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Edited on Mon Sep-21-09 10:18 AM by PreacherCasey
The excerpts I will paste below are from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. For those who may not know, Solzhenitsyn was a captain in the Soviet army during part of WWII before being imprisoned for 'Anti-Soviet Propaganda' (criticizing Stalin) and sent to the labor camps. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.
His book provides an insightful, illuminating, first-person look into how totalitarian regimes operate as well as a window into the psychological lives of those under oppression. So much of what is discussed throughout its pages sends chills down my spine as I compare it to the US treatment of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the herd mentality of so many otherwise good folks in our country who justify this type of treatment. How many of the same justifications for torture used in the USSR are we still hearing thoughtlessly parroted today in the USA?!
I want to sit down with these people one-by-one, read them the first hand accounts, show them the pictures, and tell them... Life is not played out on television folks! Life does not exist in the idea world of your thoughts!
Our country's policies have repercussions for millions. REPERCUSSIONS, like the grief and despair over dead Mothers, Fathers, Sons and Daughters. The daily reminder of atrocities while carrying loved ones badly burned, maimed, or otherwise injured. The displacement from their homes, the psychological torment of living each day in fear and the sense of powerlessness. And the TORTURE.
Solzhenitsyn on the reason for:
"Once it was established that charges had to be brought at any cost and despite everything, threats, violence, tortures became inevitable. And the more fantastic the charges were, the more ferocious the interrogation had to be in order to force the required confession... This was not peculiar to 1937 alone. It was a chronic, general practice."
On the methods:
Humiliation. "At the Lubyanka, Aleksandra O----va refused to give the testimony demanded of her. She was transferred to Lefortovo. In the admitting office, a woman jailer ordered her to undress, allegedly for a medical examination, took away her clothes, and locked her in a 'box' naked. At that point the men jailers began to peer through the peephole and to appraise her female attributes with loud laughs...They all had but a single purpose: to dishearten and humiliate."
Playing on affection for loved ones. "It was the most effective of all methods of intimidation. One could break even a totally fearless person through his concern for those he loved...In 1930, Rimalis, a woman interrogator, used to threaten: "We'll arrest your daughter and lock her in a cell with syphilitics!"
Stress positions. "...when he first sets foot in prison, he is clapped into a 'box,' which sometimes is dark and constructed in such a way that he can only stand up and even is squeezed against the door. And he is held there for several hours, or for half a day, or a day...Yelena Strutinskaya was forced to remain seated on a stool in the corridor for six days in such a way that she did not lean against anything, did not sleep, did not fall off, and did not getup from it. Six days! Just try to sit like that for six hours! ... Or else, during the interrogation itself, when the prisoner is out in plain view, he can be forced to sit this way: as far forward as possible on the front edge of the chair so that he is under painful pressure during the entire interrogation. He is not allowed to stir for several hours. Is that all? Yes, that's all. Just try it yourself! ...People could be compelled to kneel in the interrogator's office or the corridor for twelve, or even twenty four or forty eight hours...A long piece of rough toweling was inserted between the prisoner's jaws like a bridle; the ends were then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels, and without water or food for two days...Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive a person of all his strength and force him to testify to anything at all."
Sleeplessness. "Sleeplessness was a great form of torture: it left no visible marks and could not provide grounds for complaint even if an inspection were to strike on the morrow... Here is how one victim - who had just sat out six days in a box infested with bedbugs - describes his feelings after this torture: "Chill from great loss of blood. Irises of eyes dried out as if someone were holding a red hot iron in front of them. Tounge swollen from thirst and prickling as a hedgehog at the slightest movement. Throat racked by spasms of swallowing... "They didn't let you sleep? Well, after all, this is not supposed to be a vacation resort!"
Beatings. "They used rubber truncheons, wooden mallets, and small sandbags...Should we single our particularly the technique by which teeth are knocked out? ... a blow of the fist to the solar plexus... a "penalty kick" with his overshoes at the dangling genitals of male prisoners... they invented a machine for squeezing fingernails."
On the reaction of people who never experienced it, to his fellow countryman who had experienced it and had given in:
"Is it necessary to go on with the list? Is there much left to enumerate? What won't idle, well-fed, unfeeling people invent? Brother mine! Do not condemn those who, finding themselves in such a situation, turned out to be weak and confessed to more than they should have...Do not be the first to cast a stone at them."
Of course the brutality and inhumanity of the practices listed above are apparent to any thinking, empathetic person. But it is not enough to feel this and do nothing. We need investigations into those who ordered and carried out these practices.
Solzhenitsyn had something to say on this score about Russia in the time after Stalin:
“What goes on in the environs of Moscow and behind the green fences near Sochi, or the fact that the murderers or our husbands and fathers ride through our streets and we make way for them as they pass, doesn’t get us worked up at all, doesn’t touch us. That would be “digging up the past.” … Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of driveling do-nothings. First we submissively allowed them to massacre us by the millions, and then with devoted concern we tended to the murderers in their prosperous old age…For the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to announce loudly: “Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer.”
“It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that “past” which “ought not to be stirred up.”
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.”
I wonder, what will our future will look like?
P.S. Apologies to the spirit of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for not doing 1/10 the justice to his work that it deserves!
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