Americans in the gulag

Times On Line ^ | December 23, 2008 | Adam Hochschild

[Tribune7]

The testimony of Herman and Sgovio has found its way into some histories of the gulag. But Tzouliadis’s most unexpected contribution is the sorry tale of how desperate pleas for help from captive Americans, some smuggled out of prison, some made by family members still at liberty who risked their lives by walking into the closely watched US Eembassy, were ignored by diplomats in Moscow and officials back in Washington. Tzouliadis has burrowed through hundreds of old State Department correspondence files for this evidence, finding even a wooden tag smuggled out of a camp with the words, in English, “Save me please and all the others”. Even though the conservative Ambassador of tiny Austria was able to save the lives of more than twenty Austrian left-wingers by sheltering them in his basement, US officials, contemptuous of the Americans who had come to Russia out of naive idealism, did virtually nothing.

Gee, who was the president back in 1936???

[TonyStark]

Same with large, organized, centralized government. People gather the power, and then comes along a political robber, thank you very much.

This is what the left doesn’t understand. They don’t realized that putting all power in one place is like giving all your money to Madoff. It’s like going to sea in a ship with no water tight bulkheads.

You are just putting a big sign up to political psychopaths that says, “Here’s All The Power”.

It can’t happen here. Yeah, right.

This is a crystal-clear analysis of the weakness of centralized power as any sort of safeguard of life, liberty, and/or property.

Even if the initial architects are benign (which in itself is virtually unheard of), the artifice will be stormed and occupied by psychopaths.

In the case of the current US presidential coup, the architects are psychopaths who are only waiting to cement total power before opening the gates to their inner dark.

[DJ Taylor]

Here’s a tutorial that lends to the thesis of our discussion:

http://www.wimp.com/thegovernment/

[VR-21]

It was indeed a simple process, maddeningly simple, and there’s a lesson in the “over and over” part too which we fail to learn. What hubris it was for so many in the West to believe that communist ideology had been vanquished when the USSR fell. I fear that we haven’t yet seen the end of the “overs.” The terrible “-isms” of the 20th century were not dead after all, just dormant.

[sionnsar]

The communists are/were the most evil species ever to walk teh earth. It still blows my mind how “educated intellectuals” embrace these miscreants and their corrupt and evil ideology as just a different way of living.

Birds of a feather...

[Oatka]

For a good read about Americans jailed by the Russians in WWII, check out Escape From Archangel. A merchant seaman is arrested for a curfew violation and ends up in a Soviet work camp.

One passage that gives you a clue of the sub-human status people attained is where he talks about imprisoned Russians plotting an escape and needing a third man to go with them. The setup was called a "sandwich" because the third guy, chosen because he was weak and frail, would become food for the other two when things got tough - as they always did in that environment.

[starlifter]

We did very little to secure the release of the POW’s ‘liberated’ by the Russians or those (mostly aircrew) who were intered in the east. Blood is on the hands of the Russians, but not exclusively. There is also much blood on the hands of American officials who knew and chose to do nothing.

And Mr. Kissinger owes an explanation for leaving Americans behind in Vietnam. I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy where several former POW’s had their first assignment after repatriation. EVERY ONE of them told stories of acquaintances who were alive just before the repatriations began in early 1973 but were never returned nor heard from again.

A pox on Kissinger and Nixon for letting that happen.

[Sir_Ed]

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