5 ms·

Shame much of what he wrote down was a lie, or at the very least fiction. Which wasn't necessary, because the system was terrible enough. The Gulag Archipelago

• doombolt 8y ago
  When you write "places the gulag system in a different light" I can't read it as anything but genocide denial.
  • ethelward 8y ago
    > genocide denial Please don't use powerful words at the wrong place, you are depleting them of their meaning. A genocide has an actual definition according to the international law, and the Gulag system does not tick any of the boxes. The Gulag system was a very harsh penal colony system (although on a far larger scale that what was done before), in continuation of the ones already existing during the tsarist times – and with death rates comparable to what could be found i.e. in the Cayenne penal colony. It was neither aimed at killing convicts (with mortality rates under 10%, it would have done an awful job at it), nor was it targeting a peculiar ethnic group.
    • vixen99 8y ago
      So what's the term for over 1.5 million Poles deported to the interior of the USSR?
    • rjplatte 8y ago
      Wow. #StalinDidNothingWrong, comrade? Please read what you just wrote. The Gulags killed vast numbers of people in an incredibly inhumane fashion (no gas there!), in many cases based on their ethnic religion, and here you are defending it.
    • badpun 8y ago
      > The Gulag system was a very harsh penal colony system This is incorrect - the purpose of a penal colony system is to host criminals, while most people who were imprisoned in Gulag were innocent. It looks like the real purpose of the system was to convert innocent Soviet citizens' bodies into energy needed for physical labor. People captured in the system got worked to the bone and were on starvation-level food rations. In the process of physical work, their bodies burned their tissues as fuel (in lieu of insufficient external calories being provided in food), which lead to death of malnutrition and starvation within a couple of years. Millions of people were used this way to complete great industrial projects at minimal costs. This is not a penal system, this is Auschwitz.
    • gandhium 8y ago
      > with mortality rates under 10% More than 10%, and much more in some places or during some periods.
  • kryogen1c 8y ago
    Yeah I agree. This is tantamount to Holocaust denial, and to go on and compare the gulags to the American penal system really highlights the degree of nonsense.
• asianthrowaway 8y ago
  I always wondered why Franco has such a bad rep. I'm not really knowledgeable about the Spanish civil war but it seems he prevented Spain from becoming a Stalinist totalitarian country, which is a good thing in my book. I mean no doubt he was a brutal dictator but in the grand scheme of things he was by far the lesser of two evils. Edit: also I think your comparison of the American prison system and the gulag to be rather ridiculous. Afaik, american prisoners aren't worked to death in arctic conditions.
  • doombolt 8y ago
    > prevented Spain from becoming a Stalinist totalitarian country, Or maybe it would be a flop and something closer to present euro-socialism which Spain ended up implementing anyway. One should avoid being a brutal dictator since you never know at which rate you exchange real blood to imaginary one.
    • charlysl 8y ago
      The political situation in western Europe in the 1930s was explosive, specially so in Spain. On the one hand there was the then quite new Soviet Union stoking unrest in a, by contemporary standards, shockingly poor, unhealthy and exploited working and peasant class. On the other hand, you had much of the rest of society scared out of their wits by the very real prospect of revolution at their doorstep, and more than willing to support and make do with a strongman that, first and foremost, promised to crush the communists. Either side would have crushed the other if victorious. I recommend anyone to read good books about the Spanish Civil War (like for instance Hugh Thomas' very readable history) to understand the huge polarization of both extremes, the violence, and how those in the middle where totally swept aside. I doubt that the only possible outcome, given those conditions, could have been but one side exterminating the other, either the left or the right. Our world is, fortunately, very different. Of late, given an increasing political polarization and rise of populism, comparisons have been made with the 1930s, but if you start investigating you will realize that current conditions are nowhere near as bad. I don't know where you are from, and how familiar you are with European politics, but modern euro-socialism is much closer to pure capitalism than anything the stalinists would have created in Spain. I strongly dislike Franco, and I am aware that thanking him for preventing a stalinist Spain may turn heads these days. But the fact is that this is exactly what the West thought at the time. Franco became a pariah right after World War II as the only remaining leader that had supported Hitler. However, as soon as the reality of the Cold War kicked it, all that was forgotten, and western leaders (and specially the USA) started toasting him, indeed, as the man who stopped communism in a country in a very strategic position.
• arethuza 8y ago
  I read The Gulag Archipelago then later I read Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum and while Solzhenitsyn's work shocked me the sheer scale of things described by Applebaum (and how utterly futile most of it was) really left a deep impression on me.
• nec4b 8y ago
  Five years of freezing in siberian winter, starving and doing grueling manual labor makes the gulag experience not so terrible for you?
  • andrepd 8y ago
    I like how all your posts consist of "he was in a gulag therefore you can't call him out or criticise him".
    • nec4b 8y ago
      I find it terrifying that you feel the need to attack gulag survivor more than the regime that put millions of people in the gulag.