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Category: Evil

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Conservatism Democracy Egalitarianism Enlightenment Evil Individualism Liberalism Universalism

Egalitarianism is evil

Or:

Equality, the immovable object that stands in our way


Now that I am following Tom Sunic in that an egalitarian mindset is behind the empowerment of the Jews, the article “Moral Barriers to White Survival” by Alex Kurtagic published in American Renaissance (reproduced below) makes much sense, in spite of the fact that Kurtagic has been very reluctant to blame Christian axiology directly. He rightfully blames Enlightenment values though, but does not go as far as the European New Right which seems to perceive the root of our woes in our parents’ religion.

Kurtagic

Many race realists are frustrated by liberal resistance to empirical truths. They would like to think that any rational person will study the facts, reflect upon them, and modify his beliefs accordingly—not immediately, of course, nor without a healthy measure of skepticism, but surely over time. Yet, as I have often said, in discussions of race and race relations “the facts” are not as important as we would like to think, because when choosing sides on this topic people are motivated primarily by non-factual considerations. In this essay I will explore the reasons why liberalism, though rooted in the scientific revolution and coming from the rationalist and empiricist intellectual traditions, has proven so impervious to the science of race.

Any facts or arguments that are brought into a discussion about race and race relations are nearly always subordinated to social considerations. Some of these are the need to be liked by family and friends; the desire to be liked by those one likes and admires and by whom one wants to be liked and admired; the need for social status; and ethnic identification. These considerations, because they are important sources of essential human needs, may cause the same set of data to be interpreted by people in radically different ways, including ways that fly in the face of evidence and make no objective sense.

We have an obvious example in the liberal/Left’s assertion that race has no biological basis, when the senses tell us otherwise and there is even race-specific medicine. A liberal/Leftist is committed to a moral system that deems equality an absolute moral good, and in a Western society, his status, particularly among whites, depends on his being considered morally righteous. Therefore, he will readily accept convenient data but dismiss inconvenient data or make it conform to his requirements. Those who accept this convenient data are embraced by whites in Western societies as morally sound, while those who accept inconvenient data are marginalized as moral defectives.

Such bias is not exclusive to liberalism or the Left; it is everywhere. What changes according to ethnic identification and cultural context is the value assigned to a morality based on universal abstract principles: For whites in the West this is very important, for other groups, in the West and elsewhere, it is less so, as their moral systems tend to be particularist and ethnocentric rather than universalist—the good is what is good for them.

In Western societies, whites who hold unconventional views, even views that fall outside liberal morality, are not exempt from such bias either.


Critique of pure empiricism

Race realists are a product of modernity and Enlightenment philosophy. They realize that humans are motivated by moral and ethical sentiments rather than reason, but, at the same time, they act as if knowledge, understood as empirical evidence processed by reason, ought to be the basis for morality. In this sense they are the diametrical opposite of their opponents, for whom what ought to be determines what is.

Put in more simple terms, race realists forget that knowledge does not come into being in a moral vacuum. On the contrary, knowledge is sought and acquired by individuals committed, a priori, to a given moral code, and this knowledge is interpreted, disseminated, and then used in accordance with a moral code.

Liberal morality

The dominant moral system in the West is liberal morality. To understand this system we need to understand the structure of liberalism.

In liberalism, the historical subject is the individual. The individual is the measure of all things. The idea behind liberalism is to “liberate” the individual from anything that is external or transcendent to him, such as faith, tradition, and authority. The transcendent implies hierarchy: subordination of the individual to something higher. Absent this higher something, one is left only with the individual, and without faith, tradition, or higher authority, an individual becomes like any other individual. Thus, equality.

When individuals are equal, they have an equal claim to a slice of the pie. Thus the ideal type of government becomes democracy, in its most radical form. Concurrently, where there is equality, what applies to one individual applies to all equally, everywhere and always. This means universalism.

The abandonment of the transcendent leads to a worldview that is entirely secular, rational, and material. The way to happiness then becomes material increase, pursued by rational means. This results in production, consumption, and economics. It becomes necessary to produce and to find ways to maximize production. Individualism, equality, democracy, universalism, secularism, rationalism, materialism, and economism constitute the foundations of liberal morality.

Not all of these values have equal importance. Two of them—liberty and equality—are privileged above the others, and have produced two strands of liberalism in modern times. The strand that favors equality incorporates the Marxist critiques of liberalism formulated during the 19th and 20th centuries; this is the dominant strand of liberalism today.

The strand that favors liberty is closer to Classical Liberalism, and its purest expression is libertarianism; this represents an important oppositional view within liberalism. It is important to note, however, that both strands regard equality as an absolute moral good. In liberalism, in both its dominant form and its main oppositional form, the moral goodness of equality is taken for granted and stands beyond discussion or criticism. Liberal morality considers the questioning of the goodness of equality a serious moral defect.

Liberal morality therefore deems race realism an evil because race realism asserts the essential inequality of man. In this way liberal morality puts race realism outside the realm of acceptable discourse, and race realists outside the realm of civilized society.

Critiques of liberalism and its effects

During the 19th and 20th centuries, liberalism was subjected to critiques, from both the Left (Marxism) and the Right (Fascism/National Socialism). Liberalism, Marxism, and Fascism/National Socialism are the three primary ideologies of modernity. Fascism and National Socialism were defeated by Marxism and liberalism in 1945, and Marxism was defeated by liberalism in 1989. Of the three ideologies of modernity, only liberalism survives.

Fascism and National Socialism fell into discredit after the war and, due to their being inegalitarian ideologies, became shorthand for evil. Marxism was partially absorbed by modern liberalism because of its egalitarian morality, thus tipping modern liberalism even more heavily toward egalitarianism. As a result, modern liberalism is distinct from classical liberalism.

The triumph of liberalism has, in turn, made it invisible. Russian theorist Alexander Dugin claims that it has long since ceased to be political, and has gone on to become a taken-for-granted practice. We have certainly seen liberals branding critiques of liberalism as “ideological” without any sense that their own worldview is ideological.

Opposition of liberty and equality within liberalism

The triumph of liberalism, and the triumph of equality within liberalism, has meant that now, even liberty is subordinated to the requirements of equality. As communism and the multicultural experiment have demonstrated, liberty and equality are incompatible, so the ever-greater pursuit of equality results in the ever-greater erosion of liberty. A commitment to radical equality results in the proliferation of laws, state surveillance, police enforcement, prosecutions, incarcerations—and bureaucracies to administrate all of the above, and higher taxes to pay for all of it.

This is nowadays always justified with the argument that unlimited freedom leaves the field open to “fascism” (i.e., inequality), and that liberty must be curtailed in order to protect, guarantee, and maximize equality. We end up with a circular argument, then, whereby equality is good because it increases equality.



Immovable object?

Therefore, the single biggest impediment to the cause of Western man in the West is not lack of knowledge about race, but lack of a moral justification for valuing whiteness and everything it entails. Obviously, to value whiteness gives it a special status, which means inequality. In liberal morality, it is not acceptable to recognize whiteness, because it is a category that exists above the individual, and the individual is supposed to be the measure of all things, a tabula rasa, equivalent and interchangeable with any other individual.

In addition, modern liberalism incorporates a Marxist historiography in which whites are an oppressor class and people of color an oppressed class. This is explicitly the historiography of the postcolonial theory that is taught in Western universities, which privileges the voices of the colored “oppressed.” These voices subject whiteness and the West to radical deconstruction and criticism. Whiteness is, in fact, allowed recognition only when it is linked to oppression; in any other context, a black person has the specificity of his blackness, but a white person has the unspecificity of being simply a human, who is no different from or more special than anyone else.

Thus, belief in the moral goodness of equality is the seemingly immovable object that stands in the way. If politics is the art of the possible, then any campaign predicated on values outside the perimeter of what is morally acceptable—i.e. outside liberal morality—will not be politically possible.

The cause for Western man requires a fundamental shift in consciousness that would begin with a thorough discrediting of the notion that equality is a moral good. Until this has been achieved, ethnic politics privileging whiteness in the West will go nowhere, and it will remain easy for the liberals to shut down debate with the simple expression of outrage and name-calling.

Time horizons

Critics of this view may object that while it may be true that a change of politics will require a change of moral system, the time necessary to achieve this is too long and no longer available to us.

This objection assumes that challenging liberal morality is an entirely new project that must begin from zero. In fact, liberal morality, like all ideological moral systems, is merely a transient phenomenon, whose present dominance conceals the long tradition it once successfully challenged. Since ancient times and until the more recent part of the modern era, Westerners have considered quality more important than equality. Consequently, there is a vast philosophical canon to draw from, recover, reinterpret, and adapt to the modern world. Indeed, this has been the project of the European New Right, and The Fourth Political Theory, by Dugin, is an important contribution to this effort that outlines possibilities for a way forward, though any fourth political theory towards a post-liberal West would necessarily need to be home-grown and have a uniquely Western formulation.

The objection also partakes, inadvertently, in liberal cosmology, which conceives historical processes as linear progressions. In fact, as communism demonstrated, when power changes hands, the transition is not incremental but abrupt, with dissent gestating almost invisibly at first, under the surface, before growing exponentially, achieving critical mass, and producing a sudden change in state. This is also the way transformations occur in nature and the universe.

Liberal morality will eventually collapse. The question in the West is whether it will give way to another, autochthonous morality or to the morality of our conquerors. If the former, historians of the future will probably not see us as a rupture, but as yet another reinvention of European man within his wider metacultural tradition; they are likely to see liberalism as a political-moral-philosophical paradigm that came and went, the way others had come and gone before. Historians of the future may mark the periods of history differently from us, and by tracing the origins of our ideas, may decide that this reinvention was the culmination of a process that had begun centuries before.

Conservative commentators, such as Pat Buchanan, blame the multicultural society in the West on the Frankfurt School of Social Research and other such Freudo-Marxist subversion, and place the watershed moment of social transformation in the 1960s. Mr. Buchanan is, however, a liberal, albeit of a more classical or archaic sort than his critics, who are also liberals. We can trace the origins of the multicultural society much further back, to the Enlightenment, of which the United States (but not the colonies out of which it was organised) is an expression. European New Right intellectuals and historians trace it farther back still, to Christian metaphysics, which sees all men created in God’s image, with salvation available to all.

The question in the West is how much territory we will lose before we can successfully discredit liberal morality. Curtailing those losses will require the artificial precipitation within liberalism of a moral and intellectual crisis that puts current morality on the defensive, generates doubt and loss of confidence in its principles, and leads eventually to panic, overreaction, and loss of credibility. The speed at which this can be achieved depends on complex factors, not to mention a measure of good fortune, but modern technology enables us to communicate and disseminate ideas more rapidly, more widely, and more cheaply than ever before.

Theory into practice

In any movement there are five planes of operation: the intellectual, the strategic, the organisational, the activist, and the man in the street. The first four are the movement proper and the latter is its target, which can be divided into three categories: the committed, who cannot be persuaded either for or against; the persuadable, who are the primary target for recruitment; and the conformist, who is apolitical and will follow whomever looks like a winner.

The activist will be useless, even counter-productive, unless his message and his arguments are informed by a sound, appropriate, and articulable moral theory; unless he is organised to operate credibly and effectively; and unless his organisation has strategies that can translate abstract theory into a pragmatic, results-oriented program of action.

The discrediting of liberal morality will need to be a process that begins with theoretical tracts and ends with protests, sit-ins, strikes, boycotts, and a pattern of establishment compromises and capitulation. The general theory will need to find its way into an endless barrage of narrowly defined, single-issue, winnable campaigns. It will be up to each individual to decide his preferred tactic and field of operation, based on his own strengths, weaknesses, experience, and areas of expertise. In this sense the opportunities are endless.

In the battle for the West the main obstacle in the Anglo-American world has been its aversion to theory. Anglo-Saxon man is pragmatic by nature, not given to philosophical speculation. He prefers to deal in the concrete and the factual. This problem is compounded by the fact that the United States—the world’s dominant power—is an Enlightenment project, whose founding documents were formulated by classical liberals in accordance with their philosophy. United States institutions may have fallen into the hands of hostile elites, but the liberal values of liberty, equality, democracy, and progress remain strong, and are, in fact, exploited by these elites to advance their interests. Theory is important. A way around this is to focus on morality, because Anglo-Saxon man is deeply preoccupied with morality.

The breakthrough will have been achieved when homo equalis is filled with deep feelings of shame when he is confronted with his own beliefs.

Caveats

The destruction of liberal morality will cause the collapse of liberalism. However, the collapse of liberalism will not necessarily mean that the individual values that comprise it will henceforth all be beyond the pale. It may be that not all of liberalism is bad and some of its constituent parts can be repurposed within a different set of value relations. If so, they will not be recognized as part of liberalism.

Also, while theory is important, this does not mean that everyone reading this should become a theoretician. For the Marxist, his theory is everything, but the anti-racist thugs who disrupt conferences and other events, while a product of Marxism, are unlikely to have ever read Marx, for they can hardly read their own names.

Final words

Ultimately, the problem of race realism is reducible to a single idea: that it is not the facts, but how people feel about the facts. The barriers that have limited or prevented the communicability of our proposition will only start to fall away when the value of whiteness can be expressed in righteous tones.


___________________________



See also “The liberal axiom,”
which could be used as a corollary to Kurtagic’s piece.

Categories
2nd World War Dwight D. Eisenhower Ethnic cleansing Evil Hellstorm Holocaust Thomas Goodrich

Book review by Tom Goodrich

Orderly & Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2012). This review originally appeared at Counter-Currents.



orderlyandhumane
After reading a book or two and watching a few hours of TV documentaries on the couch, most smugly imagine that they know something of World War II. Most, of course, know nothing. What most think about WWII is what the winners want them to think about WWII; we call it the victor’s version of history. That version is a rather neat and tidy account, a clean and pleasing morality play of heroes and villains, of good versus evil, of catchy and easy to remember phrases like “Crusade in Europe,” the “Good War,” the “Greatest Generation,” “Nazi butchers,” “Hitler, the Evil Madman,” “Six Million,” etc. That black and white version paints the losers as all-evil, all-vicious, all-enslaving, all-everything bad and it paints the winners as all-good, all-suffering, all-liberating, all-noble, all-virtuous. But then, I’m wasting time on things most of you already know.

World War Two was man’s greatest cataclysm. Nothing else comes close. Tens of millions died, tens of millions were raped, tens of millions were enslaved, tens of millions were uprooted and cast to the wind, and the thing that Western man loves more than life itself—his freedom—was taken. With the fall of Germany and its allies in the spring of 1945, the forces of darkness stood gloating and triumphant. The last significant opposition to their grand designs on the West had been crushed, and now they went to work dividing the spoils and sucking the last drop of blood from the vanquished. One might imagine that from such an earth-shaking, epochal event every facet would have by now been studied down to the last detail by the world’s historians and academics, but one would imagine wrong. Precisely because the war was won by the forces of hate and evil, only one half of the story has ever been told and that, of course, is the side the winners chose to tell us.

Slowly, slowly, after nearly 70 years, the details from what it looked like down there in the grave where the losers lay are beginning to surface. And what is being revealed is a crime so monstrous, so enormous, and so hideous in its length and breadth that words have not yet been invented to describe it. So vicious and persistent was the anti-German propaganda, and so deep and pervasive was the consequent hatred for everything German both during and after the war, that this nearly successful attempt to extirpate the German people was committed with hardly a stir from the “civilized world.” So utterly demonized were the Germans by the largely Jewish press around the world that virtually anything could be said about Germany, virtually any crime could be committed against its helpless population, and none would raise a hand or offer a word against it. The evidence of crimes committed and the criminals who committed them have always been there. The horrifying accounts have remained in various archives and journals gathering nearly 70 years of dust but except for an intrepid few no historians have mustered the courage to reveal these dark secrets to the world.

In addition to deliberate attempts to kill every man, woman, and child in Germany by the Allied air forces with their terror bombing and “targets of opportunity” campaign (red crosses on hospital roofs were especial targets), a similar slaughter was taking place below as the invading hordes of the Soviet Union raped and/or murdered virtually every German that fell into their hands. On the Baltic Sea, a similar slaughter was taking place as Allied submarines and bombers sank every refugee ship they could find, killing tens of thousands of helpless women, children, the sick, and the elderly.

After the war, when the so-called peace was declared, millions of German POWs were herded into muddy outdoor fields where they remained without food, water, shelter, or medical treatment. Although there was plenty of food available, and although rivers often ran just beyond the barbed wire, Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight. D. Eisenhower, was determined to kill as many of the defeated as he could before world reaction stepped in to stop the slaughter.

“God, I hate the German,” hissed the future American president.

In other parts of defeated Germany, hell on earth was unleashed when Jewish émigrés and those released from concentration camps, with Allied bayonets to back them, rounded up German soldiers and civilians, men and women, then placed them in their own Jewish-run death camps. In addition to suffering some of the most sadistic and sickening tortures the mind can conjure, hundreds of thousands of these Germans were simply beaten to death, drowned, or buried alive.

One of the most heartless and deadly crimes committed against helpless Germans was the forced removal from their homes. Orderly and Humane—The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War by R. M. Douglas seeks to shed light on this little known aspect of World War II history. The story is a tragic one. First, some seven million Germans living in the eastern provinces of the Reich–Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia–were violently uprooted by land-hungry and vengeful Poles and ordered to leave, sometimes with only a few minutes’ notice. Then, several million more, many whose families had lived for centuries in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other central European nations were expelled by their envious and blood-thirsty neighbors. It is estimated that of the 12 to 14 million Germans cast to the wind, as many as two million perished. Many were slaughtered in hideous ways; others succumbed to the elements. In spite of Allied assurances to the world that the removal of these pathetic refugees was carried out in an “orderly and humane” manner, their lies were soon shown to be mere Orwellian double-speak.

I wanted to like this book. I wanted to welcome Professor Douglas into the world of truth-seekers. I wanted to praise both his bravery and honesty as well as his careful scholarship. But after only a short spin through the book, I discovered that I could not. From the outset, Douglas–a card-carrying court historian–wants to make it perfectly clear to his academic peers and the Jewish media watchdogs who stand in his career path with suspicious eyes and folded arms, that he has the “right stuff”; that this project is merely a scholarly study to understand post-war politics and European population dynamics and not an attempt to enlist sympathy for the Germans themselves; for the thousands of brained German babies, for the tens of thousands of murdered German men, for the hundreds of thousands of raped German women. “It is appropriate at the outset,” sniffs Douglas in his intro,

“to state explicitly that no legitimate comparison can be drawn between the postwar expulsions and the appalling record of German offenses against Jews and other innocent victims between 1939 and 1945. The extent of Nazi criminality and barbarity in central and eastern Europe is on a scale and of a degree that is almost impossible to overstate. In the entire span of human history, nothing can be found to surpass it, nor… to equal it. Germany’s neighbors suffered most grievously and unjustifiably at her hands, and were profoundly traumatized as a result. Whatever occurred after the war cannot possibly be equated to the atrocities perpetrated by Germans during it, and suggestions to the contrary—including those made by expellees themselves—are both deeply offensive and historically illiterate. Nothing I have written in the book should be taken to suggest otherwise.”

With that nifty bit of genuflecting, with his kosher credentials seemingly intact, Douglas no doubt imagines that he will hence be given a life-long pass to enter the happy halls of historians. As this groveling academic will find out soon enough, a Christian writing about “controversial” Christian subjects will never crawl fast enough or far enough to satisfy his commissars.

In fairness to Douglas, he does go where few have gone before. The expulsion of Germans from the ancestral homes, many families of whom had lived there hundreds of years, is a crime so enormous and cruel that had it been the only crime committed by the Allies it would have been more than enough to convict them for all times to come as war criminals and inhuman monsters. Unfortunately, this Douglas tome is dry and dead as dust.

The German victims themselves are almost never heard from. Perhaps it is because Douglas feels Germans are not to be trusted. Citing that high moral authority, Edvard Beneš, the bloody butcher who orchestrated the massacre of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, Douglas quotes: “All German stories should not, of course, be believed, for Germans always exaggerated and were the first to whine and to try to enlist outside sympathy.” As a consequence, Douglas thereupon announces that he has thus “made it a rule to exclude direct expellee testimony that is not supported by independent sources.”

One must wonder just who these “independent sources” are that could provide better testimony than the victims themselves, but then again, perhaps that is not too hard to figure out. One must also wonder if Douglas would demand “independent sources” to support the statements of Jewish “survivors” and their extravagant claims of bestial Nazi atrocities? Of human soap? Of human lamp shades? Of shower heads spewing clouds of gas? Would he say those statements were also deeply offensive and historically illiterate? Right! And that is what separates this hypocritical court historian from an honest, unbiased truth-seeker.

Although a capable, competent study, as modern histories go, so intent is Douglas to dwell in the details of politics, borders, statistics, and demographics, that the personal and human is totally lost. One hardly is aware that the subjects of his book were actually real people, people who lived, breathed, suffered, cried, and all too often, people who died.

Nowhere is heard the screams of disarmed German soldiers as they were doused in gas by mobs and hung upside down like living torches. Nowhere is found the pathos of a mother, without shelter or food, watching her tiny child die of starvation right before her eyes. Nowhere are heard the groans of women, “from 8 to 80,” forced to endure one rape after another as they slowly bled to death.

This trend in modern historical writing—“historiography,” as it is stuffily called—is one reason why the reading of history has fallen in disrepute and why such books similar to Douglas’ cannot even be given away to the public. It is also why promising students upon entering college major in anything but history. This is the type of lifeless, insipid writing that kills the heat in a history-loving heart. I suppose it is easier for a reader to dismiss several million dead Germans if they fall asleep reading the book rather than transforming them into very real people who were deliberately murdered in cold blood.

What happened to Germany during and after the war was actually a crime wrapped around a crime—the evil abomination that was committed against the German people was the initial crime and the crime that kept it dark and hidden for almost 70 years was the other. If for no other reason, Orderly and Humane is important simply because of its existence and the tacit admission, tedious as it is, that once upon a time during the “Good War” this terrible crime did indeed occur.


___________________________

Thomas Goodrich is a professional writer living in Florida. Tom’s most recent book, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, has been excerpted here: the first comprehensive account of Allied war crimes committed against Germany and her allies.

Categories
Evil Hellstorm Holocaust Thomas Goodrich

Let’s start the new year…

With an interview to the author of the most important book of the 21st century to date:




I’ve typed
some excerpts
directly from the book

Click: here



Postscript of January 4:

From Tom’s desk:

There seems to be a good many people who are critical of Hellstorm because they say it is too graphic, too bloody, too over the top. I think the implication is that I am throwing this out there in a gratuitous sort of way and that I derive some vicarious pleasure out of reporting such horror. Here is a response I sent someone last evening, and a quote you may use if you see fit:

As far as the graphic–to a sickening degree–nature of the book, I, of course, realize this but I’m not sure what to tell people. These things were done to these victims. I am not making this up or embellishing the accounts for some sadistic pleasure. If I was tortured to death by some human monster, I would want every one on earth to know just exactly how I was killed down to the last detail. To simply say that I ‘was tortured to death’ does nothing to show the full depravity and evil of the torturer. These monsters inflicted the pain and suffering on these people and I refuse to hide one bit of their vicious depravity, though it may make readers sick. To those who say the book is too violent and too graphic, I say “read the book, then read it again, read every damn word, read it and remember it, then make sure you fight to prevent it from ever happening to anyone again.”

And by the way, Cesar, as I type some of this same type of torture is being used on victims right now in the numerous CIA-run torture hells around the world. Americans have been torturing people for quite a long time now. It neither began nor ended with Germany.

Hope the New Year is treating you well.

Tom

Categories
2nd World War Americanism Europe Evil Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Who We Are, 25

The following is my abridgement of chapter 25 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

The Second World War: Greatest Watershed of World History
Racial View of Life Governed Germany
War Propaganda Depended on White Provincialism
Tide of Western Civilization Turned at Stalingrad
After War U.S. Got Same Dose as Forced on Germans

 

In recent installments we have seen the White race expand outward from Europe over the globe, conquering and colonizing; we have traced its interactions with alien races in particular, with the Jews; and we have seen its way of life transformed radically, as the feudalism and then the corporatism of the Middle Ages gave way to new social forms in the modern era. We have also witnessed two major upheavals: the Reformation, followed by the ruinous Thirty Years War; and the French Revolution, followed by the Napoleonic Wars. In both cases White society was badly disrupted, and the race’s defenses against its enemies were weakened. As we saw in the last installment, the Jews were quick to take advantage of this.

Nevertheless, when the 20th century dawned European man was still firmly in control everywhere, and he was on the verge of some of the most magnificent victories of his entire history.

But the same quarter-century also saw White men slaughter one another on an unprecedented scale. Although only the American promoters of the slaughter were so brazen as to openly proclaim that its purpose was to “make the world safe for democracy,” that, in fact, was the outcome which the First World War went a long way toward establishing. It was a democratic war, in which finance-capital and the manipulators of the rabble joined hands to finish the job begun 125 years earlier with the storming of the Bastille.

With the politicians cheering them on from a safe distance, sixty-one million White men (plus some four million assorted Japanese, Turks, and Negroes) marched forth to do battle. Nine million of them never marched back. Seven million White civilians also lost their lives, many of them from the starvation caused by a British naval blockade of Germany and her allies which was maintained even after hostilities on the battlefield had ended.

But the cause of democracy was definitely advanced. In the first place, by selectively killing off the brightest and the bravest as never before, the war left a population more susceptible to the type of mass manipulation inherent in democratic rule. And, of course, autocratic rule suffered a major setback, as Kaiser and Tsar met their ends.

In Russia the social and economic ravages of the war provided the necessary preconditions for the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, another giant step forward for democracy—at least, in the eyes of President Wilson and others of a similar mindset. Addressing the U.S. Congress on April 2, 1917, Wilson said: “Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia?”

Those who, like Wilson, fawned on the Jews also found “wonderful and heartening” the consolidation of democracy in Russia which soon followed, when the triumphant Bolsheviks murdered most of the Russian intelligentsia.

nsdap

The National Socialist Revolution. Of greater significance ultimately than all these scientific and technological advances [omitted in this abridged edition] was the dawning of a new sense of racial consciousness and racial mission during the second quarter of the century, and the establishment of a new society based on this awakened racial feeling and dedicated to the goal of racial progress. The new society was that built by Adolf Hitler and his followers in National Socialist Germany between 1933 and 1945.

It was a society from which alien racial elements and alien spiritual and cultural influences were progressively excluded. The Jews who had been burrowing into German cultural life since the Napoleonic Wars of the previous century were rooted out of the universities and the government bureaucracy, the newspapers and the cinema, radio broadcasting and book publishing.

The homosexuals who had been parading along Berlin’s main streets in women’s clothing were rounded up and packed off to labor reeducation camps to think things over. Drug dealers and communist activists found themselves facing the executioner’s ax. The mulatto offspring of French-colonial Negro occupation troops and German women, stemming from the postwar period, were sterilized, along with tens of thousands of congenitally defective Germans.

An enormous investment was made in educational and recreational programs: curricula for the schools were redesigned to develop a strong sense of racial identity in each child; young adults were taught to look for the best racial qualities when seeking mates and to think of marriage as a sacred institution for producing the next generation of the race; workers were taken on group outings to different parts of the country in order to broaden their outlooks and augment parochial loyalties with national feelings; pageants, public lectures, folk festivals, fairs, parades, and other activities were used extensively to stimulate an understanding of and an appreciation for their cultural heritage among the people.

The differing values of human beings were no longer determined by the amounts of money they were able to accumulate, but by their inherent racial quality and by the social value of their work.

Hitler was determined from the beginning that the new Germany would be a state ruled by a definite view of life, and not by politicians chosen either by power brokers in smoke-filled back rooms or by the fickle and easily manipulated masses. The leaders of the state would henceforth be men trained, screened, and selected for that task from their early youth, not those political candidates with the most fetching smiles and convincing lies, as was the rule elsewhere in the West.

The degeneracy and decadence which had characterized the democratic Weimar regime in Germany prior to 1933, with all its prancing homosexuals, self-destructive drug addicts, jaded thrill seekers, musical and artistic nihilists, pandering Jews, Marxist terrorists, and whining self-pitiers, were gone, and in their place was a nation of healthy, enthusiastic, self-reliant, and purposeful Germans.

Implacable Hostility. Thus, it was world Jewry which publicly declared war on National Socialist Germany only six months after Hitler took office as chancellor. In his declaration of war (published in the August 7, 1933, issue of The New York Times), Jewish leader Samuel Untermyer explicitly noted that he expected the Jews’ Christian friends to join them in their “holy war” (his words) against Germany.

And, of course, they did—not just the illiterate fundamentalists from America’s Appalachia, who, not knowing any Jews personally, found it easier to believe the Old Testament claim of Jewish “chosenness” than those who lived in closer proximity to the Self Anointed Ones, but also the mainline Christians of America and Britain, the more intelligent of whom recognized in the National Socialist world view a creed antithetical to their own.

In the 1930’s and early 1940’s the Jews had not yet consolidated their grip on all the news and entertainment media of the English-speaking world. There were no television networks, of course, and there were still many independent newspapers and magazines. A united opposition to Jewish war plans by alert Whites might have won the day.

Most Whites, however, were neither alert nor united. Their “leaders,” the products of a democratic system, were generally devoid of both character and any sense of responsibility. Only an exceptionally bold, selfless, and responsible few—men like aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh—spoke out effectively. The Jews, on the other hand, found many prominent and powerful Whites with no scruples against taking their money and following their lead.

Still, it was not an easy job to convince millions of White men—the majority of them originally of German origin—to march off to Germany in order to butcher their White cousins, just because the latter had dared raise their hands against the Chosen People.

[William Pierce explains in the following paragraphs that, although the racial feeling was not dead, the spiritual dimension among Americans was almost completely lacking, and that this was aggravated by a lethal form of American provincialism that became an easy target for Jewish war propaganda, through which outrageous lies were aired about German plans to invade the country. Then, under the subheading “Racial Suicide,” Pierce adds:]

When huge fleets of RAF and USAAF heavy bombers destroyed Hamburg in July and August 1943, killing 70,000 German civilians, the foolish British and Americans imagined that they had struck a great blow against their enemies. They little suspected that their true enemies rejoiced to see them killing so many of their own kind.

And when the raping queues of Mongol soldiers formed in every residential neighborhood of a shattered and defeated Berlin, in front of every house where they found a pretty German girl or woman, there was dancing in the streets of London and New York by throngs of empty-headed Whites who did not even dream that what they had caused to happen to the women of Germany would soon enough begin happening to their own women, on their own streets and in their own homes, and that Jew-instigated “civil rights” laws would render them powerless to defend their womenfolk against growing and ever-bolder swarms of savages from every non-White corner of the earth.

Postwar Payoff. And so it was that when the war was finally over—and to the people pulling the strings that meant when Germany was defeated, for Italy and Japan were wholly secondary concerns—it seemed only natural that many things should begin changing. After all, the people had assented to the destruction of everything for which National Socialist Germany stood.

Should Americans and Britons have given their all to smash racism in Germany, only to tolerate racism in America or in Britain? Should people who had just finished killing millions of Germans, in order to teach them that they did not have the right to exclude Jews from their society, still believe that Mexicans could be excluded from the United States or Pakistanis from Britain?

No, it is quite clear that the era of social turmoil and change which followed the war grew inevitably out of the new attitudes deliberately inculcated in order to make the war possible.

And it is clear that the war not only resulted in a vast spread and strengthening of Marxist power, but that it also brought about a significant decline in the moral authority of the White world relative to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The White man had questioned his own right to rule, and so he could hardly expect non-Whites not to ask the same questions. Thus, the dissolution of the British Empire, and the end of European colonialism everywhere, were direct consequences of the changed attitudes accompanying the war.

Finally, just as clearly as the Germans lost the war, so did Britain and the United States. In fact, the loser was the White race: European man, whatever his nationality. It was the greatest, most catastrophic loss the race has yet suffered. Whether the loss will prove to be irreparable and decisive remains to be seen.

Categories
2nd World War Evil Kali Yuga Philosophy of history Who We Are (book) William Pierce

The West’s Darkest Hour

To avoid replicating the texts,
I’ve moved the content of this post: here

 

Categories
2nd World War Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Autobiography Evil Hellstorm Holocaust Holocaust Kali Yuga Morgenthau Plan Thomas Goodrich

The ascent of the soul

Before reading last year J. A. Sexton’s review of Thomas Goodrich’s Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, I knew nothing of what the Allied forces had done to defenseless Germans during and after the Second World War.

I confess that, throughout most of my adult life, I was infected with anti-Nazi hatred due to my mind having been colonized with films, books that I read, articles and documentaries about the evils of National Socialist Germany. Little did I realize then that the War propaganda has not really ended, which made me demonize the Third Reich in my inner thoughts for many years—the System simply had covered up the history of what actually happened from 1944 to 1947.

Now that thanks to Hellstorm I have awakened to the real world I am moved to, in memory of the millions of men, women and children tormented and murdered by the Allies, keep a moment of silence out of respect for the victims. Freezing this site for a while with this entry at the top will provide visiting westerners in general, and Germans in particular, the opportunity to find out the grim facts about an unheard of Holocaust perpetrated on Germanic people—a real Holocaust in every sense of the word.

As to the perpetrators of the crime of the age, in his Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn, who in his younger years was involved in the rape and murder of civilian Germans, wrote:

There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my captain’s shoulders boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: “So were we any better?” And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me:

“Bless you, prison!”…

In prison, both in solitary confinement and outside solitary too, a human being confronts his grief face to face. This grief is a mountain, but he has to find space inside himself for it, to familiarize himself with it, to digest it, and it him. This is the highest form of moral effort, which has always ennobled every human being. A duel with years and with walls constitutes moral work and a path upward… if you can climb it.

Through tragic personal experience I corroborated that processing the mountain of grief was, certainly, the only way to develop the soul. Only the rarest among the rare have climbed the path. Which is why in no website that I know in this hedonistic age the forced initiation is taken seriously. But there are exceptions… In the comments section of this site, Goodrich wrote:

I wrote the above book…
I died a thousand deaths in so doing…
Yet I felt I had to finish it—for them.
Thanks to Mr. Sexton for his review.
Like himself, I have never been the same man since.
I am sad… but I am also extremely mad… extremely mad.

Last weeks I had to pause during my agonic reading of Hellstorm by talking frequent breaks, but like the author I had to digest the sins that the West committed against itself—and besides feeling outraged paradoxically I also feel strangely calm and liberated now. The psychological causes of self-loathing among present-day westerners had been an enigma. The idea is dawning in my mind that the last words quoted by Goodrich in the last page of his book provide an answer:

We had turned the evil of our enemies back upon them a hundredfold, and, in so doing, something of our integrity had been shattered, had been irrevocably lost.

Alas, since Anglo-Saxons did not examine their conscience but instead still celebrate their having led the “civilized” world in ganging up on Germany, the moral integrity of this subgroup of the white world is gone. Forever gone. And precisely because of the unredeemed character of this sin, what the former Allies did in Hitler’s Germany has created a monster from the Id that has been destroying our civilization since then: a lite Morgenthau Plan for all white people.

It is true that I have abandoned Christianity. But I still believe in the salvific effects of the triad examining conscience, repentance and atonement: the painful soul-building that Solzhenitsyn experienced in his cell (though, it must be said, not as a penalty for his having massacred civilian Prussians). If, unlike him, we haven’t had the opportunity of being committed to a gulag prison, let us experience, in the gloomy solitude of our bedrooms, the same painful yet awakening process through pondering on the historical events exposed in Goodrich’s book.

Prison causes the profound rebirth of a human being… profound pondering over his own “I”… Here all the trivia and fuss have decreased. I have experienced a turning point. Here you harken to that voice deep inside you, which amid the surfeit and vanity used to be stifled by the roar from outside…

Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering…

Categories
2nd World War Evil Hellstorm Holocaust Mainstream media Thomas Goodrich

Hellstorm • epilogue

In almost any war one side can be dishonestly demonized even by a truthful enumeration of its crimes, if the crimes of its adversaries are suppressed. —Irmin Vinson


Excerpted from Thomas Goodrich’s 2010 book

Hellstorm:
The Death of Nazi Germany
(1944-1947)



Epilogue

As Hans Woltersdorf observed, and as Allied occupation troops would later attest, the one element almost totally lacking in the German heart during the post-war years was, surprisingly, the spirit of hatred and revenge.

Paradoxically, while the defeated had neither the time nor the inclination to look back, the victors did. Continuing the process begun before the war, the Western propaganda offensive against Germany proceeded with renewed vigor following the war. In thousands of books, articles, and movies, the world was reminded over and over again that the Nazi Party in particular, and all Germans in general, were solely responsible for the war; that they and they alone had committed beastly atrocities; that only the German people and their leaders were war criminals; that German guilt was somehow something “unique.” Curiously, many who argued this thesis and were often its most violent proponents were also those who had been furthest removed from the actual fighting itself.

Among those closest to the fight, however, post-war propaganda had negligible results. Indeed, far from being filled with hatred as they were expected to be, many maturing Allied soldiers and airmen—those who actually fought on the ground or bombed from the air—were some of the least vindictive and some of the most forgiving. After boarding with Germans, dining with Germans, drinking with Germans, and sometimes, after courting and falling in love with Germans, many Allied troops ultimately began to understand and identify with Germans. Too late, most came to the shocking realization that in no appreciable way was their former enemy different from themselves. Ashamed by the sadistic, blood-thirsty propaganda they had swallowed so eagerly and obeyed so blindly, many young men—Americans, British, French, and even Russians—knew all too well from experience that neither Nazis or Germans had a corner on crime and that there was nothing “unique” about guilt or evil.

One of the most outspoken opponents of singular war guilt was the intrepid American journalist, Freda Utley. “An atrocity ceases to be one when committed in a ‘good cause,’ that is, our own,” wrote the hard-hitting author in her 1949 book, The High Cost of Vengeance.

I thought it was high time we stopped talking about German guilt, since there was no crime the Nazis had committed, which we or our allies had not also committed. I had referred to our obliteration bombing, the mass deportation and expulsion from their homes of twelve million Germans on account of their race; the starving of the Germans during the first years of the occupation; the use of prisoners as slave laborers; the Russian concentration camps, and the looting perpetrated by Americans as well as Russians… Compared with the rape and murder and looting engaged in by the Russian armies at the war’s end, the terror and slavery and hunger and robbery in the East zone today, and the genocide practiced by the Poles and Czechs, the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Germans condemned at Nuremberg to death or lifelong imprisonment appeared as minor in extent if not in degree.

J.F.C. Fuller agreed. “For fifty or a hundred years, and possibly more,” announced the British major general, “the ruined cities of Germany will stand as monuments to the barbarism of their conquerors.”

Another backward-looking Briton, an RAF crewman, expressed in simple, yet profound, terms a thought that thousands of other Allied soldiers and airmen no doubt pondered for the rest of their lives: “Had the Germans won the war, should we or ought we to have been tried as war criminals?… The thoughts live with me to this day.”

For the most part though, such reflections were kept strictly private.

We had turned the evil of our enemies back upon them a hundredfold, and, in so doing, something of our integrity had been shattered, had been irrevocably lost. All, all, were one, all were the ghastly horror of what we had known, of what we had helped to do… Face it when you close this book.


____________________________

Educate yourself about the Holocaust perpetrated on the German people by the Allied forces that the mainstream media has covered up for nearly seventy years.

Hellstorm is still available from the publisher.

Categories
2nd World War Evil Hate Hellstorm Holocaust Thomas Goodrich

Hellstorm • chapter 5

In almost any war one side can be dishonestly demonized even by a truthful enumeration of its crimes, if the crimes of its adversaries are suppressed. —Irmin Vinson


Excerpted from Thomas Goodrich’s 2010 book

Hellstorm:
The Death of Nazi Germany
(1944-1947)



The Devil’s Laughter

Among the great majority of those [civilians] who scrambled onto ships, boats, tugs, barges, and naval craft sailing west, their flight was safe and successful. Not only was the warmth and food aboard ship a God-send, but the realization that they were at last escaping the dreaded Bolsheviks proved the first peace of mind many had known in weeks. As the wretched survivors of the [ship] could aver, however, there often was no escaping the nightmare… even at sea.

Just before one A.M., two torpedoes slammed into the Stuben’s side. Somewhere the ship was burning and people everywhere jumping into the water. As the Stuben’s stern rose high out the water, hundreds leaped overboard, including some who were torn to pieces by the still-turning propellers. Within seven minutes, the ship plunged beneath the waves, swiftly silencing a final mass scream that seemed to arise from a single voice. Of the 3,500 passengers aboard, only Franz Huber and a few hundred more survived. Tragically, for thousands who successfully traversed the treacherous Baltic, American and British bombers were often the first to greet them when their ships docked.

While the slow, dangerous evacuation of women, children and wounded comrades continued [on the still departing docks at the other side], a German Landser remained in the ever-shrinking pockets, ferociously fighting on so that others might live. That most in the enclaves were already doomed, all fighting men understood. “For every thousand persons embarked, some three thousand more arrived from the east.”

Frantic to escape such carnage, desperate civilians fled across the ice of the Frisches Haff, a bay several miles wide separating the mainland from a barrier island, or Nehrung. Along the slender strip of sand that led west towards Danzing, all were hoping to reach safety. Unfortunately, the bitter cold changed to rain just when many treks set out. Recounted one survivor of the perilous journey: “The ice was breaking and at some places we had to drag ourselves with pains through water nearly a foot deep.” Juergen Thorwald describes the long, nightmarish experience of another refugee:

At seven o’clock Russian planes swooped down on them. Some women, silent with a despair beyond all words, circled around holes in the ice that had swallowed a child, a mother, a husband.

Wrote Robert Poensgen, a military dispatch rider:

Russian combat aircraft now arrived in wave after wave, and threw bombs into that unprotected, inextricable mass. This is what hell must be like. It was the worst thing I have ever seen in all my years of active service—and I tell you I had already seen a lot.

“Twice we were attacked by Soviet planes, swooping low and scattering missiles,” remembered Guy Sajer from another road. “Each impact tore long, bloody furrows in the dense mass, and for a moment the wind was tinged with the smell of disemboweled bodies.” “Never had I seen so many bodies,” another witness added as he moved west along the coast.

While the butchery on land was in progress, the slaughter at sea continued. On the morning of April 13, Soviet aircraft pounced upon the refugee-laden Karlsruhe when the little freight fell behind its convoy. Stuck by a bomb and air torpedoes, the ship broke and sank in a matter of minutes. Of the one thousand people aboard, fewer than two hundred were rescued.

Three days later, near midnight, torpedoes fired by a Soviet submarine exploded against the side of the Goya, a large transport carrying 7,000 people. Like the Karlsruhe, the Goya quickly broke and plunged to the bottom in four minutes. Meanwhile, as the Soviets closed for the kill, Konigsberg, Memel, Gotenhafen, Pillau, and other besieged ports began their death dance.

The bloody nightmare which enveloped the Baltic coast was neither more nor less than that which transpired wherever the Soviets occupied German soil. In many places—Silesia, Prussia, Pomerania, the German communities of Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Jugoslavia—the horror had been in progress for weeks. There, ghastly atrocities had abated little, if any, with the passage of time and to some it seemed as though Red soldiers were in a race with one another to see who could destroy, murder and, above all, rape the most. Some women and children were assaulted ten, twenty, even thirty times a night and for a female to be ravished one hundred times a week was not uncommon. Reveals a priest from Klosterbrueck: “I shall never forget the terrible screams of the women and the children.”

Meanwhile, in what remained of the Reich, most Germans still knew surprisingly little of the savage fate befalling their countrymen. Doubters yet attributed the hair-rising reports of genocide to Dr. Goebbels’s propaganda machine. By bits and pieces, however, the truth did emerge. When a small German counterattack temporarily recaptured Neustettin, young soldiers, unaware of the Russian rampage occurring behind the lines, began herding up their prisoners. “Then something unexpected happened,” remembered an astonished Landser.

Several German women ran towards the Russians and stabbed at them with cutlery forks and knives… It was not until I fired a submachine gun into the air that the women drew back, and cursed us for presuming to protect these animals. They urged us to go into the houses and take a look at what they had done there. We did so, a few of us at a time, and we were totally devastated. We had never seen anything like it—utterly, unbelievably monstrous!

Naked, dead women lay in many of the rooms. Swastikas had been cut into their abdomens, in some the intestines bulged out; breasts were cut up, faces beaten to a pulp and swollen puffy. Others had been tied to the furniture by their hands and feet, and massacred. A broomstick protruded from the vagina of one, a besom from that of another…

Having seen the consequences of these bestial atrocities, we were terribly agitated and determined to fight. We knew that the war was past winning; but it was our obligation and sacred duty to fight to the last bullet.


____________________________

Educate yourself about the Holocaust perpetrated on the German people by the Allied forces that the mainstream media has covered up for nearly seventy years.

Hellstorm is still available from the publisher.

Categories
2nd World War Evil Franklin D. Roosevelt Hate Hellstorm Holocaust Mainstream media Morgenthau Plan Thomas Goodrich

Hellstorm • prologue

In almost any war one side can be dishonestly demonized even by a truthful enumeration of its crimes, if the crimes of its adversaries are suppressed. —Irmin Vinson


Excerpted from Thomas Goodrich’s 2010 book

Hellstorm:
The Death of Nazi Germany
(1944-1947)



Prologue

For six hundred years East Prussia had served as the frontier outpost of Germany…

By mid-October 1944, the Soviet Army had finally reached the Reich’s border. And yet, as was the case at Nemmersdorf, there was no panic.

Thus it was, that on the night of October 20, as Nemmersdorf and other communities nearest the front slept in imagined security, the unthinkable occurred. After punching a hole through the German line, the Red Army suddenly burst into the Reich.

“They tortured civilians in many villages,” reported one German officer, “nailed some on barn doors and shot many others.”

Added another horrified witness:

In the farmyard down the road stood a cart, to which four naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position… Beyond stood a barn and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands, in a crucified posture. In the dwellings we found a total of seventy-two women, including children, and one old man, 74, all dead… all murdered in a bestial manner, except only a few who had holes in their necks. Some babies had their heads bashed in. In one room we found a woman, 84 years old, sitting on a sofa… half of whose head had been sheared off with an ax or a spade.

“Every female, including girls as young as eight, had been raped,” noted another viewer.

Old men who had feebly tried to protect their wives, daughters and granddaughters, were themselves knocked down, sawed in half or chopped to bits. A group of over fifty French POWs and Polish workers who had instinctively stepped in to protect the people were likewise castrated and killed. Lt. Amberger continues:

Neither in Nemmersdorf nor in the other places did I find a single living German civilian.

Staggered by the enormity of the crime, German authorities requested that neutral investigations and medical personnel from Spain, Sweden and Switzerland view the sickening carnage close up. When the visitors filed their reports, however, and when word finally reached the outside world, there was only silence. By the winter of 1944, the vicious propaganda war waged against Germany had been won. By that late stage few individuals beyond the Reich’s borders were concerned about brained German babies or crucified German women.

With the outbreak of the war in 1939 [ed. Note: before the first reports of 1942 on the Jewish Holocaust] nowhere was hatred more intense than among American Jews. Wrote Hollywood script writer and director, Ben Hecht:

A cancer flourishes in the body of the world and in its mind and soul, and this cancerous thing is Germany, Germanism, and Germans… That this most clumsy of all human tribes—this leaden-hearted German—should dare to pronounce judgment on his superiors, dare to outlaw from the world the name of the Jew—a name that dwarfs him as the tree does the weed at its foot—is an outrageous thing. It is an evil thing.

“Germany must perish,” echoed Theodore N. Kaufmann in a widely-read book of the same name.

And the only way to accomplish that is to remove the German from the world… There remains then but one mode of ridding the world forever of Germanism—and that is to stem the source from which issue those war-lusted souls, by preventing the people of Germany from ever again reproducing their kind.

To implement his plan, Kaufman recommended that when the war was successfully concluded all German men and women should be sterilized.

Far from being shocked by such a genocidal scheme, leading American journals were thrilled by the concept.

“A Sensational Idea!” cheered Time magazine.

“A provocative theory,” echoed the Washington Post.

While many in America and Great Britain could understand and even commiserate with Jewish emotions, many more were initially aghast by the flaming rhetoric and the murderous cries for extermination of innocent and guilty alike. Nevertheless, the sheer weight and persistence of the propaganda, both subtle and overt, in film, radio, books, magazines, and newspapers, gradually worked its way into the thoughts and attitudes of the public mainstream. Eventually, in the minds of a sizable percentage of Americans and Britons, little distinction was drawn between killing a Nazi soldier and killing a German child.

On September 15, 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt made the demand for extermination official when he endorsed the so-called “Morgenthau Plan.” Named for Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasure, Henry Morgenthau, but actually conceived by the secretary’s top aide, Harry Dexter White—both of whom were Jewish.

“You don’t want the Germans to starve?” Roosevelt’s incredulous son-in-law asked the president in private.

“Why not?” replied Roosevelt without batting an eye.

Most Germans actually knew little of thoughts such as the above. Most Germans were yet living under the illusion that the war still had rules. Few could bring themselves to believe that the horror at Nemmersdorf was anything other than an aberration; that the butchery was only a bloody mistake destined never to be repeated. Unbeknownst to those in Prussian and other German regions facing east, the nightmare of Nemmersdorf would soon prove only the faintest foretaste of what was ahead.

____________________________

Educate yourself about the Holocaust perpetrated on the German people by the Allied forces that the mainstream media has covered up for nearly seventy years.

Hellstorm is still available from the publisher.

Categories
2nd World War Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Communism / Bolshevism Evil Gulag Archipelago (book) Joseph Stalin Moscow Red terror Socrates Vladimir Lenin

The Gulag Archipelago

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious
8.- The Gulag Archipelago
(read in 1999)


The Gulag Archipelago, The Harvill Press, 1999. Abridged by Edward Ericson. No ellipsis added between excerpts:



Foreword to the Abridgement

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: “It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.”

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.

Yet I have not given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able, in spite of all, to learn from the experience of other people without having to live through it personally. Therefore, I gratefully accepted Professor Ericson’s suggestion to create a one-volume abridgement of my three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn


Introduction

For a few decades the word Holocaust has served us well as a shorthand term for modern man’s inhumanity to man. In recent years a second such shorthand term has entered our working vocabulary: Gulag. This term comes to us not from a host of witness but from one lone man: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose very name has become a household word around the world.

Were The Gulag Archipelago to be even more widely read than it has been, it would, I believe, make an indelible impression on the modern mind and have a salutary effect on the whole world. Here we have the greatest horror story of human history—in quantitative terms, at least (the comparable toll in China having not yet been calculated)—and, although it happened during our lifetime, most of us do not even know about it.

This work was written especially for future generations of Russians. It is these readers in particular who need to know, in as much detail as possible, the truth of their history. This abridged text is designed for the general reader, not for the scholar.

At Solzhenitsyn’s own suggestion, I have eliminated much of his personal story, though parts of it I treasure too much to drop.

Needless to say, I take responsibility for any errors of omission or commission. I hope only that any mistakes which I have made do not interfere with the transmission of Solzhenitsyn’s words to an audience which I believe desperately needs to hear them.

Edward Ericson


Author’s Note

And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.

And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.

In this book there are no fictitious persons, nor fictitious events. People and places are named with their own names. If they are identified by initials instead of names, it is for personal considerations. If they are not named at all, it is only because human memory has failed to preserve their names. But it all took place just as it is here described.

This book could never have been created by one person alone. In addition to what I myself was able to take away from the Archipelago—on the skin of my back, and with my eyes and ears—material for this book was given me in reports, memoirs, and letters by 227 witness, whose names were to have been listed here.

What I here express to them is not personal gratitude, because this is our common, collective monument to all those who were tortured and murdered.


Chapter 1: “Arrest”

How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? At ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they’ve never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands.

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: “You are under arrest.” The gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.

It is an alien, brutal, and crushing force totally dominating the apartment for hours. And nothing is sacred in a search! During the arrest of the locomotive engineer Inoshin, a tiny coffin stood in his room containing the body of his newly dead child. The “jurists” dumped the child’s body out of the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people out of their sickbeds, and they unwind bandages to search beneath them.

For those left behind after the arrest there is the long tail end of a wrecked and devastated life. And the attempts to go and deliver food parcels. And this means once and for all: “No right to correspondence”—and that almost certain means: “Has been shot.”

They take you from a military hospital with a temperature of 102, as they did with Ans Bernshtein, and the doctor will not raise a peep about your arrest—just let him try! They’ll take you right off the operating table—as they took N.M. Vorobyev, a school inspector, in 1936, in the middle of an operation for stomach ulcer—and drag you off to a cell, as they did him, half-alive and all bloody.

And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.

Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Vanya Levitsky: “Every honest man is sure to go to prison. Right now my papa is serving time, and when I grow up they’ll put me in too.” (They put him in when he was twenty-three years old.) The majority sit quietly and dare to hope. Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself: “It’s a mistake. They’ll set things straight and let me out!” Others are being arrested en masse, and that’s a bothersome fact, but in those other cases there is always some dark area: “Maybe he was guilty…?” But as for you, you are obviously innocent! You still believe that the Organs are humanly logical institutions: they will set things straight and let you out.

Once a person was arrested he was never released. Some still have hopes of a favorable outcome to their case and are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry. (For, after all, we get no news from that other world, and we do not realize that from the very moment of arrest our fate has almost certainly been decided in the worst possible sense and that we cannot make it any worse.)

I myself lugged a fifth suitcase with no great joy since it contained my diaries and literary works, which were being used as evidence against me. My cellmates—tankmen in soft black helmets—hid nothing. They were three honest, openhearted soldiers—people of a kind I had become attached to during the war years because I myself was more complex and worse. All three had been officers.

“Out for toilet call! Hands behind your backs!”

I was bursting with indignation that some ignoramus of a master sergeant dared to give orders to us officers: “Hands behind your backs!” But the tank officers put their hands behind them and I followed suit.

Back of the barn was a small square area in which the snow had been all trampled down but had not yet melted. It was soiled all over with human feces, so densely scattered over the whole square that it was difficult to find a spot to place one’s two feet and squat. However, we spread ourselves about and the five of us did squat down. Two machine gunners grimly pointed their machine pistols at us as we squatted, and before a minute had passed the master sergeant brusquely urged us on:

“Come on, hurry it up! With us they do it quickly!”


Chapter 2: “The History of Our Sewage Disposal System”

Although I have no statistics at hand, I am not afraid of erring when I say that the wave of 1937 and 1938 was neither the only one not even the main one, but only one, perhaps, of the three biggest waves which strained the murky, stinking pipes of our prison sewers to bursting.

Before it came the wave of 1929 and 1930, the size of a good River Ob, which drove a mere fifteen million peasants, maybe even more, out into the taiga and the tundra. But peasants are a silent people, without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs. This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it. It is as if it had not even scarred the Russian conscience. And yet Stalin (and you and me as well) committed no crime more heinous than this. And after it there was the wave of 1944 to 1946. But in this wave, too, the people were of the simpler kind, and they wrote no memoirs.

But the wave of 1937 swept up and carried off to the Archipelago people of position, people with a Party past, yes, educated people, around whom were many who had been wounded and remained in the cities… and what a lot of them had pen in hand!

It is well known that any organ withers away if it is not used. Therefore, if we know that the Soviet security organs, or Organs (and they christened themselves with this vile word), praised and exalted above all living things, have not died off even to the extent of one single tentacle, but, instead have grown new ones and strengthened their muscles—it is easy to deduce that they have had constant exercise. This action was, in fact, explained openly (Latsis, in the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918):

“We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeois class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question which you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and profession. These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and the essence of Red Terror.”

A decree of the defense Council on February 15, 1919 (the meeting was evidently presided over by Lenin), suggest that the Cheka and the NKVD take hostages among the peasants of those regions where “the cleaning of snow from the railroads does not proceed quite satisfactorily” and noted that “these hostages be executed if the cleaning is not completed.” In other words, free people were simply arrested and executed immediately…

The practice of arresting students began in 1921. In the spring of 1922 the Patriarch Tikhon was arrested and two resounding trials were held, following by the execution of those who had publicized the Patriarch’s appeal. Metropolitans and bishops were arrested, and, as always, in the wake of the big fish, followed shoals of smaller fry: archpriests, monks, and deacons. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children. In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code.

In 1929, also, those historians who had not been sent abroad in time were arrested… It even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each other’s presence—who cared about those niceties? Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water. One gold piece for a cup of water!

In sheer size this nonrecurring tidal wave (it was an ocean) swelled beyond the bounds of anything the penal system or even an immense state can permit itself. There was nothing to be compared with in all Russian history. It was the forced resettlement of a whole people, an ethnic catastrophe.

This wave was also distinct from all those which preceded it because no one fused about with taking the head of the family first and then working out what to do with the rest of the family. On the contrary, in this wave they burned out whole nests, whole families, from the start; and they watched jealously to be sure that none of the children—fourteen, ten, even six year old— got away: to the last scrapings, all had to go the same road, to the same common destruction. (This was the first such experiment—at least in modern history. It was subsequently repeated by Hitler with the Jews.)

In 1941 the Germans went round Tagnrog, cutting it off so swiftly that prisoners were left in freight wagons at the railway station where they had been brought to be evacuated. What should one do with them? Certainly not set them free nor leave them to the Germans. Oil tank trucks were rushed to the station, and the wagons were drenched with oil and set on fire. All the prisoners were burned alive.


Chapter 3: “The Interrogation”

What had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catharine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles—not by one scoundrel alone, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims.

In 1952 Anna Skripnikova was undergoing her fifth imprisonment, and Sivakov, Chief of the Investigative Department of the Ordzhonikidze State Security Administration, said to her:

“The prison doctor reports you have a blood pressure of 240/120. That’s too low you bitch! We’re going to drive it up to 340 so you’ll kick the bucket, you viper, and with no black and blue marks; no beatings; no broken bones. We’ll just not let you sleep.”

She was in her fifties at the time. And if, back in her cell, after a night spent in interrogation, she closed her eyes during the day, the jailer broke in and shouted: “Open your eyes or I’ll haul you off that cot by the legs and tie you to the wall standing up.”

As early as 1921 interrogations usually took place at night. And there was an airtight cork-lined cell in which there was no ventilation and they cooked the prisoners. A participant in the Yaroslavl uprising of 1918, Vasily Aleksandrovich Kasyanov, described how the heat in such a cell was turned up until your blood begin to ooze through your pores.

Then in the years 1937-1938, in view of the extraordinary situation prevailing (the specified millions of admissions to the Archipelago had to be ground through the apparatus of individual interrogation in specified, limited periods, something which had simply not happened in the mass waves of kulaks and nationalities), interrogators were allowed to use violence and torture on an unlimited basis, at their own discretion. For the first time in human history the calculated torture of millions was being undertaken.

In the Novocherkassk NKVD, Yelena Strutimskaya was forced to remain seated on a stool in the corridor for six days in such a way that she did not lean against anything, did not sleep, did not fall off, and did not get up from. Six days! Just try to sit that way for six hours! People could be compelled to kneel in the interrogator’s office or the corridor for twelve, or even twenty-four hours. (The interrogator himself could go home, sleep, amuse himself in one way or another—this was an organized system; watch was kept over the kneeling prisoner, and the guards worked in shifts.) What kind of prisoner was most vulnerable to such treatment? It was a good method to use with women. Ivanov-Razumnik reports a variation of it: Having set young Lordkipanidze on his knees, the interrogator urinated in his face! And what happened? Unbroken by anything else, Lordkipanidze was broken by this. Watch shows that the method also worked well on proud people.

Then there is the method of simply compelling the prisoner to stand there, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.

Sleeplessness, which they quite failed to appreciate in medieval times: They did not understand how narrow are the limits within which a human being can preserve his personality intact. Sleeplessness (yes, combined with standing, thirst, bright, light terror, and the unknown—what other tortures are needed?) befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself, to be his own “I.” (As in Chekov’s “I Want to Sleep,” but there it was much easier, for there the girl could lie down and slip into lapses of consciousness, which even in just a minute could revive and refresh the brain.) A person deprived of sleep acts half-consciously or altogether unconsciously, so that his testimony cannot be held against him.

Sometimes, as a refinement, instead of making the prisoner stand up, they made him sit down on a soft sofa, which made him want to sleep all the more. (The jailer on duty sat next to him on the same sofa and kicked him every time his eyes began to shut.) Sleeplessness became the universal method of the Organs. The prisoners were forbidden to sleep even one minute. Whoever was undergoing interrogation got no sleep for at least five days and nights. The above method was further implemented by an assembly line of interrogators. Not only were you not allowed to sleep, but for three or four days shifts of interrogators kept up a continuous interrogation.

As long ago as 1933 this was one of the ways they tortured S.A. Chebotaryev in the Khabarovsk GPU. They locked him in a concrete alcove in such a way that he could neither bend his knees, nor straighten up and change the position of his arms, not turn his head. And that was not all! They began to drip cold water into his scalp—a classic torture—which then ran down his body in rivulets. They did not inform him, of course, that this would go on for only twenty-four hours. It was awful enough at any rate for him to lose consciousness, and he was discovered the next day apparently dead. He came to on a hospital cot. They had brought him out of his faint with spirits of ammonia, caffeine, and body massage. At first he had no recollection of where he had been, or what happened. For a whole month he was useless for interrogation.

[The] bridling, also known as “the swan dive”: This was a Sukhanovka method—also used in Archangel, where the interrogator Ivkov applied it in 1940. A lone piece of rough toweling was inserted between the prisoner’s jaws like a bridle; the ends were then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels. Just try lying on your stomach like a wheel, with your spine breaking—and without water and food for two days!

Is it necessary to go on with the list?


Chapter 4. “The bluecaps”

“Just give us a person and we will create a case!” That was what many of them say jokingly, and it was their slogan. What we think of torture they think of as a good work. The wife of the interrogator Nikolai Grabishchenko (the Volga Canal Project) said touchingly to her neighbors: “Kolya is a very good worker. One of them didn’t confess for a long time—and they gave him to Kolya. Kolya talked with him for one night and he confessed.”

You have a power over all the people in that military unit, or factory, or district, incomparably greater than that of the military commander, or factory director, or secretary of the district Communist Party. These men control people’s military or official duties, wages, reputations, but you control people’s freedom. From the moment you don that heavenly blue service cap, you stand higher than the publicly acknowledged power.

The girl is blushing all over and in tears. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the case,” she protests. “Yes, it does, speak up!” If you want, she’ll demonstrate with her body. She has no way out. In your hands you hold the punishment cell and her prison term.

To know what it meant to be a bluecap one had to experience it! Anything you saw was yours! [But] let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?” Twenty-year-olds, we marched in the ranks of those born the year the Revolution took place, and because we were the same age as the Revolution, the brightest of futures lay ahead.

It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools. It certainly didn’t derive from the lectures on historical materialism we listened to: it was clear from them that the struggle against the internal enemy was a crucial battlefront, and to share in it was an honorable task.

Still, some of us were recruited at that time, and I think that if they had really put the pressure on, they could have broken everybody’s resistance. So I would like to imagine: if, by the time war broke out, I had already been wearing an NKVD’s officer’s insignia on my blue tabs, what would I have become? So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself! Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t. Just how are we to understand that? As the act of an evildoer? What sort of behavior is this?

We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past—Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens—inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And they reason: “I cannot live unless I do evil. So I’ll set my father against my brother! I will drink the victim’s sufferings until I’m drunk with them!” Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate.

But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How then, do we dare to insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago. That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear…

In that same period, by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany. And still we choke with anger here. The fact that the murderers of our husbands and fathers ride through our streets and we make way for them as they pass, doesn’t get us worked up at all, doesn’t touch us. That would be “digging the past.”

Meanwhile, if we translate 86,000 West Germans into our own terms, on the basis of comparative population figures, it would become one-quarter of a million. Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can Russia teach the world?

Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of driveling do-nothings. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.


Chapter 5: “First Cell, First Love”

How is one to take the title of this chapter? Out of all the cells you have been in, your first cell is a very special one. All your life you will remember it… those days when you rethought your entire life. But it was not the dirty floor, nor the murky walls, nor the odor of the latrine bucket that you loved. For a week or a month you had been an abandoned waif, alone among enemies, and you had already said good-bye to reason and to life; and you had already tried to kill yourself by “falling” from the radiator in such a way as to smash your brains against the iron cone of the valve. Then all of a sudden you are alive again. And reason returned to you.

And that was the purpose of silent Sukhanovka: to leave the prisoner not a single moment for sleep, not a single stolen moment for privacy. You were always being watched and always in their power. But if you endured the whole duel with insanity and all the trials and loneliness, and had stood firm, you deserved your first cell! And now when you got into it, your soul would heal.

I had been dueling for four days with the interrogator, when the jailer, having waited until I lay down to sleep in my blindingly lit box, began to unlock my door. I heard him all right, but before he could say: “Get up! Interrogation!” I wanted to lie for another three-hundredths of a second. One night of undisturbed sleep was more important than all the fates on earth! And I lay there. Interrogation still pending over me, but how far it had retreated!

And there was no reason to be bored with my companions. They were people to listen and people with whom to compare notes. The old fellow with lively eyebrows—and at sixty-three he in no way bore himself like an old man—was Anatoly Ilych Fastenko. There was much in Fastenko I could not understand. In my eyes, perhaps the main thing about him, and the most surprising, was that he had known Lenin personally. Yet he was quite cool in recalling this. (Such was my attitude at the time that when someone in the cell called Fastenko by his patronymic alone, without using his given name—in other words simply “Ilych,” asking: “Ilych, is it your turn to take out the latrine bucket?” —I was utterly outraged and offended because it seemed sacrilege to me not only to use Lenin’s patronymic in the same sentence as “latrine bucket,” but even to call anyone on earth “Ilych” except that one man, Lenin.) Observing my enthusiasm, more than once Fastenko said to me insistently: “You are a mathematician; it’s a mistake for you to forget that maxim of Descartes: ‘Question everything!’ Question everything!” What did this mean—“everything”? Certainly not everything!

When, in the spring of 1943, recruiters from the first Byelorussian “legions” put in an appearance, some POWs signed up with them to escape starvation. Yuri went with them out of conviction, with a clear mind. Yuri became lieutenant in the German Army. In all, Yuri spent three weeks in our cell. I argued with him all these weeks. I said that our Revolution was magnificent and just; that only its 1929 distortion was terrible. He looked at me regretfully, compressing his nervous lips.

On May 2 a thirty-gun salute roared out. That meant a European capital. Only two had not yet been captured—Prague and Berlin. We tried to guess which it was.

That victory was not for us. And that spring was not for us either.


Chapter 6: “That Spring” [The concealed history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union]

Along with them [a big wave of civilians that flowed into the Archipelago] were seized no less than one million fugitives from the Soviet government —civilians of all ages and both sexes who in 1946-1947 were perfidiously returned by Allied authorities into Soviet hands […]. Not until 1973—in the Sunday Oklahoman of January 21—was an article by Julius Epstein published. And I am here going to be so bold as to express gratitude on behalf of the mass of those who perished and those few left alive. One random little document was published from the many volumes of the hitherto concealed case history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union.

That spring of 1945 was, in our prisons, predominantly the spring of the Russian prisoners of war. Not only war prisoners passed through those cells. A wave of those who had spent any time in Europe was rolling too: émigrés from the Civil War; the “ostovtsy”—workers recruited as laborers by the Germans during World War II. It was the war prisoners who constituted the bulk of the wave.

“The Motherland has forgiven you! The Motherland has forgiven you!” and snared them the moment they reached the frontiers. It would appear that during the one thousand one hundred years of Russia’s existence as a state there have been, ah, how many foul and terrible deeds! But among them was there ever so multimillioned foul a deed as this: to betray one’s own soldiers and proclaim them traitors? Then, under the most just social system in the world, came the most just war of all—and all of nowhere millions of traitors appeared, from among the simplest, lowliest elements of the population. How is this to be understood and explained? Capitalist England fought at our side against Hitler; Marx had eloquently described the poverty and suffering of the working class in the same England. Why was it that in this war only one traitor could be found among them—but in our country millions?

The Vlasov men.

In addition, there were a few volunteer anti-Soviet units, made up of former Soviet citizens but under the command of German officers. The Lithuanians were the first to start supporting the Germans (understandably so: we had really hurt them beyond endurance in just one year!). Then the Ukrainians formed a voluntary SS division, and the Estonians joined a few SS units. In Byelorussia there was a people’s militia fighting against the partisans: 100,000 men. When the Germans conquered our southern regions, the number of volunteer battalions increased: there was a Georgian one, an Armenian one, a battalion of the Northern Caucasus peoples, and sixteen Kalmyk battalions. During the German retreat from the Don region, about fifteen thousand Cossacks followed the German army. The Briansk region had twenty thousand armed men. They called themselves “The Russian National Liberation Army.”

Vlasov made public appearances in the theaters of Smolensk and Pskov, both filled to capacity; he spoke about the goals of the liberation movement and then proceeded to declare openly that national socialism was unacceptable for Russia but that, on the other hand, it was impossible to overthrow the Bolsheviks without the Germans. Those were the last months during which millions of Soviet people were still out of Stalin’s reach and could fight against the Bolshevik slavery and organize their own independent existence.

But there was a gap between the Russian and the Western conscience which exist to this day. The West was fighting only against Hitler, and for this purpose all means and all allies were good, the Soviets above all. Not only could the West not concede that the Soviet people might have their own purposes which did not coincide with the goals of the Communist government; it did not want to admit any such thought, because it would have been embarrassing and difficult to live with. It is a tragicomic fact that on the leaflets which the Western allies were distributing among the anti-Bolshevik volunteer battalions on the Western front, they wrote: “We promise all defectors that they will be immediately sent back to the Soviet Union.” We soon discovered that they really were Russians fighting against us and that they fought harder than any SS men.

The West simply has to understand that Bolshevism is an enemy for all mankind. But the West did not understand at all. In World War II the West kept defending its own freedom and defended it for itself. As for us and as for Eastern Europe, it buried us in an even more absolute and hopeless slavery. But nobody heard that squeaking. Most of the America military commanders were amazed to learn about the existence of Russians who were not Soviets; they thought it quite natural to hand them all over to the Soviet state. The ROA [Russian Liberation Army] not only surrendered to the Americans; it implored them to accept its capitulation and begged for one thing only: the promise that Americans would not extradite them to the Soviets.

In Yalta Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the agreement to repatriate all Soviet citizens, and especially the military, without specifying whether the repatriation was to be voluntary or enforced: How could any people on earth not be willing to return to their homes? The nearsightedness of the West was condensed in what was written at Yalta.

The English turned over the Soviet army command a Cossack corps of forty to forty-five thousand men which had fought its way to Austria from Yugoslavia. The extradition was carried out with perfidy which is characteristic of British diplomatic tradition. The Cossacks did not grow suspicious when they were asked to turn in their weapons, on the grounds that this was necessary in order to standardize their equipment. On May 28… [Chechar’s note: Solzhenitsyn describes in this paragraph how the Allied forces extradited these Russian people, against their will, to Stalin.]

They could not even shoot or stab themselves to death, since all their weapons had been taken away. Some jumped off the high viaduct into the river or onto the stones. The hearts of the British were not troubled, nor were their democratic minds. British tanks and soldiers arrived. The British soldiers started beating them with rifle butts and clubs, grabbing them and throwing them into the trucks, including the wounded, as if they were packages. Entire families sought death by throwing themselves into the river. Meanwhile, the British units in the neighborhood pursued and shot at the fugitives. (The cemetery where the people who were shot or trampled to death and buried still exists in Lienz.)

But even that was only the beginning. During all of 1946 and 1947 the Western allies, faithful to Stalin, continued to turn over to him Soviet citizens, former soldiers as well as civilians. It did not really matter who they were as long as the West could get rid of this human confusion as quickly as possible. People were extradited from Austria, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, from the American occupation zones, and from the territory of the United States as well.

Now, a quarter of a century later, when most of the Vlasov men have perished in camps and those who have survived are living out their lives in the Far North, I would like to issue a reminder, through these pages, that this was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that several hundred thousand young men, aged twenty to thirty, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy.

♣

For the other nine books see here.