thought Coggins has already explained how modern-day liberals are all commies. Or fascists, or Nazis - it's all the same.
They are all godless heathens who want to take away American freedom to carry guns, torture prisoners, invade whatever countries they please without giving a damn about what the UN has to say... You get the idea. What a miserable country it will be if Kucinich wins! In fact, I'm sure he would start his term with opening a gulag.
Zoid, whether or not you are really from Eastern Europe or whether you're just another American leftist Moonbat howling into the night sky, I can see you for what you are, and please do not think that I cannot.
This comment says it all:
General liquidations until Gorbachev?!? There were some exiles even after Stalin, but that's it.
This is again, an example of the kind of stupidity that takes a great deal of nurturing, systematic effort and care to bring to fruition. You are an apologist for the most evil, inhumane, and repressive political system in the history of this planet, and minimizing its impacts and whitewashing its history do you no credit whatsoever.
First go here
http://gulaghistory.org/nps/about/Then to this page:
http://gulaghistory.org/nps/about/history.phpYou will here see this text:
The camp, one of several hundred logging camps in the Perm region, was constructed in 1946 at the height of the Soviet forced labor system that came to be known as the Gulag. In 1972, during a period of renewed political repression in the USSR, Perm-36 was converted into a political prison, and for the next 15 years, the camp, along with two others nearby, held many of the Soviet Union’s most prominent dissidents. Among them were human right activists such as Vladimir Bukovsky, Sergey Kovalev, Anatoly Marchenko, Yury Orlov, as well as many Ukrainian, Baltic, Tatar and Caucasian nationalist leaders and Jewish activists, including Nathan Sharansky.
Some 18 million people passed through these camps from Stalin's time to the collapse of the evil empire,a an unknown number of them, some millions, died while in those camps.
Zoid, The Gulag Archipelago was written in
1973, two decades after Stalin's reign.
Now go here:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/gula.htmlHere's what we see:
The Soviet system of forced labor camps was first established in 1919 under the Cheka, but it was not until the early 1930s that the camp population reached significant numbers. By 1934 the Gulag, or Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps, then under the Cheka's successor organization the NKVD, had several million inmates. Prisoners included murderers, thieves, and other common criminals--along with political and religious dissenters. The Gulag, whose camps were located mainly in remote regions of Siberia and the Far North, made significant contributions to the Soviet economy in the period of Joseph Stalin. Gulag prisoners constructed the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line, numerous hydroelectric stations, and strategic roads and industrial enterprises in remote regions. GULAG manpower was also used for much of the country's lumbering and for the mining of coal, copper, and gold.
Stalin constantly increased the number of projects assigned to the NKVD, which led to an increasing reliance on its labor. The Gulag also served as a source of workers for economic projects independent of the NKVD, which contracted its prisoners out to various economic enterprises.
Conditions in the camps were extremely harsh. Prisoners received inadequate food rations and insufficient clothing, which made it difficult to endure the severe weather and the long working hours; sometimes the inmates were physically abused by camp guards. As a result, the death rate from exhaustion and disease in the camps was high. After Stalin died in 1953, the Gulag population was reduced significantly, and conditions for inmates somewhat improved. Forced labor camps continued to exist, although on a small scale, into the Gorbachev period, and the government even opened some camps to scrutiny by journalists and human rights activists. With the advance of democratization, political prisoners and prisoners of conscience all but disappeared from the camps.
Now, back at the gulag memorial, we read again:
In 1972, during a period of renewed political repression in the USSR, Perm-36 was converted into a political prison, and for the next 15 years, the camp, along with two others nearby, held many of the Soviet Union’s most prominent dissidents. Among them were human right activists such as Vladimir Bukovsky, Sergey Kovalev, Anatoly Marchenko, Yury Orlov, as well as many Ukrainian, Baltic, Tatar and Caucasian nationalist leaders and Jewish activists, including Nathan Sharansky.
And of course, there were many others like this, which Solzhenitsyn symbolized as a chain of islands, an "archipelago".
Many of these people, Zoid, were political prisoners, not criminals by any normative western standards. They were there for thought crimes, and nothing more.
Then you could go here
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM for some figures regarding total government induced deaths within the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1989. You will see that it is far more than 20 million and that most of the deaths are attributable to the gulag system you say disappeared after the horrible, terrible Stalin was off the scene and those paragons of niceness, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko took the stage.
Indeed, I'd stay around a while at that website if I were you.
Really now, I'm not going to post to you anymore, this is my last one (I promise). Your views are so extreme, so intellectually vacuous, and so lacking in any serious reflective components that serious discourse with you is impossible. Your beliefs regarding both politics, history, and the Church are so unutterably bizarre that I find no perplexity whatever in conceiving you as being a supporter of an anti-American leftist ideologue like Kucinich who sees the Constitution and Declaration as impediments to his ideological and political ambitions (when they are, in fact, protections to us against people precisely like him) and for whom his own country, not the Taliban, not Al Qaada, not the PLO, Not Hamas, not Hezbollah, and not the U.S.S.R. when it still existed, is the problem.
The following is thigh slapping hilarious, if that is, you can laugh and slap your thigh while simultaneously throwing up:
They are all godless heathens who want to take away American freedom to carry guns, torture prisoners, invade whatever countries they please without giving a damn about what the UN has to say.
Americans are indeed free to defend themselves against criminal predation. This is a fundamental constitutional right. I'm not aware of a single instance of anything approaching what any reasonable person would consider "torture" ever occurring at any of our military interrogation centers. Water boarding? Barking dogs? Sleep deprivation? Brittney Spears at high volume (well, this is coming close)?
Come on now...
As far as the U.N., few intelligent observers care what it says anymore because it long ago lost any intellectual or moral credibility. Indeed, the U.N. is probably one of the single greatest impediments to peace in the Middle East, to use just one example, with which the world has to deal. The socialist thugs, kleptocrats, tyrants, and third world despots who make up most of its body do not see things that way, however.
Oh, and by the way Zoid, the U.N. was ready, with Bill Clinton, in the late 90s to do exactly what George Bush has done. At least, everybody was threatening Saddam with invasion at that time. Clinton didn't follow through on the idea of regime change, but after 9/11, Bush did. Bush actually carried through with the threat after 9/11 to clear the chessboard (we had been at war, after all, with Saddam continuously for almost 12 years) and his country was a haven for terrorists and terrorist training. And, although there were no WMD in Iraq ready to fire, we now know that, in fact, there was substantial WMD in Iraq after the first Gulf War, but Saddam had dismantled, scattered, and hidden it in the hopes that while the Oil for Food program enriched him and his regime and he kept inspectors away from his country, in time the U.S. would lose interest in him and his activities and he could reconstitute his WMD programs. Check the Rob/Silverman report, the Kay report, and the final Iraq Study Group report.
Goodbye Zoid.