July 13, 2013

nadin, nadin, nadin...

Consider this observation that I shared with pnwmom, from my time at University of Hawai'i, would have been about 1970 or '71:

79. My senior seminar professor was a specialist in Japanese-Russian history

The seminar was on Japanese history of WW II, but he was deep into Russian/Soviet history himself, with emphasis on the Kuriles. Interesting man.

A Soviet "research vessel" docked at Honolulu Harbor for a little R&R for the crew, and wherever they went they were accompanied by their handlers. My prof invited interested crew members to visit the University, and after pointing out this building and that he strolled them into the Library with its system of open stacks (oohs and aahs) and then a little trek downstairs where what to their wondering eyes should appear but shelf after shelf of books in Russian entirely unavailable to Soviet citizens (oopsie! end of tour!).

Yeah, we do that all the time here.

July 12, 2013

My senior seminar professor was a specialist in Japanese-Russian history

The seminar was on Japanese history of WW II, but he was deep into Russian/Soviet history himself, with emphasis on the Kuriles. Interesting man.

A Soviet "research vessel" docked at Honolulu Harbor for a little R&R for the crew, and wherever they went they were accompanied by their handlers. My prof invited interested crew members to visit the University, and after pointing out this building and that he strolled them into the Library with its system of open stacks (oohs and aahs) and then a little trek downstairs where what to their wondering eyes should appear but shelf after shelf of books in Russian entirely unavailable to Soviet citizens (oopsie! end of tour!).

Yeah, we do that all the time here.

July 12, 2013

"US worse than the USSR"? American Amnesia of the worst sort

When is the US going to sequester an area the size of the Ukraine and take away all the food?
Collectivization especially targeted Ukraine, "the breadbasket of the Soviet Union," which clung stubbornly to its own national identity and preference for village-level communal landholdings. In 1932-33, Stalin engineered a famine (by massively raising the grain quota that the peasantry had to turn over to the state); this killed between six and seven million people and broke the back of Ukrainian resistance. The Ukrainian famine has only recently been recognized as one of the most destructive genocides of the twentieth century. http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html

Where is our Gulag Archipelago of forced labor camps designed to work millions of inmates to death?
In the worst camps, such as those of the Kolyma gold-mining region in the Arctic, the survival rate was just 2 or 3 percent..... Alexander Solzhenitsyn calls the prison colonies in the Solovetsky Islands "the Arctic Auschwitz," and cites the edict of their commander, Naftaly Frenkel, which "became the supreme law of the Archipelago: 'We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months -- after that we don't need him anymore.'" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 49.) http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html

Where are our denunciations, including by children of their parents?

I could go on and on, but I am so angry I am shaking. I recommend The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn for an eyewitness account.

American Amnesia strikes again.

Hekate

APPARENTLY THE OP THAT SAID "Now, sadly, we are even worse than the old Soviet Union," SANK INTO THE BACK PAGES, BECAUSE AN AWFUL LOT OF RESPONDERS TO THIS THREAD ARE ACCUSING ME OF MAKING IT UP. SO HERE'S THE LINK: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023230731