Germany’s invasion of Poland triggered WWII, we’re told, and though the USSR did the same, the US became its ally. At the end, the Soviets controlled not just Poland, but Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, half of Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania and Yugoslavia, with the last splitting from Stalin three years later. Comrades in arms, the American and Russian empires divided their loots, split it in half, literally, with millions of subjected Europeans having no voice regarding their fate.
Human lives don’t matter
much to “great” nations, for their elites must never lose sight of the big
picture. They don’t see humans, only maps, and, of course, profits must be
tended to.
Though constantly hounded
by the big boys, small, underfed men must try their best to nurture and protect
their own identity and heritage, if they don’t want to be deformed, or even
erased.
---------------------------------
This entire year, I’ve been a vagabond,
but you, too, have been on a journey, away from just about everything you’ve
known, into the vaguest of futures, and we’re just getting started. Steered by
obscured hands, we’re whipped around blind bends, towards a reality we have no
part in shaping.
Yesterday, my friend Chuck Orloski emailed me photos of Fiddler’s,
a bar in Larksville, PA (pop. 4,400). They depict normal folks, men and women
from roughly 30 to 65-years-old, sitting next to each other, each with a glass
or bottle of beer. There’s a ketchup squeeze bottle as well, so at least
hotdogs are served. With a bag of potato chips, it’s a fine meal.
The bartender is a pretty blonde in her early 20’s. Eye candies
snare customers and get good tips. Older broads must work harder. In
Philadelphia’s O’Jung’s, there’s a beer slinger in her 50’s, with short hair,
false teeth, ample jugs and a fondness for jokes.
“What blinks and fucks all night?”
“I don’t know, Brigitte.”
She started to blink really fast.
As you leave, she’d yell something like, “Come back tomorrow! Free
blowjobs!”
Chuck and
I have sat in many bars like Fiddler’s. It’s where guys like Johnny the Hat or
Johnny AC go after work to reward and gather themselves. It’s where they drop
in after dinner to banter, brood, listen to all those old songs, again and
again, or stare at balls and strikes. If they’re retired or just unemployed,
they can show up minutes after breakfast. Of course, no one goes to faggoty
concerts, operas or art galleries, but even ballgames have become way too
expensive.
“So bars in Scranton are
operating normally now?” I asked Chuck.
“No. Have not seen any Scranton bars open like that. Fiddler’s is
in a small town, Larksville, near Wilkes Barre.
Was like being on another planet, Linh.”
Now, just having a beer in a neighborhood dive is
“like being on another planet”! Looking more closely, I notice no one is
smiling in Fiddler’s. All fifteen faces are blank or even grim, and who can
blame them? How many have lost their jobs? How many can no longer pay for
groceries and must rely on food banks or soup kitchens,
like Chuck himself? How many have skipped several months’ rents and are facing
eviction?
Soon enough, you may have to hit actual roads, just to eat, a
nation of juked and jived Joads.
*
During the last Depression, thousands of Americans were desperate
enough to sail all the way to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Though many were Communists
or at least left-leaning, most were just economic migrants, with some arriving
only on short-term contracts. These distinctions didn’t really matter. Most
would be killed, either with a bullet to the back of the head or from overwork
in gulags. With the conniving yet bumbling FDR as Stalin’s chum, these hapless
Yanks got no help from their government.
Thanks to an Unz commenter, mark tapley, I found out about Tim
Tzouliadis’ The Forsaken.
Scrupulously researched and beautifully written, it’s 364 pages of harrowing
yet mesmerizing reading, and entirely relevant to our times. Most
instructively, Tzouliadis highlights the moral dimension of each character,
from world figures to the forsaken and practically erased, even now.
Tzouliadis’ important book was completely ignored by the
Washington Post and New York Times, etc., but it’s no surprise, really, for the
red tinted Paper of Record had just run a remarkably bloodless, wistful and
even optimistic series on Communism, The Red Century. Since there were a few
unfortunate snags the first time around, let’s do it again, but more political
correctly. It’s time for a Red redux!
Invited writer Kristen R. Ghodsee tells us, “Some might remember
that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal
democracies at the time, including major state investments in their education
and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity
leave allowances and guaranteed free child care. But there’s one advantage that
has received little attention: Women under Communism enjoyed more sexual
pleasure.”
Yuri Slezkine spins hammer and sickle childrearing, “The
Bolsheviks never worried much about the family, never policed the home, and
never connected the domestic rites of passage–childbirth, marriage and death–to
their sociology and political economy […] Even at the height of fear and
suspicion, when anyone connected to the outside world might be subject to
sacrificial murder, Soviet readers were expected to learn from Dante,
Shakespeare and Cervantes.”
Never policed the home?! What about all those Soviet kids who were
brainwashed and hectored into denouncing their parents as enemies of the
people? For accusing his peasant father of hoarding grain, 14-year-old Pavlik
Morozov became a Soviet hero whose statues littered the Russian landscape.
Andrew Gittlitz concludes his piece, “‘Make it So’: ‘Star Trek’
and Its Debt to Revolutionary Socialism,” with a “revolutionary ultimatum” from
Rosa Luxemburg, “socialism or barbarism,” and that’s pretty much the New York
Times’ stance as well. There’s only one correct way forward!
Even with 85 to 100 million victims, Communism remains au courant,
especially among the sophomoric, ahistorical and, well, Jews, so if you even
dare to cite those unfathomably ghastly figures, you must be a Nazi or
something.
With its absolute moral righteousness, us-against-them mentality
and incitement to violence in the name of global justice, it attracts the worst
kind of busybody fanatics. Cloaking their boundless hatred, anger and
resentment with feel-good buzzwords, they can go on an invigorating offensive
against accused bourgeoisies, kulaks, reactionaries, Fascists, spies, wreckers,
diversonists and deplorables, ad infinitum. Since there will always be those
who resist their suffocating orthodoxy, if only by a hair, they will never run
out of enemies.
By 1937, Soviet Russia has already disappeared 17 million souls.
Tzouliadis, “According to a report from Mech, a Russian-language weekly
published in Poland, the [1937] census declared a population total of 159
million, instead of the projected 176, amounting to 17 million people who had
disappeared […] Stalin reacted to the news by having the hapless statisticians
shot. A new census was ordered whose experts learned from their predecessors’
mistakes and wisely presented the ‘correct’ set of results. Years later a
secret report ordered by Nikita Khrushchev revealed that between 1935 and 1941,
the NKVD arrested more than 19 million citizens.”
At the beginning of the 1930’s, however, no one could foresee this
impending carnage, so thousands rushed to the Socialist Paradise. “In the first
eight months of 1931 alone, Amtorg—the Soviet trade agency based in New York—received
more than one hundred thousand American applications for emigration to the
USSR.” As the country collapsed, like right now, citizens simply fled. There
were “more people out of work in the United States, both actually and
proportionately, than in any other nation on earth.”
This influx of Americans was a propaganda bonanza for the Soviets,
so they gladly touted how well these transplants were doing. In 1934, 30,000
Russians watched as a 19-year-old American, Victor Herman, jumped from an
airplane to set the world free fall record, at 142 seconds. Herman was feted as
“the Lindbergh of Russia.”
When a black American, Robert Robinson, was assaulted by two white
compatriots, the resulting trial generated worldwide publicity. Ironically, the
repatriation of his assailants likely saved their lives, while Robinson would
be stuck in the Soviet Union for 44 years, with his attempts to get out
repeatedly thwarted.
When Robinson sought help from Paul Robeson, he was lectured by
one of his aids, “What do you think you are doing, Robinson, running away from
here? You must stay right where you are. You belong here for the good of the
cause. Or maybe you’re trying to tarnish Paul’s reputation, by getting him
involved in your attempt to leave. That is all I have to say to you. You may go
now!” Robeson’s wife added, “We have thought about your request, and he has
decided that he cannot help you. You see, we do not really know you well
enough, to know what is in your mind. Suppose he were to help you leave, and
then when you arrived in Ethiopia, you decided to turn anti-Soviet. We would
find ourselves in trouble with the authorities here.”
Finally allowed to take a vacation in Uganda in 1974, Robinson was
granted asylum by Idi Amin. There, he married an American, but only in 1986
could they return to the US together.
By November 1932, the Anglo-American school in Moscow already had
125 students. There, Lovett Fort-Whiteman taught chemistry, physics and math. A
co-founder of the American Negro Labor Congress, Fort-Whiteman had first come
to Moscow in 1924 for ideological training.
By 1937, the Texas native had seen enough of the Soviet Union. Tzouliadis,
“Lovett Fort-Whiteman disappeared soon after applying for permission to return
home to the United States. His exit visa was refused, and the former teacher at
the Anglo-American school, born in Dallas and educated at the Tuskegee
Institute, was denounced as a ‘counterrevolutionary’ by a lawyer from the
Communist Party of the United States. Three weeks later Fort-Whiteman was
arrested and sent to a ‘corrective labor camp’ in Kazakhstan. In Moscow, Robert
Robinson heard more news from a Russian friend who had returned from the same
camp. According to this witness, Fort-Whiteman had been severely beaten because
he had failed to meet his work quota. In the camp, he had died of starvation, a
broken man whose teeth had been knocked out.”
Tzouliadis points out, “Sympathy for the Soviet cause was no
guarantee of safety; instead it attracted suspicion.” Born in Russia, Julian F.
Hecker was educated in the US, where he published several books defending
Communism. With his American wife and three young daughters, Hecker returned to
his native country to teach philosophy at Moscow University.
Tzouliadis, “According to the American embassy, in earlier
summers, when Moscow was crowded with tourists, Julius Hecker had made
‘speeches almost daily to the visitors on the subject of religious tolerance in
the Soviet Union.’ His daughter Marcella Hecker remembered the day the NKVD
came to take her father away. ‘He was asleep in a little room which I occupy
now,’ she said. ‘Although my mother opened the door very, very quietly, Father
must have had some terrible dream, because he woke up at once with a jerk, and
immediately understood everything. They bore him away and we never saw him
again.’ Julius Hecker’s wife remained convinced that her husband’s arrest was
just a terrible mistake, and she waited long years for his return. She never
learned that just two and half months after his arrest, on April 28, 1938,
Professor Julius Hecker confessed to being an American spy who had written his
books merely to draw attention away from his espionage. Two hours after making
this false confession, he was shot.”
The hard-hearted may sneer that American Communists had it coming,
but top American officials, from FDR on down, were also praising the Soviets,
and the US was the biggest buyer of Russian gold, as mined by its gulag slaves.
Tzouliadis sums up Roosevelt’s assessment of Stalin, “After his
return from Tehran [in December of 1943], the president broadcast a fireside
chat to the nation: ‘To use an American and somewhat ungrammatical
colloquialism, I may say that ‘I got along fine’ with Marshal Stalin. He is a
man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good
humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia;
and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian
people— very well indeed.’ Nor was this simply a public façade designed to
reassure the American public. In her memoirs, Eleanor Roosevelt confided that
her husband had been ‘impressed by the strength of Stalin’s personality. On his
return he was always careful in describing him to mention that he was short and
thick-set and powerful… He also said that his control over the people of his
country was unquestionably due to their trust in him and their confidence that
he had their good at heart.”
On March 17th, 1945, Roosevelt telegrammed Stalin to ask that sick
and injured American soldiers be allowed to leave Poland, “This government has
done everything to meet each of your requests. I now request you to meet mine
in this particular matter.” Nothing came of it. Stalin knew his ally well.
In fact, hundreds of US soldiers were kept by the USSR, to be
worked to death or killed, with survivors sighted well into the 1950’s. Having
locked up Americans with impunity since the 30’s, the Soviets saw no reason to
stop. Tzouliadis, “There was no logic within this hidden underworld in which
American soldiers were held captive with German and Japanese prisoners, their
wartime enemies, in camps run by their former Soviet allies.”
Top capitalists felt no qualms dealing with Commies, and Victor
Herman’s father, Sam, was personally recruited by Henry Ford to come to Russia.
Tzouliadis, “No other firm in the United States, or even the world, conducted
as much business with Joseph Stalin as the Ford Motor Company between 1929 and
1936 […] Lenin himself had been a passionate advocate of Ford’s methods of mass
production […]” Man as cog was their shared vision.
What doomed Victor Herman, “the Russian Lindbergh,” was his repeated
refusal to declare himself a Russian in the paperwork for his record jump. It
made no sense, for he’s an American.
In 1938, Herman was abruptly taken away in a Ford Model A, of the
kind his father had helped the Soviets build. Herman couldn’t fathom why he was
arrested, “I am an American! You will pay for this! This is kidnapping! You
cannot do this to an American!”
Herman would spend 18 years in Siberian gulags, where he somehow
survived starvation, freezing temperature, barbaric overwork and beatings.
Before leaving Moscow, Herman was subjected to “physical pressure,” a Stalinist
term, or what Americans now sinisterly christen as “enhanced interrogation.”
Tzouliadis, “After the fifteenth night, Victor began bleeding from
his penis, his rectum, his nose, and his eyes. He was returned to his cell each
morning at dawn. Eventually the cell ‘elder’ pleaded with him to talk—‘Save
your life, American’—but Victor Herman stubbornly refused to confess to a crime
he had not committed. On the fifty-third night of his torture, he was told he
would be released if he only signed a list of names. When Victor refused again,
he was taken to a basement cell and beaten by a gang of men with clubs. The
next morning he was coughing up clots of blood, and the following night he was
beaten again and told he was going to be killed. Losing consciousness, Victor
was woken by the sensation and smell of his leg being burned to bring him back
around.”
After Herman returned to the US in 1976, he published his memoir,
Coming Out of the Ice, and another key source for Tzouliadis is Thomas Sgovio’s
Dear America! Why I Turned Against Communism. Although many testimonies in
Tzouliadis’ book were already out there, they had not been essentialized, given
a clear context or synthesized into a compelling narrative.
As Americans were disappeared, tortured, sent to gulags or killed,
as they desperately needed protection, intervention and help in going home,
their officials did next to nothing. Their ambassador during the worst of the
Soviet Terror was Joseph Davies, a long-time friend and benefactor of FDR with
no diplomatic experience, Russian knowledge or, apparently, much interest in
being an ambassador, for he was often absent for long stretches.
Tzouliadis describes Davies’ majestic entrance, “In January 1937,
the Davies entourage arrived in Moscow on a special train, waited on by a small
army of footmen, secretaries, chauffeurs, a chef, a hairdresser, and a
masseuse–making up sixteen servants in all, with an attendant mountain of
luggage. Stepping off the train dressed for the Russian winter in a thick fur
hat, immaculately tailored coat, and gold-topped cane, Joseph Davies glanced
around for the first secretary of the embassy, Loy Henderson, who recognized
the ambassador’s ‘flashing, probing eyes,’ and noted his fine clothes.”
His residence has been thoroughly remodeled, with a crystal
chandelier, insured for $10,000, lording over the ballroom. “In the basement, a
Belgian electrical engineer had installed the twenty-five deep freezers
required for two box cars of American frozen food shipped ahead to Russia.
Steaks, fowl, wild game, and exotic fruit and vegetables were all now on the
daily menu, with four hundred quarts of frozen cream specially imported to
soothe the ambassador’s troublesome stomach. News of the couple’s ‘desert-island’
food supply was soon leaked to the press, irritating the Soviet censors with
its presumption that there was no decent food to be had in Moscow […]”
This, in a country of long lines for food, with innocent Americans
among the tortured and killed, and others begging for help, only to be shooed
away, to then be arrested, very often, right outside their embassy.
Too busy hunting art bargains everywhere, Davies was oblivious.
Tzouliadis quotes him, “As usual, we cannot resist them and have been having somewhat
of an orgy again in picking up these interesting souvenirs.” Attending show
trials, Davies was convinced of each cowed and tortured defendant’s bizarre
confession. From Leningrad harbor, Davies and his heiress wife set sail for the
Baltics on their 375-foot yacht, Sea Cloud. On board, Davies watched Hollywood
movies with his Soviet secret police minders.
In this sick drama, there are plenty of villains, such as an NKVD
who at age 79 recounted quite casually, “I figure, that thirty-seven people
were shot dead by me personally, and I sent even more to the camps. I can kill
people so that the shot won’t be heard… The secret’s this: I make them open
their mouth and I shoot down their throat. I’d only be splashed by warm blood,
like eau-de-cologne, and it doesn’t make a sound. That I can do–kill. If I
didn’t have seizures, I wouldn’t have taken my pension so soon.”
One of the most repulsive characters in the book is Walter
Duranty. Working for the New York Times, his extensive reports on the Soviet
Union earned this monster a Pulitzer.
Tzouliadis quotes Duranty on the gulags, “Each concentration camp
forms a sort of ‘commune’ where everyone lives comparatively free, not
imprisoned, but compelled to work for the good of the community. They are fed
and housed gratis and receive pay for their work . . . They are certainly not
convicts in the American sense of the word.”
Duranty on the Holodomor that killed millions, “I have made
exhaustive inquiries about this alleged famine situation […] And here are the
facts: there is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is
widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”
According to Duranty, there was also no famine in the Caucasus,
“The use of the word ‘Famine’ in connection with the North Caucasus is a sheer
absurdity. There a bumper crop is being harvested as fast as tractors, horses,
oxen, men, women, and children can work… There are plump babies in the
nurseries or gardens of the collectives… Village markets are flowing with eggs,
fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter at prices lower than in Moscow.”
The man simply lied and lied. Tzouliadis, “But Walter Duranty’s
private remarks were very different from his published story. To British
diplomats in Moscow he admitted ‘that Ukraine has been bled white… It was quite
possible that as many as ten million people may have died directly or
indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.’”
Abandoning his mistress and son in Russia, Duranty lived until 73,
and is buried in Orlando. His breed lives on, of course. There are many
Duranties roaming around.
Tzouliadis, “Many years later, Victor Hammer–the brother of the
notorious American businessman Armand–told an investigative reporter that
Duranty had reported regularly to the OGPU throughout his period working for
The New York Times in Moscow. According to Victor Hammer, Duranty had a
weakness for young girls, and Victor’s brother, Armand, had kept him supplied.”
On July 13th, 1956, Paul Robeson had to appear before the House
Un-American Activities Committee. Questioned about his long time support for
Stalin, Robeson’s response is telling, “Whatever has happened to Stalin,
gentlemen, is a question for the Soviet Union and I would not argue with a
representative of the people who, in building America wasted sixty to one
hundred million lives of my people, black people drawn from Africa on the
plantations. You are responsible and your forebears for sixty million to one
hundred million black people dying in the slave ships and on the plantations,
and don’t you ask me about anybody, please […] As far as I know about the slave
camps, they were Fascist prisoners who had murdered millions of the Jewish
people and who would have wiped out millions of the Negro people could they
have gotten hold of them. That is all I know about that… You are the
non-patriots, and you are the un-Americans and you ought to be ashamed of
yourselves… You want to shut up every colored person who wants to fight for the
rights of his people.”
Just brand all your enemies as Fascists then. Sounds familiar?
Russian POWs were also massacred after they had been repatriated, and even the
greatest war heroes weren’t safe.
Tzouliadis describes a Kremlin meeting in 1949, “Stalin wondered
if perhaps the leaders of the Leningrad siege should replace him as premier and
general secretary. The rest of the Politburo immediately chorused, ‘No, no,
Comrade Stalin!’ But when Aleksei Kuznetsov and Nikolai Voznesensky hesitated,
Stalin had them arrested. At the end of the show trial known as the ‘Leningrad
Affair,’ the former Soviet war heroes were draped in white shrouds and led out
of the courtroom to be shot one hour later.”
In a book filled with mass murderers, evil cynics, hypocrites,
liars and fools, there are also individuals who managed to remain decent and
kind, to their own kind.
Tasked with burying eight bodies unloaded from a prison train, a
worker noticed one was still breathing, so he didn’t put this half-dead man
underground, for it “did not correspond to Christian traditions.” A second
worker, one Mrs. Khorshunov, then nursed him for a week in her own home. Before
dying, he managed to tell Mrs. Khorshunov that he was American named Fred, with
his last name sounding like “Collins.” With much strain, Fred Collins even
managed to draw a picture of a falling airplane, to indicate that he was a
pilot, perhaps? After Mrs. Khorshunov and her son, Yuri, buried the American,
they tended to his grave for many years.
Tzouliadis, “Decades later, fulfilling his duty to the American
prisoner, Yuri Khorshunov sat down to write his letter to [American]
investigators: ‘There may be nonsense in my writing to you, since one human
life is really nothing for such a great country like yours, though the
relatives of that man may still be waiting for some information about him. If
you have any questions, I will be glad to answer them.”
*
Germany’s invasion of Poland triggered WWII, we’re told, and
though the USSR did the same, the US became its ally. At the end, the Soviets
controlled not just Poland, but Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, half of Germany,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania and Yugoslavia,
with the last splitting from Stalin three years later. Comrades in arms, the
American and Russian empires divided their loots, split it in half, literally,
with millions of subjected Europeans having no voice regarding their fate.
Human lives don’t matter much to “great” nations, for their elites
must never lose sight of the big picture. They don’t see humans, only maps,
and, of course, profits must be tended to.
Though constantly hounded by the big boys, small, underfed men
must try their best to nurture and protect their own identity and heritage, if
they don’t want to be deformed, or even erased.