oyuki

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Gitmo <> Gulags

Have not been posting due to computer crashing.

Amnesia Internationale has been pushing this new big lie calling Camp X-ray the equivalent of a Soviet-era gulag.

I will offer one case from the Stalin era of fear and tyranny to refute this lie. A man named Viktor Herman was whisked off to the Soviet Union along with his siblings because his father was offered a lucrative job in the Soviet Union to help industrialize the country. So that entire family left the safe confines of the United States and traveled to the Soviet Union. Viktor set a free-fall parachute record and the propaganda minions of the USSR wanted to capitalize on this, to prove the superiority of the New Soviet Man. Well things hit a snag, Viktor refused to say he was a Soviet citizen and insisted on keeping his American citizenship.

For this egrarious affront to the honor of the Rodina, Viktor was sentenced to the Siberian gulags. One winter in one of the Soviet slave labor camps, gulags, Viktor was tasked to chop trees down and load them in a railway car. Remember this is a Siberian winter and the trees were frozen almost solid. He was being fed less than a thousand calories a day while doing this hard labor. Well Viktor out smarted his captors by loading the felled trees in each railway car in such a way there was a hollow core so while it looked like he filled each car when in fact he had not. So Viktor survived by using his wits.

But his imprisonment did not end when he was released from the Siberian slave labor camps. He could not leave Siberia after release, so sayeth the NKVD. He was exiled to Siberia. And there is seemed he would die except for thawing relations with the United States allowed him, his wife, and children to finally leave the USSR and live in the United States.

To Amnesia Internationale and all others who say Camp X-ray is an American gulag, I ask how? Are we using the detainees for slave labor like People's Republic of China still does? Are we casually killing off prisoners like the NKVD/KGB would do? Are we starving these people like the USSR's gulags did? Are US guards bursting into the prison cells and confiscating religious books? The answer to all these questions is an emphatic no. In fact the United States has bent over backwards to treat humanely people, that according to the Geneva Conventions are either mercenaries or spies; in either case this qualifies the detainees for summary execution. The US has released some of these detainees; of these some have gone back to Pakistan and died in further terrorist attacks.

All these attacks really do is trivialize and reduce to sound-bytes one of the greatest injustices ever committed against innocent people. In fact if Amnesia Internationale really wants to complain about gulags, just look a few kilometers beyond the fence at Guantanimo Bay at what that Stalin wanna-be with the grey beard has been doing to his people. Now there is a true gulag.

Until Amnesty International removes its political blinders then I consider the organisation a terrorist collaborater and will be treated as such. Their moral capital in my eyes is zero and they can sod off.

For further reading: Coming out of the Ice by Viktor Herman.

3 comments:

RightWingRocker said...

DITTO


RWR

Van Helsing said...

Excellent point: Gitmo is actually the part of Cuba that is farthest from being a gulag. It's certainly the only part where people are treated like individuals instead of slaves. You have to wonder whether the nuts at AI are trying to make Gitmo out to be infinitely worse than it is, or trying to make the real gulags out to be infinitely better than they were. Both, I suppose.

Anna said...

Amnesty International is just pushing forward the argument that the United States is evil incarnate and must be fought. Sen. Durbin is helping that along. Meanwhile in Iran the crackdowns continue[Sean Penn getting his camera confiscated - Sean could have been worse; you could have been carted off to prison, beaten, and 'accidentally' die.].