re: Solzhenitsyn

drieux H. (drieux@wetware.com)
Tue, 30 Apr 1996 15:40:08 -0400

]
] There was a long-time debate among anti-communist Jewish Soviet
] emigres about S's anti-semitism. Much of this was published in
] Russian-language journals published in Israel; I have some of it. It
] was summarized in some articles in _Slavic Review_ by American
] anti-communist "champions" of Solzhenitsyn, who thought that tarring
] S. with the brush of anti-semitism would ruin his usefulness as a
] stick to beat the Soviets with. Very revealing about the uses of
] history in the Cold War.
]
] Grover Furr

I am pleased at the conjecture.

But as we both know, there are few folks
who made it out of the Gulag to argue against
or for the anti-semiticism of the Evil One.

I find it amusing that we finally get down to
the Gambitry that a Wiff of Anti-Semeticism, and
the fact that a person is less than socially pleasant
becomes the equivocation point. Truth Rests upon
political allegience, a lovely maxim to live by.

Allow me to restructure why I consider Solzhenytsyn to be
at least moderately credible. There is a statue in my dorf
in bayern dedicated to the dead from both world wars, and
the less than pleasant editorial commentary that an unpleasant
number of them would DIE in the USSR in the late fourties on
through to the early fifties. As I had originally attempted to
note to this list, there had been 123,00 German POW's walk out
of the Stalingrad Pocket. 50,000 of them would make it into the
Gulag, and only 5,000 of them would make it back to Germany.

When I hear folks Whine about the 'MIA/POW' issue, I find it at
best commical, if not parochial, that their cultural myopia has
allowed them to 'politicise' their Angst....

I was somewhat amused to Read in Sudoplatov's book that much of
the radio traffic that was run out of the Ukraine from alledged
german 'hedgehog' formations had been set up by NKVD units as traps
for the few remaining lufftwaffe flights that would try to brave it
out to support these lost units.

In like manner this same methodology was not uncommon for dealing
with internal dissent.

I have put forward my thought Experiment based upon the Chernobyl
incident, and the 'political allignment' of the data. Perhaps you
can make me feel safe by telling me which parts were mere Propoganda
of the AntiCommunist, and which parts leads to the unpleasant side
effects of radiation poisoning.

You will forgive me, but it was DISGUSTING when Americans were mindlessly
telling people that Only Faggots Got AIDS, but when the Good Komsomol
were being told that there were no AIDS cases in the USSR, the limits of
credulity were not stretched much.

ciao
drieux