Posted on 02/08/2010 4:21:12 AM PST by Michael van der Galien
The tortures included laying a man naked on a freezing cement floor, forcing his legs apart, and then an interrogator stepping on his testicles, applying increasing pressure until the confession surfaced. Imagine the consequences of no surfacing confession. Indeed, many people refused to confess to a crime they did not commit.
Daughters and sons were raped in front of their fathers and mothers — for the sake of extracting “confessions.” These are just some of the delicacies that the Stalinist machinery inflicted on its citizenry in the hope of bringing socialism into earthly incarnation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has shared much of this horror with us in his Gulag Archipelago — a work, mystifyingly enough, that I had never heard mentioned, except with a few exceptions, by one professor in a lecture or seminar in my entire eleven years studying Cold War history in academia. It was a work that I never saw, again with a few exceptions, on any academic syllabus — and many of my courses concerned Soviet history and American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union.
Both of my grandfathers were exterminated by Stalinist terror. Both of my parents, Yuri and Marina Glazov, were dissidents in the former Soviet Union. They risked their lives for freedom; they stood up against Soviet totalitarianism. They barely escaped the gulag, a fortune many of our friends and relatives did not share.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
Your problem is that when most Americans look at American liberalism, they don't see the Nazis or commies. They see, if they actually understand the socialist goals of liberalism, the democratic socialism of UK or Sweden.
While you and I might not prefer to live in those societies, you have to recognize that very few people are terrified by them.
I think it’s been since the 1950’s that we’ve had people openly and publicly discussing the left as they are. The pretense, and thier control of the discussion is gone for the moment. They will try to reassert control over the discussion as they did in the 60’s through the 2000’s.
BUMP for the work of Beck AND Glazov!
Not terrified until they are beaten by some privileged, politically active group (muslim, union, take your pick). Not terrified until they are on a multi-year waitlist for an operation that allows them to walk again — while the elites fly away to a foreign hospital for immediate treatment — and then they realize that they’ve given away their freedom AND that THEY are the abused underclass of the regime.
I agree that a lot of folks are uninformed and I appreciate your comments. I was just jerking your chain a little, but I also think that we dodged a bullet by not having Sen. McCain in the WH. Had he been elected I think it would have been the end of any opposition to a progressive agenda since McCain basically supported a lot of Obama’s policies.
I can see the group reaction at Obama’s Super Bowl party, “Right on, Right on”!
“...he’s also showing that there has always been an unholy alliance between Western leftists and the world’s most ruthless dictators...”
Now he should also go on to say that there has been an unholy alliance between plenty of top American Corporations and a place like China, which on last examination is still governed by the People’s Workers’ Party, brutally crushes dissent, supports North Korea (reduced to cannibalism)and is rapidly modernizing it’s military with the AID of - well, I don’t want to sound like a commie, but, I can only say “American Corporate Capitalism.”
Seen in that light, some of the so-called lefties are almost patriots for wanting to keep their American factories in America.
As I don’t want to be called something that I’m not, a Commie, I’d like to know the rationale behind - say a Walmart or an Intel (and many others) actually furthering the wealth, world standing, prestige, military might of a country that still venerates the mortal remains of a man who slaughtered more human beings than anyone else in the history of Humanity.
Keep on pubicizing the atrocities of the Communists. There needs to be a balance of these truths. All we ever hear about is the Nazis.
They are all the same.
Yah, I think Beck is doing a great service because many people will learn about much of this history for the first time from Beck. It’s one of those things that sounds so extreme (it really should be the biggest scandal in our history and treated as such) that people think you are extreme and on the fringe if you discuss it honestly — because otherwise they would have heard about it on TV and they haven’t. They don’t realize that the media was controlled by the left for 50 years and that they spiked stories that didn’t meet their idealogical needs . . . and that the same is true for academia and schools . . .
We know a lot of the history of the left and control of the media and so forth here at FR, but it’s easy to forget that for most people they have discounted this already or not really paid attention to it.
The problem is that to the extreme radical left all the horrors mean nothing. They are merely method to the end. All they have to do is dupe fellow travelers and perpetuate historical ignorance to succeed. Perception is reality and one show will do little to erase fifty years of indoctrination and control of the educational and media system by the left. We need to persist on a one to one basis and heavily proselytize our view if we are to have any hope of winning and defeating the enemy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.