difference in the degree of evil? How much difference is there in working someone to death in the uranium mines or the Kolyma. Small comfort to die at a more leisurely pace and as a mere "class enemy."
In some ways the Soviet version was the more horrific for there having been a pretense of adherence (however laughable) to legal norms. Judicial (or administrative) murder seems especially cruel for the illusory tidbit offered of some kind of a legal rationale in an ocean of irrationality.
Bottom line, however, is that one will wait a long time to see an accurate treatment of the damage done by communists in this world. This wait probably has everything to do with the complicity of the intellectuals in denying the communist threat, promoting moral equivalence, and even actively aiding the communists. Alger Hiss call your office.
And remember Armand Hammer? He was a bag man for the Soviets but made it a point to ruin any person who pointed out his communist associations by filing libel suits. (Why Nixon pardoned Hammer is a great mystery to me, and it surely says something very important about Nixon. Perhaps the answer is in Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer.)
The latter half of the last century was an era of massive historical distortion.
Are we similarly blinding ourselves with respect to Islam? That is the question. Whoever starts from the premise that Islam is a religion of peace is either mad, unbelievably naive, or a dissembler. A lot rides on whether we can overcome this self blindness. In the past, the enemy was, for the most part, confined to areas outside the borders. As Europe and we are finding, allowing people from hostile cultures to immigrate to and settle in within the curtilage, so to speak, is a dangerous new development in world history, the wisdom of which very much depends upon the ability of Western hosts to see their self interest more clearly than they did during the Cold War.
Yes, I've been fascinated by the Soviet, Chinese, and Cambodian gulags ever since reading Solzhenitsyn in 1974. I almost flunked a bar exam because I couldn't put the darn book down.
As you have ably pointed out about war reporting since Tet '68 in Vietnam, there is a form of willful blindness about the crimes of communism. The comedian Gallagher tellingly refers to the History Channel on the cable as the "Hitler Channel."
No truer observation could be made. If Solzhenitsyn's estimate of 60,000,000 deaths caused by Stalin is accurate, give or take a million or two, that is more than 10 times the number who perished in the Holocaust. Yet it is the very limited Holocaust that is featured incessantly on this major medium with hardly a mention of the 94,000,000 other people who died at the hands of communists.
The cold bloodedness of the Holocaust marks the Nazi version as especially horrific. But is there a significant difference in the degree of evil? How much difference is there in working someone to death in the uranium mines or the Kolyma. Small comfort to die at a more leisurely pace and as a mere "class enemy."
In some ways the Soviet version was the more horrific for there having been a pretense of adherence (however laughable) to legal norms. Judicial (or administrative) murder seems especially cruel for the illusory tidbit offered of some kind of a legal rationale in an ocean of irrationality.
Bottom line, however, is that one will wait a long time to see an accurate treatment of the damage done by communists in this world. This wait probably has everything to do with the complicity of the intellectuals in denying the communist threat, promoting moral equivalence, and even actively aiding the communists. Alger Hiss call your office.
And remember Armand Hammer? He was a bag man for the Soviets but made it a point to ruin any person who pointed out his communist associations by filing libel suits. (Why Nixon pardoned Hammer is a great mystery to me, and it surely says something very important about Nixon. Perhaps the answer is in Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer.)
The latter half of the last century was an era of massive historical distortion.
Are we similarly blinding ourselves with respect to Islam? That is the question. Whoever starts from the premise that Islam is a religion of peace is either mad, unbelievably naive, or a dissembler. A lot rides on whether we can overcome this self blindness. In the past, the enemy was, for the most part, confined to areas outside the borders. As Europe and we are finding, allowing people from hostile cultures to immigrate to and settle in within the curtilage, so to speak, is a dangerous new development in world history, the wisdom of which very much depends upon the ability of Western hosts to see their self interest more clearly than they did during the Cold War.
So many things disturbed me when I was in HS when I read Gulag Archipteligo...the collectivization of farm in 1920 - 23...at least 15 million died...the re-settling of entire villages - sending these people to end of rail lines with the name of their 'new town' nailed to a tree...putting as many people on ice flows and sending them down rivers...the special orders of units to charge German units with no weapons.
The list of attrocities is endless. And I had hoped that after the fall of the USSR, more NVKD, GRU, KGB files would be made public. But without the push from the west, this never materialized. Still, an accounting needs to happen. And we are also talking about recent attrocities with survivors who are not in the same generation as holocaust survivors.
The silence of the west is deafening.
And when is the last time the MSM said anything about Pol Pot and the K Rouge?
Man's inhumanity to man never ceases to amaze me.
And your links to Cuba are excellent. I can't wait for the Beard to die!
Keep The Faith!
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The list of attrocities is endless. And I had hoped that after the fall of the USSR, more NVKD, GRU, KGB files would be made public. But without the push from the west, this never materialized. Still, an accounting needs to happen. And we are also talking about recent attrocities with survivors who are not in the same generation as holocaust survivors.
The silence of the west is deafening.
And when is the last time the MSM said anything about Pol Pot and the K Rouge?
Man's inhumanity to man never ceases to amaze me.
And your links to Cuba are excellent. I can't wait for the Beard to die!
Keep The Faith!
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