You should go to the web site: Go Sand Bag Me!. Seriously, good luck!
If’n you need a break from the thundering volume of Q news, check this out
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3890541/posts?page=1
A Zek Remembers Stalin’s Camps
Tablet ^ | SEPTEMBER 30, 2020 | TIMOTHY SNYDER
Long but fascinating. This is what the left really wants to do with those who don’t share its vision of a ‘radiant future’.
A Zek Remembers Stalin’s Camps A new foreword to Julius Margolin’s stunning, recovered memoir of the gulag
TIMOTHY SNYDER SEPTEMBER 30, 2020 Wikipedia Political prisoners eating lunch in the Intalag coal mineWIKIPEDIA We speak of memory, but memory is empty without witness. It is too much to expect that all who suffer speak. Yet without witness, memory devolves into propaganda that serves the moment. Julius Margolin asks whether the real Russia is the one that celebrates victory over Nazi Germany on Red Square, or the one that exists in the uncharted universe of concentration camps that he calls “the land of the zek.” He wrote in 1946 and 1947, right after five years of Soviet penal servitude; the question is still pertinent in the Russia of the 21st century. Margolin was himself a “zek,” a convict, who survived incarceration in the largest concentration camp system during its most murderous period.
We call the Soviet camps the Gulag, after the title of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s much later book, published in 1973. Had Margolin’s book been published when he wrote it, “zek” and “land of the zek” would be the terms we use now. This first complete collection of Margolin’s texts about the camps, published as a whole in English translation, arrives at a time when we know a great deal about them. When documents became available after the end of the USSR in 1991, historians sought to balance the experiences of the prisoners with those of the guards, the camp directors, the politburo, Stalin himself. We know certain things that Margolin did not: the locations of most of the camps, the numbers of registered prisoners and deaths, the names of those who persecuted them. Yet without the voices of the witnesses, even such knowledge is not enough. If memory is challenged by witness, history is enriched by it.
Only a very few memoirs of concentration camps, and only a scarce handful of memoirs of the Gulag, give a sense of what it was like on the inside. Margolin gives a reason: to become a zek was to lose the points of reference that would make the experience intelligible to others: “No one retains his original form. Observation is difficult because the observer himself is deformed. He, too, is abnormal.” In this sense the title of this book is perfectly chosen. Margolin recounts the five years between his deportation from Soviet-occupied Poland in 1940 and his return to postwar Poland in 1946 and then his subsequent departure for Palestine via France. It is a mark of his honesty that he records his own decline; it is a mark of his recovery that he was able to write this book. This literary and philosophical memoir is not simply an unmatched historical record; it is also a deep moral judgement. Tens of millions of people passed through the Gulag; only a few were able to write searching and reliable books about it. This one is perhaps the best.
moar,,,
this suddenly looks more interesting today, huh?
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/who_targeted_the_president.html
Who targeted the president?
By Sally Zelikovsky