Goodbye and Good Riddance

Updated August 23:

A traitor is dead. Goodbye and good riddance.

A notorious serial liar, fascist, Nazi sympathizer and novelist has died. He was lionized in the West for his lying novels and his lies where he claimed that 60 million, or 110 million, or however many, humans were murdered in his country. In reality, the state did kill some people in his country, but the number of those killed in peacetime was 1.6 million, not 60-110 million as he lied, I mean wrote.

Furthermore, the death rate was three times higher under the Czarist regime he so loved and championed his whole life than under the revolutionaries who replaced them.

He supported fascism his whole life, championing the Spanish Francoist Falangist fascists in Spain in the Spanish Civil War and later all through their rule. In 1975, as anti-fascist and pro-democracy demonstrations rocked Spain, the novelist traveled to Spain to shill for Spanish fascism.

Truth is, he never met a fascist he did not like.

He opposed the democratic revolution that overthrew the Portuguese fascist Salazar dictatorship in 1974, and advocated that the US military invade Portugal to restore the fascists to power. After the North Vietnamese conquered South Vietnam and reunited the country in 1975, he urged the US to attack Vietnam again. He opposed the liberation from colonialism of Portugal's colonies.

He gave speeches saying that North Vietnam was hiding tens of thousands of US servicemen as slave labor prisoners. These lies served as the basis for the crazy POW-MIA movement and the Rambo movies. Any American journalist arguing for peace between the USSR and the US was condemned as a traitor in the novelist's speeches.

He also lied about the military prowess of the USSR and urged a massive US buildup to counteract it. He said that the Soviets had a 5-7 times advantage in conventional weapons and nuclear weapons that were 2-5 times more powerful than those of the US. After the fall of the USSR, the novelist advocated a return to Czarism under the wing of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Most such people in his country were hardcore anti-Semites, and he was apparently no exception. He blamed Jews for the supposed deaths of 110 million people in his land and wrote an anti-Semitic book called Two Hundred Years Together on the history of his people and the Jews of his land. Due to Jewish pressure, that book has not yet been published in English in the US, but if you're lucky you can get it in Russian.

After World War 2, he came back to his native land, the USSR, and wrote polemics. These polemics resulted in his conviction as a counterrevolutionary for distributing anti-Soviet propaganda. His writings said that the war with Nazi Germany could have been avoided if the USSR had reached a compromise with the Germans.

He also said that the USSR and Stalin were worse than Nazi Germany and Hitler due to the sufferings of the Soviet people during the war. His detractors accused him of being a Nazi sympathizer. In 1946, for those writings, he was tried, convicted and sent to a labor camp for the crime of treason.

Now he's dead, but at least he can't write anymore lies.

I would like to post another side to his infamous archipelago. His gulags were obviously not a paradise, and 300,000 political prisoners, not 60-110 million, did indeed die there. 50% died during World War 2, mostly due to medicine shortages that were effecting the entire land at this time.

For instance, during the late 1940's in the USSR, some people were unemployed and wanted a job. They could not get one, so some of them would try to get arrested. They would walk up to the (evil, murderous Jewish NKVD that killed millions in an instant and for no reason) and asked to be arrested.

The NKVD, at that time being mostly fairly principled folks who would not arrest people just because they walk up to them and demand to get arrested, would not arrest them, and informed them that they would not arrest them unless they had committed a crime. The people who wanted to get arrested said they just wanted to work, so they were sent to work in the gulag in the Far East.

They were undoubtedly sent to one of the highest level gulags, which were really no more than huge zones with fences and guards around them. Inside were cities, towns, fields and factories.

Actually, there was all kinds of people out there - prisoners, yes, but also just workers. Prisoners and workers hung out together and had relationships and children with each other. It was not the mass murder system that the liars like the recently deceased novelist make it out to be.

How could this be if everyone hated the horrible mass murdering terror machine? For better or for worse, at the time of the gulags, a lot of Soviet citizens supported the repression because for various reasons they opposed those who opposed Stalin.

Out in the gulags in the 1950's, they all even went on strike one time - guards, prisoners, and workers together, after Khrushchev killed Beria, supposedly the most evil NKVD mass murderer of them all. Apparently Mr. Beria was quite well liked in the gulags, by guards, prisoners and workers all, for being a fair-minded man. Why they felt this way, I have no idea.

There were four or more levels in the gulag, and not all of them were harsh. Some of those levels were more exile or penal colonies than anything else. As you can see from the anecdote above, some of the "gulags" were not uniformly miserable places.

However, it is true that in 1939, 1 million Poles were deported to the gulags after the invasion of Poland. There were reasons for that, since this occurred during the Soviet occupation of Poland in the context of a hellaciously murderous war between the USSR and Germany, but it doesn't seem like it was the right thing to do.

The novelist lied when he said that 110 million people were murdered in his land. The number is 1.6 million and breaks down as follows:

Executions of political prisoners: 900,000
Deaths during dekulakization in Ukraine: 390,000
Deaths of political prisoners in labor camps: 300,000

I'm not including the "Holodomor" crap because the famine was not intentional, nor was it limited to the Ukraine.

Executions of political prisoners and deaths during population transfers during WW2 are not included. It was a terrible time, with a tremendous amount killings of civilians and fighters on all sides by all forces.

I'm also not including criminals who were executed or deaths of criminals in labor camps. Most of them were rapists, robbers and murderers. Of the 1.2 million deaths in the gulag, 900,000 were such criminals.

On the other hand, I would like to point out that some of the gulags were pretty horrible places, lots of people were punished there who had done little wrong, and punishments for infractions while in the camps were also very harsh and cruel.

I think most people nowadays do not wish to live in a secret police state like Stalin's that executes dissidents and throws them into often-Hellish labor camps. So I think that Communists should not execute political prisoners and ought not to operate gulags. Remaining Communist states often adhere to this rule.

Cuba's prisons are not very harsh on a Latin American scale, and no one has been executed for a political crime in a very long time. In Vietnam and Laos, things are similar. North Korea is still an extremely harsh and cruel police state, and in many ways, so is China. For one thing, China probably executes 20,000 prisoners, mostly or all common criminals, a year.

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