With all this talk about the Gulag....

[burythehatchet]

it would be appropriate to recall the Gulag. Not many of us were alive when the Gulag was finally ended in the late 50's. I did some reading about it and it is remarkable that a mere 50 years ago, there existed a system of forced labor that was perhaps as insidious as slavery in the US.

They were installed for various categories of people deemed dangerous for the state: for common criminals, for prisoners of the Russian Civil War, for officials accused of corruption, sabotage and embezzlement, various political enemies and dissidents, as well as former aristocrats, businessmen and large land owners.

It's worth remembering that today the US has the largest prison population in the world

the development of the camp system followed economic lines. (To "corrective labor colonies" this applies to a much lesser extent, to special settlements almost not at all.) The growth of the camp system coincided with the peak of the Soviet industrialization campaign. Hence, most of the camps established to accommodate the masses of incoming prisoners were assigned distinct economic tasks. These included the exploitation of natural resources and the colonization of remote areas as well as the realization of enormous infrastructural facilities and industrial construction projects.

The atrocity of the Gulag was evident in the human suffering that was inflicted on a massive scale.

The total documentable deaths in the system of corrective-labor camps and colonies from 1930 to 1956 amount to 1,606,748, including political and common prisoners; note that this does not include more than 800,000 executions of "counterrevolutionaries" during the period of the "Great Terror", since they were mostly were conducted outside the camp system and were accounted for separately. From 1932 to 1940, at least 390,000 peasants died in places of labor settlements. The number of people who were prisoners at one point or the other is, of course, much larger, and one may assume that many of the survivors suffered permanent physical and psychological damage. Deaths at some camps are documented more thoroughly than those at others.

Forced labor

Extreme production quotas, brutality, hunger and harsh elements were major reasons for Gulag's high fatality rate, which was as high as 80% during the first months in many camps.

Of course, sheeple existed even then...

The memoirs of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov and Yevgenia Ginzburg, among others, became a symbol of defiance in Soviet society. These writings, particularly those of Solzhenitsyn, harshly chastised the Soviet people for their tolerance and apathy regarding the Gulag, but at the same time provided a testament to the courage and resolve of those who were imprisoned.

Now, as horrible as the Gulag was, GITMO, Abu Ghraib, Baghram are far worse from what I can tell. From what we know, prisoners are treated worse than animals. And whereas we do not know if prisoners in the Gulag were tortured and killed for amusement, we DO know that has taken place in American camps. So George, Dick, Donald, and the rest of you asses, Amnesty International has it exactly right.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

[lenidog]

1. You really need to read about the Gulag system

Because as bad as GITMO, Abu Ghraib, Baghram are the Gulags are infinitely worse.

[xray s]

2. Gulags were much larger in scope, certainly.

But the injustices and horrors on an individual basis seem to be comparable.

Being arrested without any legal recourse, innocent of any crime, and then tortured or beaten to death is wrong.

[burythehatchet]

3. that's the point. The administration cannot argue against

the individual level of abuse.

[burythehatchet]

5. I did read about it

and I would agree only in the dimension of scale. (btw, there is no plural of Gulag. The term refers to a system of prison work camps)

on edit - also keep in mind that there is a network of american prisons that are supposed to be completely secret. Then there are the flying prisons. The point is that these animals know exactly the extent of their atrocities. They also know to keep the light from shining on their activities.

[lenidog]

6. Yes I know exactly what a Gulag refers to

Many of these places were so horrific that only Nazi Germany's slave labor programs can compare to the conditions and the death rate that one found on them. Here is the most infamous of them.


http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/sjk/kolyma.html

[Yupster]

7. Just to mention another class of zechs

After holding out for months in the frozen kessel of Stalingrad, 95,000 German soldiers finally surrendered to the Russians in late February 1943.

Less than 5,000 of them ever returned to Germany. The rest of them died, were worked to death or were killed in the Russian system. And that was just from one battle.

Another pitiful class was Russian soldiers who had been overrun and surrendered to the Germans early in the war. When returned to Russia after the war, hundreds of thousands of them were sent to the Archipelago of camps since they were no longer trustworthy.

Solzhenitzyn himself was a Soviet artillery officer. He was sent to the Gulag because he wrote a letter critical of Soviet military leaders near the end of the war.

[MrModerate]

4. One of the reasons the Gitmo Gulag has not gotten traction . . .

Is the scope. Even if we assume tens of thousands of prisoners in the American Gulag (most in Iraq), that doesn't touch the millions in the Soviet system. Most Soviet citizens knew someone who'd been sent to a camp (and disappeared), knew someone who'd been sent and came back, lived near a camp, feared being sent to a camp, or HAD been sent to a camp. In that sense, the Soviet Gulag was a constant threat to everyday people.

Not so with the American Gulag. Dark-skinned people snatched from Afghanistan, Iraq, and other foreign places that most Americans never go don't seem quite real to many of our fellow citizens. The few (is it only a few?) taken in America itself or from Canada, the UK, etc. have generally left no impression.

Basically, Americans don't quite believe in the Gulag. News about the Amnesty International report might be the first time they pay attention.

IF they pay attention.

American has been guilty of small-scale concentration camp crimes before, and the governments who allowed them have generally gotten away with it. I mention the camps during WWII as only one example.

Gitmo, Baghram, Abu Ghraib don't add up to the Soviet Gulag, and don't (in lots of ways) even rise to the level of the WWII camps.

They're plenty evil, though, and certainly should be added to the impeachment scorecard. However, let's face it: the smoking guns with Bush administration fingerprints on them would have brought down 10 previous presidencies, but because of media cowardice and consolidation, wingnuts owning congress, the genuine fear of another 9/11 (which the bushbots have exploited brilliantly), plus (insert your favorite explanation), they're getting away with it again.

[lonestarnot]

8. Put a copy of the Gulag Archipelago out on my front patio months ago.

[morgan2]

9. I believe they are comparing it to a gulag

because its a prison, where a state powerful enough to not be questioned on the international scene is locking people up without any sort of trial or legal representation. The people there could be anyone the state deems worthy of being locked up.