I get really annoyed when the word "gulag" is bandied about with gay abandon. Do any of the people using it really know what it means? My Dad as a child was in a gulag with his entire family for the sole reason that his family was an "enemy of communism". His family wasn't there because they were being punished for a crime, they were there because they were not likely to agree or submit to the new regime that had invaded their part of Poland.
So when Tumeke use the word "gulag" to describe private prisons, I find myself annoyed because the word is being misused, and in the misuse, people may over time think that a gulag is a private prison where criminals are made to work - not a place of semi-starvation where political prisoners are being kept unjustly.
When it comes down to it, a gulag is where the state imprisons people that do not agree with the state's ideology. It's not a private prison.
Related Link: National Party Gulags ~ Tumeke
See also: Corporate Prisons
So when Tumeke use the word "gulag" to describe private prisons, I find myself annoyed because the word is being misused, and in the misuse, people may over time think that a gulag is a private prison where criminals are made to work - not a place of semi-starvation where political prisoners are being kept unjustly.
When it comes down to it, a gulag is where the state imprisons people that do not agree with the state's ideology. It's not a private prison.
Related Link: National Party Gulags ~ Tumeke
See also: Corporate Prisons
You're wrong (again) Lucyna - the Gulag was where every criminal in the Soviet Union would up. Very few Gulag inmates were political prisoners. Most were sent there for crimes like absenteeism, theft of food, hoarding and other petty crimes - or simply because the local party head had a quota of prisoners to meet every month.
ReplyDeleteThe gulags are still there, by the way. The forced labour prisons in Siberia contain about 1.5 million convicts.
Danyl
ReplyDeleteit is you who are wrong (again).
Further, you just like taking cheap shots for your own personal titilation.
The Gulag developed out of the 1917 revolution. Sure prisoners of all ilks were sent there but many, not "very few", were prisoners of politics. You conveniently gloss over the fact that the Gulag was used as a means of control of Soviet Society; they only changed primarily to prisoner based use after 1973 and the more so after the fall of communism.
To claim politics formed the basis of "very few" Gulag inmates is hysterical.
Go and do some proper reading (http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/) instead of living off Wikipedia.
Thanks for clearing that up Lucyna. Yeah, it and many other words are bandied about too much as smears.
ReplyDeleteHi, Lucyna. Thanks for alerting us to Bomber's diatribe. We could not resist fisking his post, although we have a sense of guilt over taking on such a weak opponent. http://jtcontracelsum.blogspot.com/2008/10/corporate-prisons.html
ReplyDeleteDanyl, what's with the seething resentment?
ReplyDeleteA quote I am sure you, of all people will appreciate, from Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum:
"It was the branch of the State Security that operated the penal system of forced labour camps and associated detention and transit camps and prisons.
While these camps housed criminals of all types, the Gulag system has become primarily known as a place for political prisoners and as a mechanism for repressing political opposition to the Soviet state
Just like Amnesty International trying to mischaracterise Gitmo as a Gulag, Bomber's definition is quite off the mark.
Particularly ironic given his mate Tim is the only Kiwi to be found guilty of sedition in the last 75 years or so, he should be more worried about Labour's propensity for making laws that the state can enforce or disregard on a whim - laws of so-called common sense (smacking, EFB).
What would Solzhenitsyn, Anne Applebaum, and Simon Sebag Montefiore know!
ReplyDelete