For Mattp and JayB

[Peter_Puget]

Years ago a visit to the city of Norilsk prompted then-prime minister Trudeau to wonder why Canadians had never managed to settle the Arctic as the Soviets had.

 

“NORILSK, Russia — The bones appear each June, when the hard Arctic winter breaks at last and the melting snows wash them from the site of what some people here — but certainly not many — call this city's Golgotha.

 

“The bones are the remains of thousands of prisoners sent to the camps in this frozen island of the Gulag Archipelago. To this day, no one knows exactly how many labored here in penal servitude. To this day, no one knows exactly how many died.”

 

Link to NYT.

 

Those darn liberals....

 

PP

[slothrop]

Liberals? Huh? Someone put some liquid paranoia into your coffee this morning?

[Peter_Puget]

Egads Sloth. Jayb has often remarked how liberals have supported guys like Stalin and Mattp has said that they hadn’t. I thought my post illustrated how they can both be correct when coupled with my suggestion (See Bush Lie Peopel Died thread) such complete disregard for facts can/should be considered a lie.

 

 

 

Trudeau was head of the Liberal party for almost 20 years. Outlined below are some of his educational achievements. His comment relative to development of the Arctic shows that he must have had an almost willful (if not criminal) disregard for honest analysis – that a man in his position could apparently not understand Gulag system is unbelievable.

 

Jean de Brébeuf College, B.A. 1940 University of Montreal, LL.L. 1943 Harvard University, M.A. Political Economy 1945 École des sciences politiques, Paris 1946 - 1947 London School of Economics 1947 - 1948

 

PP

[slothrop]

Guess I hadn't been following the overgeneralizations of JayB and mattp w/r/t who liberals might support in some vague way.

 

Perhaps Trudeau was indeed aware that the Gulag system was the method by which the Soviets industrialized and settled the Arctic. Perhaps he wondered why there wasn't another way to take advantage of Canada's vast amount of frozen land. It's hard to glean much insight into Trudeau's thinking with only one third-hand quotation and an article written years later on the place he visited when he was quoted.

 

And then you imply that liberals are "darn" (could you be more specific?) by associating a contextless quotation from a former Canadian prime minister with some hearsay about what he must have been thinking (or rather, not thinking), then mentioning that said Canadian was a prominent liberal. Thus, liberals have some kind of negative energy associated with them: "they may be smart, but they sure know how to disregard the facts" or something like that.

 

Huh?

Edited February 24, 2004 by slothrop

[Peter_Puget]

In your third paragraph you are simply confusing me. But your final sentence is somewhat close to stumbling into the truth. Liberals throughout the 20th century have been quite reluctant to see the true effects of communist ideology. I believe more Ukrainians were killed in the “terror” famines than Jews were killed by the Germans. The same is probably true with regard to the great leap forward/Cultural revolution in China. Both used crass political power to reduce political dissent. Both were the darlings of liberal chic. The NYT earned a Pulitzer prize on stories about the Soviet Union under Stalin that have now been admitted by all parties were full of outright lies. 40 years later Mao shirts were the rage. (Heck read the Nation in the 50s! For more liberal rubber stamping to the Soviet Union.)

 

ANother fave example of the same phenomenon is that case of Reinaldo Arenas a Cuban writer. In his autobiography he writes painfully of how the liberal Intellectual elite thought him wonderful when his writings were smuggled out of Cuba but as soon as he was in America they denounced him almost as a fake when he continued to speak out against Fidel's repression.

 

The list can go on forever.

 

By the way I am sending out good energy vibes right now! Relax and enjoy the flow.

 

PP

[slothrop]

Well, yeah. The kind of ideological rubber-stamping you describe is definitely bullshit. It doesn't matter to me who's doing it: fans of Stalin or Hitler or Bush or Clinton or the liberal PC police or the Ashcroft thought police.

 

I just didn't get how Trudeau's comment implies that he was unaware or tacitly approving of the Gulag system.

 

*shrug* I'll just go back to feelin' the good vibes now. Cheers!

[rbw1966]

Funny how neither JayB nor Mattp responded to this thread. You're losing your fishing skills PP.

[JayB]

I was too busy using my newfound abundance of spare time elsewhere today to do much replying, but the claims that PP makes w/r/t Leftists in the West turning a blind eye to these atrocities - mass murder on scales that literally have no parallel anywhere in history outside of the Third Reich. This is a historical fact that has been so thoroughly documented in so many books that there is no longer any dispute in the matter. People on both sides of the spectrum have willfully overlooked their fare share of outrages but I there's really nothing out there that can compete with the state-sponsored carnage that occured within the Soviet Union or Communist China in terms of duration or scope, or the continuing dismissal/denial of both by the Western left. I think I did the math at one point and the Chinese Communists alone killed something like 30,000 times more people than Pinochet yet Mao recieved rather fullsome eulogies from nearly every Leftist of note on the planet when he passed away. Rather odd, that.

 

 

[Jopa]

...but there's really nothing out there that can compete with the state-sponsored carnage that occured within the Soviet Union or Communist China in terms of duration or scope...

 

What about the Africans? The state sponsered carnage continues to take place, and has for millenia. I think everyone is guilty of turning their heads on this event. No event in history comes even close.

[Stonehead]

When the State assumes too much power:

 

Museum of Communism.

 

The founder and curator of the museum is Prof. Bryan Caplan, who recently received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University, and has just joined the economics department of George Mason University.

[j_b]

there's really nothing out there that can compete with the state-sponsored carnage that occured within the Soviet Union or Communist China in terms of duration or scope, or the continuing dismissal/denial of both by the Western left.

 

let's not mention colonialism and its modern version. your generalizations about the western left are laughable.

[JayB]

The real question is - how much fan mail have you sent to Paul Ehrlich since 1968?

[j_b]

poor dodge, but to answer your question: none.

 

is this the "let's revive the cold war" thread? aren't you guys supposed to be pushing the "perpetual war on terror" these days? or do you think you need both to justify spending our children's future on the military-industrial complex?

[JayB]

I am primarily in favor of spending our children's future on Colt45 TallBoys and Pull-Tabs, but sustaining the millitary industrial complex is a close second.

 

Are you sure that you don't have a talking Paul Ehrlich plush doll somewhere in your house that dishes out lines from "The Population Bomb!" when you squeeze it?