Sunday, March 03, 2013

The best of times, the worst of times . . .

MOSCOW, 1937: time of terror. The Atlantic has a fine article/book review by Benjamin Schwarz, "Moscow Under Terror". It's a wonderful description of a surreal environment with real horrors, and worthy of pondering.

Genrikh Yagoda

Yezhov and Stalin

2 comments:

Silverfox said...

You might have mentioned that Yagoda, on the right, was a Jew from Poland, who was responsible for the mass murder of at least ten million Russians before he ran afoul of Stalin, or that 11 of the 12 Commissars that he ran the main gulags with and most of their support staff were also Jews and not primarily Russian ones, either.

Or that Yezhov "the Dwarf" and head of the NKVD happily pictured on the left there with Stalin, was yet another from Lithuania or Poland and the very man that would have Yagoda stripped naked, brutally beaten in public and then finally shot.

A display of utter viciousness and brutality that was so impressive his pal Joey, seated next to him, there, would make it his own by having the very same thing done to Yezhov himself not even a year later.

Of course to know the truth and real history behind those photos and the actual nature of the creatures in them you'd really have to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "Russia & the Jews" to properly understand it and unless you can read and lay your hands on the French or German editions you're shit out of luck because no one that know's what's good for them is willing to translate and publish it in English for reasons even we can't speak openly about or discuss here because of how that would be characterized.

Once upon a time the Atlantic monthly would have stood up against
that kind of repression and suppression of information, particularly when it is aimed at the works of someone like Solzenitsyn, but not any more.

For the last decade it has become nothing more than another nest of mass media hacks and propagandists who are no more free to speak about such taboo subjects than rest of us and out of the same fear that holds us all in thrall while our world relentlessly goes to Hell in handcart.

Steve said...

RIP Stompin Tom and Hugo Chavez