Posted on 06/13/2006 6:58:17 PM PDT by nuconvert
Didn't the Nazis give tours of some ghettos to Red Cross or other organizations? I know I've seen this portrayed in films.
And a PBS documentary on child prostitution and slavery in India showed the "public" face of the people running things and denying horrors.
Yeah, right. In The Gulag Archepelago, there was a scene where Elanor Roosevelt visited a Stalinist slave camp. The inmates were given new clothes, fed a huge meal in front of her, and the translators gave their own answers to all the questions she asked the prisoners. "I murdered children for the Gestapo", etc.
I suppose we can learn from this and force the inmates at Gitmo to do some rug weaving, and take classes in safe homosexual sex.
As I understand it, we're already providing classes in literacy at Gitmo among other amenities.
Get a look at the picture at the link!
Yeah, all the cells look just like that!
Potemkin Prison...
The joke is on us Part 1 of 17: Returning to Iran: 1986-87 Sima Nahan
The really sick thing is, the regime actually thinks people will believe this!
After Elanor left they probably were all beaten.
ALI AKBAR !!!!
"The panorama of Evin serves for Melli University a function beyond what the site of the Namaz-e Jom'eh (Friday Prayer) serves for Tehran University. Shortly after the revolution, the soccer field at Tehran University was paved over and turned into the stage for the Friday Prayer. The area is wire-fenced in, facing a painted blue and green and yellow pulpit - a vague landscape of a sky and a sun - displaying a large photograph of Khomeini and smaller ones of the "martyred" Ayatollah Beheshti and Khomeini's then heir Ayatollah Montazeri. Before the mid-day prayer, a semi-automatic-toting preacher high in the power hierarchy - the President, the Speaker of the Parliament, the Prosecutor General, or the like - delivers a sermon or two that set the tone for the social and political atmosphere of the week to follow.
Modeled after the early Islamic display of Moslem unity and power, the Namaz-e Jom'eh in Tehran is a resurrected ritual that in the age of mass-media has increasingly been turned into a spectacle. From dawn each Friday, the streets surrounding the university area are closed off to traffic while thousands of men, women, and children - the umma of Hezbollah - are bused in and arranged in sections and rows designated by special rulings that are regularly repainted on the streets.
The televised broadcast of the image of the umma in prostration, then on their feet, on cue, stringing a series of "Death to..." slogans and shaking clenched fists into the camera, often finds its way into many a faraway living room. By late afternoon, buses transporting the last groups of women - drenched with sweat underneath their heavy veilings and carrying heat-struck small children - vacate the area, leaving the neighborhood to enjoy a brief respite after hours of blasting speeches and screeching microphones, and before the return of the noise and fumes of the usual traffic. On weekdays, the special rulings on the streets - signifiers of the farcical and violence-infused Namaz-e Jom'eh - blend with unobserved traffic signals into the gridlock of an even larger organization of ignored signs.
The impact of Evin, on the other hand, is that of a referent. The panorama of Evin is not meant to symbolize; and, while accessible to a live audience, the still-life vista is not meant for video cameras.
Two main buildings comprise the prison compound of Evin Prison. A red brick building that was operational under the Shah was "liberated" Bastille-style in 1979, with the intention, people now recall almost with amusement at their own naiveté, of turning it into a museum. Next to it stands a yellowing cement construction about three times larger in size, whose foundation was laid before the revolution and has been speedily completed by the Islamic Republic >>> Photos
The interior architecture of these buildings is impossible to reconstruct from descriptions. Visitors and prisoners are blindfolded as they are taken inside the buildings or moved about. Those prisoners who are allowed to visit with their families for ten minutes every 45 days across Plexiglas and through telephones, are led to the visiting room in a row, blindfolded, holding on to each others' hands, a rope, or corners of each others' veils. Visitors are screened at an office located in an amusement park ("Luna Park") across the highway from the main area of the prisons, where in the evenings children are treated to their meager, wartime ration of recreation"
And from another part:
"During her time at Qezel Hesar, the head of the prison was a man known by the customary title of Haji who has since been dismissed, allegedly on account of his unusually cruel ways but possibly because of factional differences. The pride of his establishment was one infamous Unit One, nicknamed The Coffin (Tabut), which was a large room divided by waist-high wood planks into a number of "coffins." Prisoners were confined to these structures, blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs, sitting upright without back support and with their legs stretched in front of them -- sometimes for months at a time.
The idea was to devise a method for prolonged torture that minimized the chance of death and loss of urgently sought information, and did not leave physical scars. The silence of the room was periodically broken by a fit of crying, or a prisoner standing up in her coffin, after which she would be taken away to "write." She would be given a supply of paper and left alone to put down the entire content of her memory, relevant and irrelevant to her accusations, until she became empty.
Haji was known to bring in a bouquet of flowers every now and then and declare: "I am holding fresh flowers from the garden outside. Would anyone like to smell the flowers?" He would even sometimes bring in his newborn son and ask: "Would anyone like to hold a baby...?" He would urge: "Come on girls, stand up, speak up, look what you're missing." And often the prisoners who did smell the flowers or touched the baby would "stand" and "write." M never experienced Unit One. Soon after her transfer to Qezel-Hesar her health began to deteriorate, her energy dwindle, and she broke no more rules. Unbeknownst to her she was serving the final months of her jail term and within four months she was returned to Evin and then released."
Cindy Sheehan and human shield crowd will lap it right up.
Definately barf alert.
These are, in fact, two different prisons, but the reasons for imprisonment and the treatment of the prisoners differs little. That the government buses "demonstrators" in every Friday to take propaganda clips says much. I could swear I've seen the exact same crowd clips during filmed news of Ahmadinejad's speeches - months apart.
Thanks. I haven't read that. But I certainly will.
The term for this is Potemkin Village. Stalin was an expert at it.
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"That the government buses "demonstrators" in every Friday to take propaganda clips says much. I could swear I've seen the exact same crowd clips during filmed news of Ahmadinejad's speeches - months apart."
They've been doing "rent-a-mob" since the rebellions against the Shah. Remember the mobs we were shown on the nightly news every night back before and during the hostage crisis? They got thousands to show up by offerring free food and money.
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