- Oct 9, 1999
- 12,513
- 49
- 91
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de...8546-2106442?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Should be required reading for anybody who thinks that what Time describes happens at Gitmo is torture.
For their edification, the Soviet gulag consisted of hundreds, possibly thousands of forced labor camps that existed from the time of the Russian revolution right up through the Gorbachev era. (As a literary device, Solzhenitsyn compared them to an archipelago or system of islands, which in this case were connected only figuratively). Here somewhere between 18 million and 25 million Soviet citizens ? not foreign-born terrorists or enemy combatants, but Soviet citizens, mostly ? were housed in POW-style barracks and given just enough nourishment, usually, to survive. Unlike POWs, or the current residents of Guantanamo, gulag residents performed slave labor in the mines, forests, and farms of the Soviet empire. This vast pool of unpaid labor was, in fact, instrumental in propping up the otherwise unsustainable Soviet economy.
Solzhenitsyn writes that the gulag interrogators weren't content to simply torture until the pain became so unbearable that one cried out, "I'm guilty. Where do I sign?" Instead, detainees were required to guess which counterrevolutionary crime they had supposedly committed by confessing to one, then another, then another, and so on until by sheer trial and error they stumbled upon which particular, imaginary offense "against the people" their interrogators had pre-determined them guilty of. Only then would the pain stop, making the gulag interrogation process something of a macabre game show. Except that instead of cash and prizes contestants fought for their lives while suspended from a ceiling by their heels with electrodes stuck in their various orifices.
Which is not to say that life inside the gulag was without its perks. These included hands-on training in exciting industries like strip-mining and pole-cat skinning, as much sawdust and fish-head soup as you could eat, sometimes twice a day, and a dental plan which consisted of the occasional rifle butt to the mouth. Plus, many of the camps were located in virtually uninhabitable Siberia, the kind of place where the start of the brief summer season was announced by the appearance of ravenous, crow-sized mosquitoes. The kind of place where any day in which the temperature approached zero degrees Fahrenheit was considered balmy. As opposed to Guantanamo, which I believe is still located on a sun-kissed island in the Caribbean.
O.K., some of you are thinking, what's the catch? Could just anybody sign up for a sweet deal like that? Actually, compared to Guantanamo it was a cinch to get into the old Soviet gulag. You didn't have to be a would-be suicide bomber, or take up arms and shoot at American soldiers, or even actively plot terrorist attacks in faraway places like New York. All you had to do was say or write something against the Soviet government, or even be suspected of doing so. Sometimes just being an intellectual, like being a doctor or a professor, was enough to get you in. And if all else failed you could just get on the wrong side of some petty military bureaucrat like Solzhenitsyn did and it was goodbye, civilian life, hello gulag! Where, of course, you were not entitled to a trial, or a lawyer, or even to hear the charges against you until such time as your mock trial was scheduled.
(from http://www.nationalreview.com/rice/rice200506140804.asp)
Should be required reading for anybody who thinks that what Time describes happens at Gitmo is torture.
For their edification, the Soviet gulag consisted of hundreds, possibly thousands of forced labor camps that existed from the time of the Russian revolution right up through the Gorbachev era. (As a literary device, Solzhenitsyn compared them to an archipelago or system of islands, which in this case were connected only figuratively). Here somewhere between 18 million and 25 million Soviet citizens ? not foreign-born terrorists or enemy combatants, but Soviet citizens, mostly ? were housed in POW-style barracks and given just enough nourishment, usually, to survive. Unlike POWs, or the current residents of Guantanamo, gulag residents performed slave labor in the mines, forests, and farms of the Soviet empire. This vast pool of unpaid labor was, in fact, instrumental in propping up the otherwise unsustainable Soviet economy.
Solzhenitsyn writes that the gulag interrogators weren't content to simply torture until the pain became so unbearable that one cried out, "I'm guilty. Where do I sign?" Instead, detainees were required to guess which counterrevolutionary crime they had supposedly committed by confessing to one, then another, then another, and so on until by sheer trial and error they stumbled upon which particular, imaginary offense "against the people" their interrogators had pre-determined them guilty of. Only then would the pain stop, making the gulag interrogation process something of a macabre game show. Except that instead of cash and prizes contestants fought for their lives while suspended from a ceiling by their heels with electrodes stuck in their various orifices.
Which is not to say that life inside the gulag was without its perks. These included hands-on training in exciting industries like strip-mining and pole-cat skinning, as much sawdust and fish-head soup as you could eat, sometimes twice a day, and a dental plan which consisted of the occasional rifle butt to the mouth. Plus, many of the camps were located in virtually uninhabitable Siberia, the kind of place where the start of the brief summer season was announced by the appearance of ravenous, crow-sized mosquitoes. The kind of place where any day in which the temperature approached zero degrees Fahrenheit was considered balmy. As opposed to Guantanamo, which I believe is still located on a sun-kissed island in the Caribbean.
O.K., some of you are thinking, what's the catch? Could just anybody sign up for a sweet deal like that? Actually, compared to Guantanamo it was a cinch to get into the old Soviet gulag. You didn't have to be a would-be suicide bomber, or take up arms and shoot at American soldiers, or even actively plot terrorist attacks in faraway places like New York. All you had to do was say or write something against the Soviet government, or even be suspected of doing so. Sometimes just being an intellectual, like being a doctor or a professor, was enough to get you in. And if all else failed you could just get on the wrong side of some petty military bureaucrat like Solzhenitsyn did and it was goodbye, civilian life, hello gulag! Where, of course, you were not entitled to a trial, or a lawyer, or even to hear the charges against you until such time as your mock trial was scheduled.
(from http://www.nationalreview.com/rice/rice200506140804.asp)
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