They’ll literally talk about feeding millions of people alligators or put on theatrically staged shows of tying people up to chairs with bags on their heads and executing them via gunshot to the back of the head among other monstrous acts but will cry crocodile tears enough to flood the Great Plains with an ocean and accuse you of being a monster in human skin if you don’t want basic human rights for everyone.
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible
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A maximum sentence in the worst Soviet prison in the Stalin era is a kindness to these people.
Solzhenitsyn, one of the most influential figures in the western perception of the gulag system, had his cancer treated there and it saved his life. His book is mostly rumors and folktales written as though they were things he had witnessed, which is why editions in some languages call it what he did, a “literary experiment,” and his wife further clarified in an interview for NYT decades later that these were folklore. Solzhenitsyn was also an antisemitic freak who somewhat bought into the “Judeo-Bolshevism” thing and was arrested for writing a letter about how the USSR needed to be overthrown while he was an officer in the Red Army on the Eastern Front, favoring an Eastern Orthodox theocratic monarchy.
Robert Conquest, probably the other most influential figure in this perception, claimed more people died in the gulag system than had ever even been entered into it (as we discovered when we gained access to the Soviet archives). This joins the list with other discredited theses from him, such as his thoroughly-debunked idea that the USSR’s Great Famine of '32-'33 was a deliberate “terror famine” and a Holocaust-like event. He also preceded his work as a “historian” by working for 8 years in post-war British intelligence as specifically an anti-Soviet propagandist.
Just some fun facts.