Tag: Gulag Archipelago

Thoughts on Our New Status as a Banana Republic

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Tomorrow and Wednesday I’m on the road.  So, posting will be iffy.  Of course, now that Brandon is unleashing the Stasi and the IRS to round up all of us Yellow Star folks maybe I’ll be stopped at the state border and forced into a cattle car.  I hope there will be lots of straw in the cattle car.  That stuff keeps the smell down in cattle cars, I hear.

Seriously, I feel the Left and their allies in the Deep State have crossed the Rubicon.  At this point I don’t think they’ll hesitate to come after all their enemies and punish them with every trick in the book.  I expect really bad stuff to begin happening to just about anyone they can identify as “not their friend.”

You know I expected this type of thing to happen but I didn’t think it would bother me as much as it does.  It really is a complete break with the America that I believed in as a young man.  This is no different from the East Germany that we read about back in the 1970s.  It’s right in line with the things I read in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.  There’s the bang on the door at night and jack-booted thugs carrying off someone into the dark.  Secret courts and show trials and rat-like characters like Merrick Garland and Joe Biden.

And of course, we will be powerless to hold any of these people responsible.  Just as with the Summer of George rioting and the election fraud in 2020 those responsible won’t suffer any consequences.  Whereas innocent people will have their lives ruined and be imprisoned and robbed of their livelihood by these rats.

Joe Biden and his drug-addled son Hunter shake down China and Ukraine for millions and there are no consequences even when the moron leaves evidence of his crimes out in the open.  The FBI and the media are his fixers and they’ll make sure that nothing interrupts the graft and corruption.  But at this point only the brain dead are unaware of the depths of Biden’s dishonesty and incompetence.

November truly will be the acid test.  If the Democrats aren’t swept out of power in a tidal wave, then there is literally no hope for this once free country.  If the Democrats aren’t banished then either the American people are already brain dead or the election fraud is so thorough that we’ll never see a fair election again.  And even if the Republicans take back the House and Senate, Biden’s re-animated corpse will still be torturing our country for two more years.  With tens of thousands of new IRS employees Biden will use the death by a thousand paper cuts on his enemies’ supporters.

Well, enough whining.  It’s only a few months until November and I’m sure I can keep busy working and playing until then.  And as the Good Book says “The truth shall set you free.”  It’s better to have the bad news than to be confused by the lies.  If the bad guys have won it’s best to know.  Then you can make the decisions you need to in order to figure out Plan B.

Tucker Carlson Describes the NSA Spying on Him

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In this interview with Maria Bartiromo Carlson describes the facts of how he knows that not only has the NSA spied on his phone text messages but also leaked them to journalists.

The best line was from Bartiromo who described the tactic as the “stuff of banana republics.”  And that’s exactly right.  We either have become or always were a banana republic.  If the FBI and NSA have always been doing this then this has always been a police state.  Even if they only used these tactics against the presidents and congressmen they didn’t like then effectively the security agencies are our masters and are running the country.

This sickens me in a way that I thought I was past feeling.  I knew they went after Trump.  But this is the stuff of KGB or Stasi tactics.  Honestly, if the Republicans don’t latch onto these things and use them to do whatever is necessary to push back then we’re just a permanent slave state, no better than North Korea or Cuba..

 

Observations from The Gulag Archipelago Relevant to Today – Part-2 – Learning a Lesson from Uncle Joe

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A lot of discussion has been expended about exactly how real is the belief in the “Woke” religion.  Many find it unimaginable that there could be so many people who actually believe in the nonsense being preached by the Left.  Everything from the Gaia cult of humanity-as-a-disease to the Anti-White mania to the recent trans-fetishism bespeaks a lack of intelligence that is shocking in a country supposedly so steeped in higher education and civilized values.

But what people forget is that in a country of 330 million people even a tenth of a percent is over three hundred thousand madmen.  And that is more than enough to account for the street theater we have seen unleashed across the country last summer.  Even a few thousand people would be enough as long as they are tolerated and even encouraged by the local officials.  And because even if the maniacal believers only number in the thousands, the majority of the millennials have been indoctrinated in these things for decades.  And even if they don’t believe these things, they believe that everyone else believes these things because that is what the media and Hollywood and their teachers have told them.

So, a small minority of true believers push the sheep in the direction they want.  And if no one resists that is the direction the country will go.  But what about the top of this pyramid?  Do the shot-callers in Washington and New York believe in these things?  I think the answer is certainly not.

I think that is like asking if Joseph Stalin believed in Communism.  I have been reading the Gulag Archipelago for the last month or so.  I have just about finished the first volume.  That’s over six hundred pages of very dense text and numerous footnotes and so far, we haven’t even arrived at the labor camps.  The level of intentional cruelty and systematic destruction of every organization in the Soviet Union up to and including members of Stalin’s own inner circle is mind-numbing.  The lengths that he went to destroy any power other than his own is shocking.  Solzhenitsyn estimates that he was responsible for the death of sixty million Soviet citizens through his purges and other attacks.  There was even a belief in the Soviet Union that before joining the Bolshevik revolution Stalin was a member of the Tsar’s secret police.

I assume what Stalin believed in was Stalin.  But what he saw was a population of people who did believe in Communism and he wielded that population as a tool to gain control over a giant empire.  And once he had full control of that empire, he liquidated those true believers because they were a danger.  He was like the phony televangelist who discovers that other people’s faith can be a money-making machine.  He doesn’t believe in God.  He believes in himself and he sees other people’s faith as a tool for making himself rich.  Luckily for those faithful, the televangelist won’t have to kill them off at the end of the latest crusade.

But in the case of the woke faithful they may not be so lucky.  Once they have performed their function, once they’ve provided the Left with total control of the country, they may become inconvenient themselves.  Stalin was lucky in that when he decided to purge people he didn’t want around, he didn’t have to bother with things like laws and judges and juries and courts.  The various incarnations of the secret police that would one day be the KGB simply scooped up the victims and brought them to interrogation prisons and used physical and psychological torture until the victims were glad to sign confessions to whatever ridiculous charges had been concocted.  Prison was a relief, even a bullet in the head was a release from a fate worse than death.

Our FBI is trying out for the part of the KGB.  Right now, they’re a poor man’s version.  But it’s easy to see the shape of what they would like to be.  And it is the KGB, or in our case, the Justice Department that gets to play kingmaker.  They can support or thwart a president.  They can terrorize private individuals of all levels of importance and they can even take down political opponents with the help of a hand-picked federal judge who is willing to hand-waive a FISA warrant and refuse bail to a railroaded victim.

The only question is who will be their boss?  Will it be a Stalin or more of a committee?  Will Barack Obama and the Clintons and the people who pull Joe Biden’s strings sit down with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and the CEO of Goldman Sachs and Jeff Bezos and decide how we will be fed into the American Gulag?  It wouldn’t surprise me a bit.  And to get back to the original question, no, none of those people believe in any of this woke crap in the least.  It’s just a hell of a way to conquer an empire.  They learned it from Uncle Joe Stalin, the guy who wrote the book.

Observations from the Gulag Archipelago Relevant to Today – Part 1 – Show Trials

Will We Get a Gorbachev?

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The Soviet Union was an abomination.  It tortured and killed its most loyal citizens on an industrial scale that had never before been seen.  And then it exported the formula abroad to places like China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba and Venezuela.  Up until recently the legal apparatus in the United States specifically forbade the techniques and tactics that the Soviets used.  But with the passing of the Patriot Act and the weaponization of the Judiciary we have the ingredients needed to institute the purges that Stalin perfected in the 1930s and unleashed on his people to such devastating effect during his long and nightmarish reign.

As an example, look at the techniques used by the FBI and the Justice Department in conjunction with federal judges like the vicious thug Emmet Sullivan who persecuted General Michael Flynn even after the Justice Department admitted that they had no case against him and dropped the prosecution.  Or look at the recent imprisonment of the harmless protestors who were involved in the January 6th “riot.”  Here is the federal justice system imprisoning without bail harmless Americans who are much less dangerous than all of the Antifa and BLM criminals who are still rioting and destroying federal property in Portland, Oregon with impunity.

The Soviet Union finally reached a point after seventy years of torturing its citizens that it could not continue.  Decades of terror and insanity had finally killed off all belief in the system among the populace and this was terminal for the vitality of the state.  After all, once even the stupidest of the people know it’s all a sham, they stop caring about anything but getting through the day.  It finally reaches the point where life is characterized by the saying, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”  When a dispirited population that is barely kept alive on the meager output of their own slave labor is the basis for a supposed world power it doesn’t take forever before the whole thing just falls apart of its own accord.  The upkeep of nuclear weapons and the fighting of foreign wars requires dedication and  morale.  Terrorized slaves lack those qualities.

The United States and the Soviet Union are very different places.  And even granting that the power of the federal government augmented by its alliance with the tech companies like Google and Facebook is a frighteningly powerful force to wield against private citizens and even state officials.  But I still believe there will be a reaction to this attempt to subjugate the free people of this country by the thugs who are attempting to use the Stalinist playbook against us.  Americans are not Russian serfs.  They have a history of being free.

I have no proof that there exists a base of people in one of the red states that will stand up against these thugs.  But I think it will happen.  And if it happens at all it will inspire a groundswell of the same resistance in a thousand places.  And that will put an end to these creatures.  Because if the American people ever get their freedom back again, they’ll take steps to put an end to the laws and individuals that have allowed this tyranny to exist.  They’ll cancel the Patriot Act.  They’ll shut down the FBI and start from scratch.  They’ll put every one of the FBI and CIA and media hacks who lied and persecuted innocent men during the whole Russiagate witch hunt on trial.  Comey and Brennan and the rest of the Obama cronies will be thrown into prison and left to rot.  And then we should empty the federal judicial bench all the way up to the Supreme Court and replace them with citizens who have worked for a living and even if they’ve never been inside a courtroom, they would be better judges of their fellow citizens than all these ivy league intellectuals who let us suffer under the current regime.

For me the only question is who will light the match?  Will we have to wait until our country is falling apart at the seams before we get our Gorbachev?  I hope not.

Observations from the Gulag Archipelago Relevant to Today – Part 1 – Show Trials

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Solzhenitsyn’s epic history of the Soviet Union’s war against its own people is a crippling experience for the reader.  The first ninety pages are a seemingly endless list of purges that went on from 1917 to well into the 1950’s.  The scope, the strategies and the tactics that were used to terrorize, imprison, torture and mostly murder these poor human beings is almost beyond comprehension.  In Solzhenitsyn’s own words “If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.’”

To try and understand how a government of men would choose to decimate and more than decimate its own people is very difficult.  But it is telling that in every society where radical socialism has taken hold it follows the same pattern and causes monstrous suffering.  Because this same ideology is now loose in our own society, I thought it would be useful to select specific details from the Gulag Archipelago and elaborate on how they relate to our time and place.

I’ll start off the series with the concept of show trials.  Among the many purges there was a period when a decision was made to go after engineers.  They were selected because previously they had been given a certain immunity due to their usefulness.  Because of the backwardness of pre-revolutionary Russia and because of the agricultural disruptions that occurred due to the collectivization of the farmlands, having men who could manufacture and repair and improve modern equipment like tractors and automobiles was quite important.  Sending them to the gulag was quite counterproductive.  But at a certain point logic ceased to be strong enough to prevent the next victim group from being fed into the maw of the meat grinder.

And it was quite easy to incriminate engineers.  By definition they were intellectuals, a classic category of counter-revolutionaries.  Also, most of them had studied at the universities during the czarist period so there were all kinds of associations and attachments to people and organizations that had already been condemned and consumed in the earlier purges.

But the technique that the authorities wanted to most use was to find someone innocent of any real crimes and tell him that if he would denounce himself and all his fellows of some absurdly improbable crime in a public exhibition then he would get a lighter sentence.  And so, we got the show trial.

At the trial the accused had to go through the full histrionics of denouncing himself and confess to all his crimes and accuse all of his co-conspirators.  In the best case all of the other equally innocent men would also confess to their inhuman crimes against the collective.  And finally, they would finish off by demanding their own deaths as the only fitting punishment for their atrocious crimes.  And ironically, despite the assurances that they had received of a lighter sentence, often death was awarded to them.  But either way this theater of the perverse was conducted and make-believe crimes were punished and more fodder was fed into the killing machine.

Amusingly, these trials came to an end when during the show trial against the ceramic industry the defendants as a body decided at the last minute to deny all charges.  And since the prosecution had no actual evidence to produce against them at this very public trial, they were exonerated.  It just goes to show sometimes courage is rewarded.

Currently, examples of show trials in our country are only the thinnest of ghosts of what the Stalinist regime could perpetrate.  A recent example is New York Times science writer Donald McNeil Jr.  He was denounced for the use of the black ethnic slur that shall not be repeated unless you are black.  He was on a trip with students in Peru, for some reason, and one of his students finked out another of the students for having used the black ethnic slur that shall not be repeated unless you are black (tbestsnbruyab).  When McNeil said tbestsnbruyab in the context of condemning the use of tbestsnbruyab he was reported by those present of using tbestsnbruyab.  He was condemned by his colleagues and the incident was forgotten.  But two years later the retroactive punishment for this offense became capitol and his colleagues demanded his firing.  And being the good progressive that he is, he made a statement applauding his professional lynching.  Now admittedly this is poor stuff compared to shipping him off to a labor camp or putting a bullet in his brain.  But it’s a rousing start when it occurs in the so-called land of free speech.

I expect there will be other examples of looney lefties denouncing themselves.  And I think we’ll also see that after the fact they’ll be heard caterwauling at the gates of the Emerald City claiming that they weren’t given a chance afterward to be re-educated and rehabilitated.  But it’s a funny thing.  Once you’ve been cast out into that void it’s really hard to get the “good” people to take your calls.  Contamination from bad thinking is much scarier than COVID.  They’re going to have to get back to you sometime in the future.  And that future sure isn’t tomorrow and chances are it’s never.

So, as you can see, we are only at the very beginning of the great revolution that the Russians perfected.  But I will continue this series and I’m sure we’ll use our Yankee ingenuity to innovate and who knows even show the masters a thing or two.  So, stay tuned comrades.

Back in the USSA, Not Quite

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The downside of reading the Gulag Archipelago is that you become dismissive of the power of the FBI.  I mean compared to the KGB and its precursor the NKVD our secret police are pretty lame.  Of course, everything is relative.  Compared to the unimaginable freedom that we used to enjoy here, the present police state is very repressive and upsetting.  A generation ago we would have laughed at the idea of the government spying on all of the phone conversations of the American people.  And the idea that political opponents would now be the targets for re-education camps would have been the subject of science fiction dystopias that sane people would have found too far-fetched to be interesting.

But getting back to the USSR, the Soviets didn’t do anything half way.  They were so zealous and thorough that they would arrest random people just because their quotas hadn’t yet been met.  I was reading a story about a landlady who went to the police station to ask about what to do with a nursing infant whose mother was one of her tenants.  The mother had been arrested by the NKVD and now the child needed milk.  She wanted to know where she should bring the child.  They brought the landlady to a waiting room and after a delay of a few hours they decided to arrest her just because she was already there and the quota needed filling.  She disappeared into the gulag and was never seen again.  Now there’s an action that would bring tears of joy to Jim Comey’s eyes.

I guess my point is that as maddening as it is to see the freest country ever imagined devolving into a police state the reality is that we have a lot of latitude to communicate our ideas and information with each other.  After all I can call Joe Biden, Dementia Joe and Kamala Harris, Willie Brown’s Ho.  And so far, I haven’t been dragged away to Siberia (or even Minnesota) or been shut down by the thought police.  Sure, they’ve shut us out of Twitter and Facebook but honestly those things were overrun with Leftists anyway and from what people on them have told me they weren’t fun anymore anyway.  Larry Correia is one of my favorite fantasy authors partly because he is not a Leftist.  On his blog, Monster Hunter Nation, he wrote a recent post that chronicled his decision to abandon Facebook.  Apparently, they didn’t shut down his very popular page but instead blocked him from writing to it.

I have a Gab page, but honestly, I’ve never really gotten any traffic from it.  The short-short form of writing doesn’t really seem to suit me.  Maybe it’s a skill I need to learn.  But I like writing on my blog and if I can get some visibility from folks like Whatfinger, Disturbed Deputy and MaddMedic then I’m happy to communicate that way.  Lately I’ve been getting some organic search traffic but it’s still quite limited and is restricted to very specific posts that have little to do with the majority of my content.

What I’m getting at is that although I’d love to suddenly go viral and have millions of readers, I’m not sure that was ever a realistic thing.  Are there really that many people interested in the things I am?  Maybe I’ll never know.  But if the people who like my stuff tells some of their friends that’s probably the best way for my site to grow and right now, I don’t think the FBI or even Google is interested in my nefarious writings.  If I do get hurled off my platform, I guess I’ll change my tune but I think what I’d do is what Gab did.  I’d make my site completely bullet proof.  I believe I’ve found a hosting plan that avoids all the vulnerable infrastructure and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Circling back to the beginning.  We have lost a lot of freedom but compared to real totalitarian hell like the Soviet Union or that madman in North Korea we have enough wiggle room to say what we want, to whom we want.  And right now, that’s good enough.

So spread the good word, send all your conservative friends to Orion’s Cold Fire and spit in the eye of Google and the FBI.  Free America still exists here and I’m not feeling pessimistic today.