A Zek Remembers Stalin’s Camps

Tablet ^ | SEPTEMBER 30, 2020 | TIMOTHY SNYDER

[robowombat]

This both fascinating and horrifying. Take this paragraph:

Margolin and his fellow inmates were evacuated eastwards from the camp on Lake Onega when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Some four million people were in Soviet camps when Hitler betrayed Stalin and Nazi Germany invaded its ally. In the next two years some 2.5 million more Soviet citizens were sentenced to the camps. Between 1941 and 1943, chaotic transports and drastic shortages made a camp sentence even more dangerous than before. About half a million deaths were officially registered in the camps in those years; the true figure is likely far higher.

[untenured]

The author, FWIW, while he has written compellingly on 20th-century horrors, thinks Mr. Trump is an incipient fascist.

[MuttTheHoople]

This is Kamala Harris’ vision for America.

[1FreeAmerican]

[ryderann]

The most fascinating book of this type that I’ve read is “The Long Walk”, by Slavomir Rawicz. Prepare for a long night because you won’t be able to put it down.

[HighSierra5]

It’s Kommiela’s vision for us patriots. They will be living the good life on our backs. But first they gotta come through me.

[robowombat]

I think this is done by many in the historical fraternity to keep their standing good so they will have career. Just for most of the Viet Nam the only books published were critical or worse derogatory and slanderous. Now that the 25 year rule has been passed a great volume of hitherto classified documentation has been made available but the history fraternity won't touch it. These documents include following day by day how in June 1965, LBJ felt there was no choice but for large scale conventional intervention as the general VC-NV operational plan had been picked on wireless and easily decrypted. It called for a progressively larger NVA conventional attack, at first out of the LAO Panhandle and then once the ARVN units were cleared out directly across the DMZ. The goal was to isolate destroy the five ARVN division and the SV Marines that the the NV considered capable of protracted resistance. Now outside of one book I have yet to see any of this documentation used. The original US commitment may have been unwise but the attempts to defeat the NVA/VC forces was not an exercise in great power chauvinism and racism.

[DIRTYSECRET]

An executive order is needed. All home must have a gun.

[EEGator]

[the OlLine Rebel]

Which author?

I’m confused which name to tie to this piece.

[untenured]

Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian, the author of the article

[robowombat]

To get a better understanding of why individual such as LTG McMaster oppose the Trump as strongly as many woke academics the following book is most enlightening:

Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century

Marini, John

It is not a quick read as the old Conservative Book Club volumes mostly were. It does explain how the elite attitudes which were incorporated into US security programs such as NATO, foreign military assistance, Marshall Plan which had general public support morphed into globalistic attitudes of brute force social engineering, gunpoint democratization and the PC/Cancel culture. As I say not an easy read but very worth while.

[Rummyfan]

I've been slogging my way through The Gulag Archipelago. It's slow going because it is so depressing....

[Rummyfan]

If there is one constant throughout human history, it seems to be man’s inhumanity to man. Across all centuries and all forms of government and all cultures.

[lurk]

Every American should read Solzhenitsyn. And Wurmbrand.

[Rummyfan]

The Zek was the only good thing about that Jack Reacher adaptation. Well, that and Rose Byrne....

Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher?! C’mon!

[TStro]

So true. Reacher was 6’5”, and came across as a lot tougher in the books. Read every one as it came out.

[DUMBGRUNT]

“This both fascinating and horrifying.”

Once started, difficult to stop reading.

Curious as to whether he reunited with his wife and son, I found this interesting review.

“Forgotten Witness to the Gulag”
https://forward.com/culture/134265/forgotten-witness-to-the-gulag/

Have yet to learn if he reunited with his family in Israel?
Does anyone know?

[avenir]

This short piece was riveting. The memoir has to be a heart breaker.

[cherry]

they're already living the good life....no govt worker lost anything during the panic....

same as in Russia....people vacationing in Sochi and people barely able to buy a car....