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Category: Red terror

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2nd World War Dwight D. Eisenhower Franklin D. Roosevelt Hellstorm Holocaust Holodomor Joseph Stalin Red terror Thomas Goodrich Winston Churchill

Hellstorm • chapter 9

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)



A War without End

In their own tally of bombing causalities, the British estimated they had killed 300,000 – 600,000 German civilians. That some sources from the Dresden raid set the toll there alone 300,000 – 400,000 dead would suggest that the British figures were absurdly—and perhaps deliberately—low. Whatever the accurate figure, the facts are that few German families survived the war intact. In many towns and villages the dead quite literally outnumbered the living.

For Germany, May 8, 1945, became known as “The Hour Zero”—the end of a nightmare and the beginning of a dark, uncertain future. Most assumed, no doubt, that awful though the coming weeks and months would be, the worst was nevertheless behind them. But these people were wrong. The worst yet lay ahead.

♣

Although forced to the shadows by public opprobrium, the Morgenthau Plan for Germany was never actually abandoned by Franklin Roosevelt. Indeed, up until his death, the American president had secretly favored the “Carthaginian” approach to the conquered Reich. When Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, met at Potsdam with Stalin and the new British prime minister, Clement Attlee, in July 1945, most of the teeth in Morgenthau’s scheme remained on the table. With the signature of the Big Three, the plan went into effect.

The plundering of Germany by the Soviet Union first began when the Red Army penetrated Prussia in 1944. With war’s end, Stalin’s methodical looting in the Russian Occupation Zone became prodigious. Steel mills, grain mills, lumber mills, sugar and oil refineries, chemical plants, optical works, shoe factories, and other heavy industries were taken apart down to the last nut and bolt and sent east to the Soviet Union where they were reassembled. While the Soviet government pillaged on a massive scale, the common Red soldier was even more meticulous. Wrote one woman from Silesia:

The Russians systematically cleared out everything such as all sewing machines, pianos, grand-pianos, baths, water taps, electric plants, beds, mattresses, carpets, etc. They destroyed what they could not take away with them.

Not in a single village did one see a cow, a horse, or a pig… The Russians had taken everything away to the east, or used it up.

As this woman made clear, what was not looted was destroyed. Unlike its primitive Soviet ally, the United States had no need for German plants and factories. Nevertheless, and as Ralph Franklin Keeling points out, the Americans were far and away the “most zealous” at destroying the Reich’s ability to recover. Continues the historian:

Although America went about the business of dismantling and dynamiting German plants with more fervor than was at first exhibited in any other zone, our motive was quite different from the motives of our allies.

♣

Russia suffered no shortage of slave labor. Added to the millions of native dissidents, repatriated refugees, and Wehrmacht prisoners toiling in the gulags, were millions of German civilians snatched from the Reich. “The screaming, wailing and howling in the square will haunt me the rest of my life,” remembered one horrified female.

Mercilessly the women were herded together in rows of four. Mothers had to leave tiny children behind. I thanked God from the bottom of my heart that my boy had died in Berlin shortly after birth… The wretched victims were then set in motion to the crack of Russian whips.

“One young girl jumped from a bridge into the water, the guards shot wildly at her, and I saw her sink,” recalled Anna Schwartz. “A young man, who had heart-disease, jumped into the Vistula. He was also shot.” When the trains finally reached their destination… “the dying really began,” remembered Schwartz.

Our camp was a large place of land with a barbed wire fence, 2 meters high. Within this fence, at a distance of 2 meters, there was another small barbed wire fence, and we were not allowed to go near it.

While Anna’s camp worked on a railroad and was driven day-in, day-out “like a herd of draught animals,” and while others toiled in fields, factories, peat bogs, and lumber camps, thousands more were relegated to the mines.

(Germans shipped to the Gulags)

“Every day in the coal-pit camp even as many as 15 to 25 died,” added fellow slave, Gertrude Schultz. “At midnight the corpses were brought naked on stretchers into the forest, and put into a mass grave. “We were eternally hungry, “recalled Erich Gerhardt. “Treatment by the Russian guards was almost always very bad. We were simply walking skeletons.”

♣

Continuing the policy of their predecessors, Harry Truman and Clement Attlee allowed the spirit of Yalta and Morgenthau to dictate their course regarding post-war Germany. Because of enforced famine, it was estimated that thirty million Germans would soon succumb. Well down the road to starvation even before surrender, those Germans who survived war now struggled to survive peace.

The deadly effects of malnutrition soon became evident. Wrote one horrified observer:

They are emaciated to the bone. Their clothes hang loose on their bodies, the lower extremities are like the bones of a skeleton, their hands shake as though with palsy. The weigh of the women of average height and build has fallen way below 110 pounds. Often women of childbearing age weigh no more than 65 pounds.

“Infant mortality has reached the horrifying height of 90 percent,” added another witness to the tragedy.

When a scattering of reports like the above began filtering out to the American and British publics, many were shocked, horrified and outraged at the secret slaughter being committed in their name. Already troubled that the US State department had tried to keep an official report on conditions in Germany from public scrutiny […] Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana replied [to Senator James Eastland]:

This administration has been carrying on a deliberate policy of mass starvation without any distinction between the innocent and the helpless and the guilty alike.

Surprisingly, one of the most strident voices raised against the silent massacre was that of influential Jewish journalist, Victor Gollancz: “The plain fact is… we are starving the German people.” Although Gollancz felt the famine was not engineered, but rather a result of incompetence and indifference, others disagreed.

“On the contrary,” raged the Chicago Daily Tribune, “it is the product of foresight. It was deliberately planned at Yalta by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, and the program in all its brutality was later confirmed by Truman, Attlee, and Stalin… The intent to starve the German people to death is being carried out without remorselessness unknown in the western world since the Mongol conquest.”

Because of those and other critics, Allied officials were forced to respond. “We would never condone inhuman or un-American practices upon the helpless,” assured Eisenhower as Germans died by the thousands in his death camps. When Senator Albert Hawkes of New Jersey pleaded with President Truman to head off catastrophe and allow private relief packages to enter Germany, the American leader offered various excuses, then cut the senator short:

While we have no desire to be unduly cruel to Germany, I cannot feel any great sympathy for those who caused the death of so many human beings… No one should be called upon to pay for Germany’s misfortune except Germany itself… Eventually the enemy countries will be given some attention.

In time, Germany did receive “some attention.” Late in 1945, the British allowed Red Cross shipments to enter their zone, followed by the French in theirs. Months later, even the United States grudgingly permitted supplies to cross into its sector. For thousands upon thousands of Germans, however, the food came too late.


____________________________

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 Franklin D. Roosevelt Hellstorm Holocaust Joseph Stalin Red terror Third Reich Thomas Goodrich Winston Churchill

Hellstorm • chapter 4

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)



Crescendo of destruction

Roosevelt slapped a crippling embargo on the Reich’s ally, Japan, in hopes of provoking an attack and slipping into the war via the “back door.” When the Japanese, facing slow strangulation, dutifully responded at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it was Roosevelt dream come true. Later, when his Secretary of Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, proposed a plan to pastorialize Germany upon victory, thereby assuring the death of millions, Roosevelt was its strongest supporter.

“I would like to see the Germans on the breadline for 50 years,” the president admitted in private.

♣

In early February 1945, leaders of the three most powerful nations on earth assembled a final time at Yalta in the Soviet Crimea. Despite the obvious dissimilarities of the men, intellectual as well as physical, each shared a characteristic with the other that shrank into insignificance all outer contradictions—all three harbored a inveterate hatred of not only Adolf Hitler and Nazism, but Germans and Germany.

At a meeting with Churchill at Casablanca in 1943, Roosevelt declared that nothing short of “unconditional surrender” would be accepted from Germany. Thus, by removing any possible latitude Hitler might have had for negotiation, the American president’s pronouncement insured that not only would Germany fight to the death, but it also guaranteed that hundreds of thousands of Allied airmen and soldiers would perish as well. Additionally, that such a protracted war would enable the Red Army to reach and no doubt enslave much of Europe seemed a foregone conclusion.

When Soviet forces invaded Poland in 1939, one of Stalin’s first moves was to round up and execute upwards of 15,000 army officers and intellectuals, thereby removing in one stroke much potential opposition. Well aware of his past, nervous about the impact his future acts in Europe would have upon a squeamish British public, desperate to hold an unnatural alliance together, Churchill’s government tried mightily to cover for the bloody behavior of their communist ally. Ran a secret memo of the British Department of Intelligence to high-ranking civil servants and opinion-molders in the press:

We cannot reform the Bolsheviks but we can do our best to save them—and ourselves—from the consequences of their acts. The disclosures of the past quarter of a century will render mere denials unconvincing. The only alternative to denial is to distract the public attention from the whole subject. Experience has shown that the best distraction is atrocity propaganda directed at the enemy… Your cooperation is therefore earnestly sought to distract public attention from the doings of the Red Army by your wholehearted support of various charges against the Germans… which have been and will be put into circulation by the Ministry.

Let anyone doubt Stalin’s intentions once his legions gained control of Germany, the reality was made crystal clear at the Teheran Conference in 1943. Lifting his glass of vodka for the “umpteenth toast,” the communist leader suddenly announced, “I propose a salute to the swiftest possible justice for all of Germany’s war criminals—justice before a firing squad. I drink to our unity in dispatching them as fast as we capture them, all of them, and there must be at least 50,000 of them.” When Churchill, well into his cups, angrily protested—“The British people will never stand for such mass murder without a proper trial!”—Stalin smiled, his eyes twinkled and overall he seemed “hugely tickled.”

“Perhaps,” the American president interrupted, “we could say that instead of summarily executing 50,000 we should settle on a smaller number. Shall we say 49,500?”

Despite Stalin’s well-earned reputation as the greatest mass murderer in history, Franklin Roosevelt was a staunch supporter and admirer of the dictator and defended him at every turn. In an effort to put a friendly, folksy face on the Russian premier and convince Americans that he was a “magnificent” and “gallant” ally, Roosevelt began referring to Stalin as “Uncle Joe.”

“He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor,” explained the president of the American public. “I believe he is representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed.”

The eyes of the world were now upon Yalta, said the prime minister, and what the “Big Three” accomplished during talks over the next few days would affect mankind for a hundred years.

Another subject Stalin was explicit about at Yalta concerned the return of over two million Soviet citizens who had either fled to Germany to avoid persecution at home or who had joined the enemy to fight against communism. Again, to this demand Roosevelt promised his complete cooperation. But of course, the main topic of discussion at Yalta was the fate of their mutual enemy, or, as Churchill grimly phrased it, “The future of Germany, if she had any.”

Once victory was complete, the three leaders agreed that the former Third Reich would be carved up like the evening’s meal and her people marched off as slaves to the Soviet Union. Although Roosevelt had solemnly announced earlier that “the united Nations do not traffic in human slavery,” when Stalin proposed the plan, the president called it “a healthy idea.”

Another subject broached at Yalta, albeit a seemingly minor one, was Stalin’s request for the massive bombing of eastern Germany to smooth the way for the Red Army’s final sweep across the Reich. Eager to demonstrate to his ally that Britain, and especially the RAF, was yet a force to be reckoned with, Churchill quickly agreed.

When the Yalta talks were finally concluded on February 11, the three Allied leaders signed a joint statement for press release, then bid each other a fond adieu.


____________________________

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.

____________________________


My 2 cents:

As described by Solzhenitsyn:

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… [Solzhenitsyn describes in this paragraph of his Gulag Archipelago 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.

It goes without saying that most of the deportees died in the Soviet Gulag. So who was the real monster, the three Allied leaders or the German chancellor?

Categories
2nd World War Conspiracy theories David Irving Final solution Heinrich Himmler Holocaust Holodomor Red terror Third Reich

New approach to the holocaust

Himmler_advert


If there’s a moral of the story on the recent debate at The Occidental Observer about the so-called “holocaust” that can only be that most white nationalists are cognitively immature. I find it scandalous that I was the only one who linked Greg Johnson’s piece as an important article, as can be ascertained at the bottom of the TOO article (5 trackbacks to “Dealing with the Holocaust”): four trackbacks to this blog and the other one to my nationalist blog in Spanish.

One example is Carolyn Yeager’s recent podcast “Should White Nationalists leave the Holocaust alone?”, where the possibility that millions of Jews could indeed have died as a result of the harsh treatment they received in the Third Reich is not even considered as a remote possibility.

Just contrast most of the nationalists’ dogmatic stance on the “holocaust” with the intellectual trajectory of David Irving, who a few years ago acknowledged that at least more than two millions of Jews died in the camps (source, National Alliance News):

According to an article in the extremist leftist Guardian newspaper in Britain, historian David Irving has backtracked on his earlier views about the Holocaust myth and now accepts that the Nazis engaged in mass extermination of Jews in certain camps.

Irving says that his views on the Holocaust have crystallized rather than changed. He says that he believes the Jews were responsible for what happened to them during the Second World War and that the “Jewish problem” was responsible for nearly all the wars of the past 100 years: “The Jews are the architects of their own misfortune, but that is the short version A-Z. Between A-Z there are then 24 other characters in intervening steps.”

He says that a document, which he is 80% sure is genuine, suggests that 2.4 million Jews were killed in Poland, but goes on to claim that the gas chamber at Auschwitz was fake. “It was not the centre of the killing operations—it has only become a focus because it is the site that is best preserved. Much of what is shown [to] the tourists there is faked postwar—watchtowers, even the famous gas chamber.”

He added: “In my opinion now the real killing operations took place at the Reinhardt camps west of the Bug river. In the three camps here [Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka] Heinrich Himmler’s men (mostly Ukrainian mercenaries) killed possibly as many as 2.4 million in the two years up to October 1943. There is now nothing to be seen of the Reinhardt camps, neither stick nor stone, so few tourists go there. I have visited all four sites earlier this year.”

Pressed as to whether this change undermined his previous stance, Irving replied: “It is a crystallization of my view.” Asked if he now accepts there had been a Holocaust against the Jewish people he said he was “not going to use their trade name.”

He added: “I do accept that the Nazis quite definitely, that Heinrich Himmler, organized and directed a program, a clandestine program, for the liquidation of European Jews… and that in 1942-43 alone over 2.5 million Jews were killed in those three camps.” He added that Hitler was “completely in the dark” about the program.

This of course doesn’t mean that Irving is guilt-tripping whites for what happened in Poland. Like me he’s only concerned with facts and honesty.

I find it pathetic that this holocaust guilt could have been overcome decades ago by simply pointing to the fact that the Jewish Bolsheviks started the genocide by killing more White civilians than what Himmler did with the Jews as a prophylactic response. If the astronomic amount of time spent by nationalists and non-nationalists in researching paranoid conspiracy theories like 9/11 would have been spent researching real historical facts, like what happened in the Gulag under Stalin’s willing executioners, the tide could have been turned in our favor long ago.

I look forward for a new generation of nationalists who leave behind “holocaust” denialism, 9/11 and JFK conspiracy theories, monocausalism and even their infatuation with rock music and degenerate, Jew-controlled Hollywood films (yes, this includes Nolan’s silly Batman trilogy that presently is being hysterically praised in some nationalist blogs).

Categories
Heinrich Himmler Holocaust Holodomor Red terror Ukraine

Time to use the spear, not the shield!

The recent exchange between Greg Johnson and Hadding Scott on the Holocaust is proof that at least some revisionists are deceiving themselves. Take a look at this:

A rational person who has agreed to the common understanding of what the word Holocaust means, and has given a little thought to the matter, would have to concede that Anne Frank was a victim [of] a wartime disease epidemic. The same kind of disease epidemic has occurred in many European wars… [—Hadding, way below]

So Hadding is saying that Anne Frank died of a natural cause, typhus epidemics, omitting to say that her body defenses were weakened as a result of being interned at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp!

Enjoy the whole exchange and pay special attention to Hadding’s semantic flim-flam (no ellipsis added between unquoted comments):

♣

Hadding said…

Holocaust revisionism primarily challenges the facts of the Holocaust narrative, usually focusing on death totals and techniques of extermination.

I am not aware of any important revisionist focused, as Greg Johnson says, on quibbling about death-totals. Jews always would like to say that revisionists are just quibbling about numbers, but serious revisionism has a much more radical criticism than that.

Second, Holocaust death totals are never going to be revised to zero.

The position of Professor Robert Faurisson is precisely that the Holocaust death-toll is zero. He is able to say this because he begins by defining the word Holocaust: an alleged program of the German government to kill all of Europe’s Jews. There is no evidence for such a program.

The question of how Jews died is crucial. Jews that died of typhus, like Ann Frank, are not legitimately counted as Holocaust victims, because in their deaths they were not intended victims of any program.

How is the German government supposed to have killed Jews in this program? Usually at least 4 million are claimed to have been killed in gas-chambers, either with HCN gas (Auschwitz-Birkenau) or diesel exhaust (Aktion Reinhardt). The other methods by which Jews are alleged to have been killed, hanging and shooting, cannot be unambiguously represented as part of a program to kill all Jews: when the Einsatzgruppen shot Jews on the Eastern Front in retaliation for guerrilla actions, or Jews in camps were hanged for sabotage, it did not have to be interpreted as the expression of an intention to kill all Jews. The gas-chamber story however is unambiguous. The gas-chamber story therefore is the Holocaust.

Because the gas-chamber story is the Holocaust, we can say that the death-toll of the Holocaust is precisely zero.

You can say that a lot of Jews died during the war (although Mark Weber becomes very irresponsible when he concedes that “millions” lost their lives) but there is not one that can be demonstrated to have been gassed. More to the point: there is no alleged homicidal gas-chamber that withstands forensic scrutiny.

When a criminal accusation has no evidence to support it, when key evidence ostensibly supporting the accusation turns out to be fraudulent, we take the position that the accusation is false.

Greg Johnson said…

Hadding, I deal with your points in section 5 above [Greg refers to his recent featured article at The Occidental Observer], in the third point of the bulleted list. Claiming that the Holocaust did not happen on the basis of a strict definition of the term (the plan to kill all Jews) strikes ordinary people as morally obtuse quibbling about definitions, which ignores the facts that (1) Jews were singled out for especially harsh treatment by the Germans, and (2) countless innocent Jews lost their lives because of that policy. In the end, that is all one need claim to say that the Jews suffered their greatest tragedy at the hands of the Third Reich during World War II. Even if the genocidal intent, the gas chambers, etc. go the way of human soap and lampshades, that fact is never going to disappear, so it is indeed fortunate that the fortunes of White Nationalism do not depend on Holocaust revisionism.

Hadding said…

The principle that a clear discussion has to begin with a clear definition of what is being discussed derives from Socrates and Plato. Staying in the realm of mushy, malleable terms, one can never really resolve anything.

Anybody who thinks that establishing what is to be proven is “morally obtuse quibbling” needs to be excluded from the discussion of adults.

I don’t care that most people’s thought-processes are mush. I am not going to compromise for them. You can’t really win those people anyway, until you control their TV shows. I am interested in the people that are able to think.

And there are White Nationalists who are not Holocaust revisionists. Indeed, there are some who hope that the revisionists are wrong.

I wonder who those people could be? The few such individuals that I have encountered over the years were very crude. To think this way would seem to require the combination of unusual degrees of thoughtlessness and callousness. I imagine such a person to be a low-grade criminal-type.

Is this a type of person whose opinion we should value?

Greg Johnson said…

Hadding, I should have said “normal” people rather than “ordinary” people. Normal people think that reducing the Holocaust death total to zero merely by stipulating a particular definition of the Holocaust is morally obtuse quibbling about definitions.

I think it is morally obtuse quibbling about definitions, which is something different than dealing with historical facts, namely the facts that the Germans singled the Jews out for harsh treatment and that many innocent Jews died because of these policies. That is the worst thing that ever happened to the Jews, and it will continue to be a millstone around our people’s neck until we deal with the real sources of Jewish power and white weakness.

Hadding said…

My view is that H-revisionism is not part of an intellectually sound defense of WN, whatever soundness H-revisionism might possess as a field of historical research.

You’re going to be dragged into that issue whether you want it or not. To respond that it has no relevance because you’ve drawn an imaginary chalk-line that puts Hitler (“Old Right”) on one side and Greg Johnson (“New Right”) on the other is not going to convince anybody, for one thing because nobody, so far as I know, has ever used the term Old Right that way before. Everybody is going to see you as trying to dodge the issue.

Hadding, I should have said “normal” people rather than “ordinary” people. Normal people think that reducing the Holocaust death total to zero merely by stipulating a particular definition of the Holocaust is morally obtuse quibbling about definitions.

Okay so I am abnormal because I demand clarity?

You said what you meant the first time. Ordinary people means people who don’t do much thinking. The Holocaust story has been able to survive largely because people don’t want to think about it. They would rather agree to give the Jews some money to take away the gory pictures than to investigate whether what is being said is valid or not. It is reprehensible that our thinking class has allowed the Jews to get away with this.

Any intelligent discussion of the matter must begin with a definition of what is being discussed. The fact that a typhus casualty like Anne Frank can be passed off as a famous “victim of the Holocaust” shows that failure to think through what is meant by the word Holocaust, i.e. failure to define the term, is a large part of the problem.

If you reject the proposition that terms have to be defined before a rational discussion can occur then I have to ask from what kind of sorry institution you got your doctorate, because, while you are manifestly able to churn out large quantities of verbiage as needed to meet word-counts and term-paper due-dates, the foundation of clear discourse has somehow been neglected.

Greg Johnson said…

RE “not dealing with the Holocaust” or “running away from the Holocaust”: you are begging the question, since I take pains to argue that WNs do need to deal with the Holocaust, but Holocaust revisionism is not the way to do it.

Hadding said…

since I take pains to argue that WNs do need to deal with the Holocaust, but Holocaust revisionism is not the way to do it.

You advocate a lame conservative response, which means not challenging the assumptions, even when you know that they are false. Idealistic people will have only contempt for this.

Greg Johnson said…

Hadding, you need to deal with my arguments rather than simply try to stick negative labels on them.

Hadding said…

Since I explained what I meant by conservative rhetoric (not challenging the enemy’s assumptions) it should be pretty much self-evident that this is an accurate description.

Greg Johnson said…

Hadding, I argued at great length what you label “challenging the enemy’s assumptions” (i.e., Holocaust revisionism) is not a winning hand for white nationalism. You don’t challenge that argument. You just try to hang a negative label on it. Well, if this be conservatism, then I’ll make the most of it, since my argument still stands unchallenged. Really, I am disappointed that you can’t come up with something better than this.

1. The distinction between the New Right and the Old Right is real, not imaginary, so it really does not matter what people who are ignorant or indifferent to truth say about it.

2. Google: Anne Frank Holocaust victim.

About 630,000 results come up. Yet you claim that she was not a Holocaust victim because she did not die in a gas chamber, or because the Germans were not trying to kill every Jew on the planet. Sensible people look at that kind of argument and conclude that they are being flim-flammed.

Hadding said…

Back in 2001, a very well-informed gentleman sat me down to explain Holocaust revisionism. The first words out of his mouth were, “No serious revisionist denies that a very large number of innocent Jews died as a result of the Third Reich’s policy of deporting Jews to concentration camps.” I said, “Stop right there. That’s all I need to hear. I didn’t need to hear any more…

That’s pretty stupid Greg. Now for some “morally obtuse quibbling.”

What is a large number of Jews? What is the relationship between the fact that they were deported and the fact that they died? Was it deliberate or accidental? Is what happened to the Jews in this situation a unique event that deserves a special name like “Holocaust” or was it similar to events that befell various other populations in modern times?

I will also say that the omission of the name of the “very well-informed gentleman” is interesting. Who was that man?

Honestly, Greg, I think you are overly sensitive to Jewish suffering. A man tries to tell you what happened and you say, “Stop right there! That’s all I need to hear!”

You need to “step over” that squeamishness and deal with the fact that what happened to Jews in WWII was not unique or special. It was not an attempt to kill all the Jews. Get your head on straight. Then when somebody mentions the Holocaust you can say with serene confidence, “There was no Holocaust.”

Greg Johnson said…

A “serene confidence” won through self-induced imbecility. I’ll pass.

Hadding said…

What you’ve passed on is putting thought ahead of sentimentality. You’ve passed on thinking like a man.

You pretend to be some kind of ideological kin to Jonathan Bowden but you really didn’t grasp what Bowden meant by “stepping over.” Here’s the passage from his speech, Nietzschean Ideas: it’s a short dialog to demonstrate how one ought to respond to moralizing, followed by a statement about what people usually do instead:

You just say, “Liberalism is moral syphilis, and I’m stepping over it.”
“Well I don’t like the sound of that! You sound like a bit of a Fascist to me!” And I’d say, “There’s nothing wrong with Fascism. Nothing wrong with Fascism at all.”

Everyone now adopts a reverse semiotic and runs against what they actually think in order to convince people that don’t agree with them anyway.

You, Greg Johnson, are doing and advocating the opposite of what Jonathan Bowden advocated, even while copying his phrase and pretending to be influenced by him.

Bowden is “stepping over” liberalism as “moral syphilis,” while you embrace and hang on to your squeamishness and even moralize to others that they should be squeamish too.

Bowden asserts that there is “nothing wrong with Fascism,” while you abuse his expression “stepping over” as a rhetorical excuse for distancing yourself from Fascism because you lack the fortitude to side with Bowden. You lack the fortitude to say that there is nothing wrong with Fascism.

You even engage in the “reverse semiotic,” as Bowden calls it, [for] trying to make our enemies’ rhetoric work for us. If Bowden were here, I think he’d be none too pleased with the pretense that you are implementing his ideas.

Greg Johnson said…

I cite one point by Jonathan Bowden that I agree with, and you pop up citing other points where we disagree, and pretend it is somehow a problem with my position. It really is childish.

I agree with Jonathan on the idea that the primary problem of the Holocaust is moral.

I disagree with him RE Fascism: there’s plenty wrong with historical Fascism. We should maintain what is good in it, but we can do better.

No, I am not running a “reverse semiotic”: I am saying what I really believe. So stop bobbing and weaving and making things up and start dealing with the actual argument.

Hadding said…

You and Bowden are utterly opposite. Bowden puts a high value on thinking and masculinity. You represent dodging issues while using some specious excuse.

You are using a reverse semiotic, for example, when you justify your use of the term Holocaust with Google hits. That is not a result of any thinking on your part. You are not authentic, you are not thinking; instead you are trying to operate within the enemy’s rhetoric and assumptions. That is a reverse semiotic.

Greg Johnson said…

Hadding, I accept your confession of bad faith and inability to deal with my arguments.

Hadding said…

Backhanded insults from Greggy:

1. Hadding is not normal.
2. Hadding is morally obtuse.
3. Hadding has “self-induced imbecility.”
4. Hadding speaks in “bad faith.”
5. Hadding is unable to deal with Greggy’s arguments.

I think I’ve dealt very concisely with your slop. Forgive me for not providing excess verbiage for you to nitpick so that you can distract attention from my core points.

Greg Johnson said…

The Google search is a good tool to determine public opinion. If you ask any of our brainwashed brothers and sisters to name one person who died in the Holocaust, I guarantee Anne Frank would top the list. Since these are the people whose minds Holocaust Revisionists presumable wish to liberate, one needs to know what they think.

Now, imagine what kind of figure Hadding cuts when he says, huffily, that Anne Frank did not die in the Holocaust, because (a) she did not die in a gas chamber and the Holocaust is defined as killing Jews in gas chamber, or (b) there was no Holocaust, because the Holocaust means the attempt to kill all Jews, and the Nazis did not do that.

I submit that anyone who took that sort of tack would be seen, correctly, as a flim-flam man. But let me ask some of the other commentators here: what do you think of Hadding’s tactic? Does it free our people of the burden of Holocaust guilt, or does it make revisionists look bad?

Or do you all just ignore him?

Greg Johnson said…

White guilt and self-punishment induced by the Holocaust is a serious impediment to white survival.

So we have to attack this problem. There are basically two ways to do it.

First, one can attack the Holocaust itself via revisionism.

Second, one can attack the psychological and moral roots of the guilt and self-punishment.

The problem with revisionism is that it cannot revise away the fact that the Germans singled Jews out for harsh treatment and a lot of Jews died as a result. The only thing that can be revised away are the lies and myths told about these events after the fact. But no serious revisionist denies these facts, and those facts are Holocaust enough for Jews to be guilt tripping us until the sun burns out.

Does anybody need any clarification of this argument so far? So we need to attack our susceptibility to the guilt-tripping.

Exposing the nefarious lies told about these facts does not deal with the problem, because the victims did not tell the lies. The survivors did. And the victims will still be pitied, even if the survivors are revealed to be contemptible liars and swindlers.

So again, we need to focus on immunizing ourselves to susceptibility to the guilt-tripping.

Arguing that the word “Holocaust” does not apply to the innocent Jewish casualties of the Third Reich is merely a semantic flim-flam, since all those poor dead Jews are still there tugging at our heart-strings, no matter what we call it, or how they were killed, or the motives for the killings, or the stories told about the killings long after the war—which are the subjects of revisionism.

Even if not a single hair on an innocent Jewish head were harmed in the Third Reich, whites would be guilt-tripping and self-flagellating over slavery, the American Indians, and the passenger pigeon.

So again, we need to deal with the moral and psychological roots of the problem.

Hadding said…

Since this is a swipe specifically directed at me, let me just see if I can give a clearer response than I’ve given already.

Arguing that the word “Holocaust” does not apply to the innocent Jewish casualties of the Third Reich is merely a semantic flim-flam, since all those poor dead Jews are still there tugging at our heart-strings, no matter what we call it…

It’s not about what word is to be used. You’re not grasping at all what is accomplished by defining the word Holocaust before we discuss it. If we define our terms, we gain the possibility of clear discussion. From clear discussion you can get clarification of thoughts, so that people may end up with a radically different understanding of a matter as a result of discussing it.

Most people think that “Holocaust” means the attempt by the German government to kill all the Jews. In particular, they understand this to mean killing with gas-chambers. That definition has implications. We can reasonably ask whether various aspects of what passes for the Holocaust make sense under that definition.

How does a typhus epidemic make sense as part of a government’s attempt to kill all the Jews, when the epidemic could not be limited to Jews? A rational person who has agreed to the common understanding of what the word Holocaust means, and has given a little thought to the matter, would have to concede that Anne Frank was a victim a wartime disease epidemic. The same kind of disease epidemic has occurred in many European wars, as far back as the Great Plague of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. But death in a disease-epidemic is really not what we mean we say “the Holocaust.”

What has been more powerful than any other piece of “evidence” in securing popular belief in the Holocaust have been the films and images of emaciated people, dead and alive, from concentration camps captured by the Western Allies. Then you find out that the places where those films were made are no longer claimed to have been killing centers, and that what the images show is the effect of a typhus epidemic. So, since we have defined the term Holocaust as a deliberate attempt to kill all the Jews, we suddenly find that what has convinced most people that the Holocaust occurred is really not evidence for it at all. Those images have been used as spurious evidence to convince the public that the Holocaust story, specifically the gas-chamber story, was true, when a little bit of information and rational consideration reveals that they prove no such thing.

A reasonable person at this point may understand that he has seen essentially no evidence for this claim called “the Holocaust” that he always accepted as true.

Definition of terms is the prerequisite for clear discourse. Sometimes when you clarify the meaning of a word and compare the meaning to specific examples, you find out that what the word was supposed to signify doesn’t exist. This is not “flim-flam”: this is philosophy.

Greg Johnson said…

[responding to another commenter]

1. Yes, I argue that “Whites should concede that Jews suffered during World War II.” It is true, and no serious revisionist denies it, and that is all Jews need to keep playing violins and tugging at the heartstrings of morbidly conscientious whites until we cease to exist.

2. You then state:

“then you go on to believe that this warrants the continued application of ‘The Holocaust’, as if there was something exceptional about Jewish suffering and as if among all of the peoples that suffered in that war, they are so clearly individuated as a people as to warrant the dignity of a separate name and distinct narrative for their experience.”

I think there is a major confusion here.

First, I will charitably assume that, unlike Hadding, you are not merely objecting to the term “the Holocaust” and pretending that such autistic semantic quibbles matter.

Second, the major point of my article is that Whites need to stop caring so much about dead Jews. We need to stop thinking like Jews (i.e., in a Judeo-centric way) and come up with a white-centered perspective on genocide, because whites are being destroyed right now by soft, cold genocide. Moreover, Jews are the major architects of that genocide. Jews have (and continue) to subject whites to genocide on a far larger scale than anything that happened to the Jews in WW II. Once we start thinking that way, we are immune to the Holocaust guilt trip.

Third, everything is unique metaphysically speaking. But everything is also comparable to everything else. Jews insist that the Holocaust is both unique (which is trivially true) and incommensurable (which is false). That is just a projection of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism, which the rest of humanity needs to identify and reject. Jews can sell this absurdity because they have the power and money to do so. We need to immunize our people so they stop buying it.

3. You are misrepresenting my views on Israel. Philosophically speaking, if ethnonationalism is true and good, it applies to Jews too. I think we need to be consistent and principled on that point.

But that does not imply any sort of political support of Israel: no aid, no alliances, nothing. Of course it doesn’t exclude them either. For it is conceivable that a WN state might find such things to be in their interests (really in their interests).

As for any relations between WNs today and Jews: I make it very clear that the European nationalists who suck up to Jews are fools who are being played. Jews are the most powerful people on the planet. White nationalists have no power at all. Nobody makes alliances with the powerless. So when Jews try to establish friendly ties with White Nationalists, there can be only one agenda: the subversion of White Nationalism.

Hadding said…

First, I will charitably assume that, unlike Hadding, you are not merely objecting to the term “the Holocaust”…

I have explained very clearly that this is not what I am about. I define terms so that they can be discussed intelligently.

This accusation of merely trying to change what things are called as a kind of “flim-flam” is really projection on your part.

♣

Read the 500+ responses to Greg Johnson’s piece at TOO here.

As to whether or not millions of Jews died as a result of the “harsh treatment” they received in the Third Reich, this is my strategy: Stop using revisionism as a shield against the Jews’ accusations (“I didn’t do it!”). Use your spear instead (“You started the massive killing of white civilians, fucking kikes!”). As explained in my response to Greg in the above-linked thread:

So we need to rethink the issue and find a new way. [—Greg Johnson]

The “new way” is so obvious. Forget revising the Holocaust story. Focus on what the Jews actually did: Yagoda killed more innocent people than those attributed to Himmler.

As someone who used to comment at TOO [Wandrin] has said: Hitler didn’t win an electoral majority. He won most seats and was given the Chancellorship by the German elite in 1933: the year after the Jewish Bolsheviks deliberately starved six million Ukrainians to death. Can there be any real doubt that the threat of the Bolshevik terror influenced both the German voters and the decision to give Hitler the Chancellorship? Why isn’t this taught in the schools?

Tens of millions killed in the first industrial scale mass murder in history from 1917 onwards—the Red Terror and War Communism under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership long before Stalin—culminating in the deliberate starvation of six million Ukrainians in 1932 as revenge for past anti-Jewish pogroms. Why isn’t this taught in the schools?

Trillions of dollars and millions of man-hours have gone into creating a global memorial to the Holocaust—films, books, indoctrination of millions of school children, countless museums—and absolutely nothing to commemerate the tens of millions murdered by the Jewish Bolsheviks? Not only a Holocaust in its own right but the primary cause of the subsequent Fascist reaction they say came out of inherent evil of the Aryan nature: a position that would be impossible to sustain if Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik holocaust was more widely known.

So, compare and contrast the collective memorial to the Jewish dead with the collective non-memorial to the non-Jewish dead and you have Talmudic morality caught in the headlights.

Every single penny they spent on building Holocaustianity then works for us. Every film, every book, every museum highlights their denial of the Bolshevik holocaust and the value they place on non-Jewish dead: Zero.

Use this to destroy their moral authority first and then their power to enforce taboos…

Time to use the spear, not the shield!

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Alice Miller Arthur C. Clarke Gulag Archipelago (book) Lloyd deMause Maxfield Parrish Red terror

Ten books that changed my mind


1. Maxfield Parrish Poster Book

2. The Sickle

3. Laing and Anti-Psychiatry

4. Childhood’s End

5. A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology

6. The Relentless Question

7. Final Analysis

8. The Gulag Archipelago

9. For Your Own Good

10. The Emotional Life of Nations

Categories
2nd World War Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Communism 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.

Categories
1st World War Esau's Tears (book) Holodomor Israel / Palestine Leon Trotsky Red terror Winston Churchill

Mark Steyn

Steyn at the center, wearing a Kippah with Jews at Toronto



This month at Toronto, the famed author Mark Steyn said that Western society is complicit in a resurgence of anti-Semitism that may lead to a second Holocaust, for which humankind will have no excuses. “There is something profoundly wicked in the contortions that Europeans are willing to make with respect to their own complicated history with the Jewish people,” said Steyn. “We are on the verge of the biggest, most disgusting and evil event of all, in part because of the complicity of the West” (see the Jewish Tribune article where these statement and many other similar statements by Steyn on “anti-Semitism” have been recorded).

Either Steyn is playing the fool by willfully setting aside from his consciousness the vast pool of information about the role of the Jews in the ongoing Western collapse, or he has not heard this sort of info during his long career as an intellectual who presumably defends our civilization. There’s no third possibility.

Considering that Steyn said every recorded word at Toronto assuming that any anti-Semitic sentiment must be pathological, it is impossible to discuss what he said this month without basic information about the Jewish Problem.

If the Jewish Problem (1) does indeed exist, Steyn is either playing the fool or simply someone who has not heard of the Jewish Problem throughout his life, as stated above. On the other hand, if (2) the Jewish Problem is sheer white nationalist paranoia, Steyn’s recent statements make sense from the historical and ethical viewpoint. Everything has to do with these two possibilities.

The long quotation that below comprises most of this post—9,000+ words—conveys the idea that #1 is the right approach to understand Steyn’s mind.

Rather than a quotation it’s a series of excerpts that I typed directly from an academic work by Albert Lindemann, a Jewish scholar who specializes in anti-Semitism and acknowledges the reasons why Jews have been so disliked.

No ellipsis added between unquoted excerpts:


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Note of February 23, 2013. I have moved the long book quotation elsewhere.