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Raymond wrote: "The more later Gavin, regarding the unfortunate horror and difficulties of war and your favorite - George Orwell: " We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." (George Orwell) Maybe we sleep safe in our beds also because messages from terrorists to their allies in America are intercepted. Recently, while reading a book of pro-Stalinist propaganda published in the late 1980’s, I was immediately struck by how the arguments which supporters of Stalin use to justify torture: i.e., that it is necessary to use “whatever means necessary” in order to preserve the Communist revolution against Western agents who were trying to undermine it, are very similar to those currently in use by the Bush II regime to justify the use of torture. The Stalinist, Kenneth Neill Cameron, an American Shelley scholar, writes in his 1987 biography Stalin: Man of Contradictions: “But the question of numbers, however, of imprisonments or deaths [under Stalin], is not the essential question. The basic issues are those of motivation and guilt. Why were these people arrested? What had they done? Why was the penal code amended to secure swift arrest and imprisonment? The underlying, indeed sometimes outspoken thesis of Khrushchev, Medvedev, Conquest, and others is that of a sadistic persecution of innocent people by an insane dictator. But this view smacks more of sensationalist journalism than of social analysis. Moreover, Stalin alone could not have initiated the prosecutions. Even if the whole party leadership was not involved, the central leadership certainly was. At the time, the inner core of leaders included Molotov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Voroshilov and Manuilsky. Thus, if the professional anti-Stalinists are to be believed, we are confronted with not one insane dictator but a group of insane dictators. When we consider the records of these men, their years of heroic revolutionary work and their determined struggle for socialist industrialization, it is clear that, mistaken or not, they must have believed they were acting in the face of a threat to socialism. They were all responsible and serious men, not men who would persecute for the sake of persecution or who would lightly endorse executions.” [emphasis mine] (CAMERON 128) And what was this “threat to socialism” which these “serious men” of the Soviet Union aimed to combat --a threat so serious that it led them to “amend” “the penal code” “to secure swift arrest and imprisonment”? Why, terrorism, of course --Cameron writing: “As we look over the history of the 1920’s and the 1930’s in the USSR, one of these reasons quickly becomes apparent, namely massive sabotage --in the mines, on the railways, in factories, in agriculture, in economic planning, in government. A picture of the extent of this sabotage emerged only in the trials of the various opposition leaders between 1936 and 1938, which also revealed that sabotage was linked with plans for the destruction of the Soviet Union in war. These public trials of the ‘opposition’ leaders, however, had revealed only the tip of the iceberg. They indicated the existence of followers everywhere --wrecking machinery, making the wrong parts, sending materials to the wrong places, poisoning farm animals, starting pit fires in mines, planning railway sabotage to build up to the immobilization of the railways in the coming war. Nor was the sabotage only physical. Economic plans were deliberately distorted, government documents lost, statistics faked --actions which could cause widespread disruption in planned economy. Furthermore, this sabotage was coordinated with Nazi and Japanese war plans and with terrorism. Sergei Kirov, the popular head of the Party in Leningrad, was assassinated, and terrorist plans seem to have been afoot to assassinate the whole top party leadership. To assert, then, that most of those arrested were innocent ‘victims’ is patently absurd. If the leaders were guilty --and the evidence, as we have seen, indicates that they were-- their followers on the whole must have been guilty also. When the workers began to realize the nature of the situation --the assassination of Kirov in particular evoked angry demonstrations and petitions-- they demanded action. The Party, which until then had actually been lagging behind events, began wide investigations and amended the penal code in order to move forward swiftly in a situation of threatening war.” [emphasis mine] (CAMERON 130) Robert Conquest, in his book The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (Collier Books, New York, 1973) --which Edmund Wilson on the cover blurb calls “..the only scrupulous, non-partisan, and adequate book on the subject”-- tackles this issue from an opposing, anti-Stalinist perspective; even so, his observations regarding the Stalinist purge clearly parallel the methods in use by the Bush II regime today. Conquest writes: “The Purge raises, at every step, the most profound moral issues. On most of these the facts speak for themselves, by any moral standards; and I hope that I have been able to avoid too much tedious moralizing. But there are cases in which judgment became perhaps a trifle confused by the claims of the regime that the ends it supposedly held in view permitted it to transcend ‘bourgeois morality’….” (CONQUEST 12) “…There is another implied attitude of some oddity, met with occasionally not only in the Communist apparatuses themselves, but even in old admirers of the Stalin system in the West. A lot of killing seems to convince people of the seriousness, and thus the justifiability of a cause. Similarly, Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon has the NKVD interrogator Gletkin say that it is the Stalinist willingness to face the ‘necessary’ filth and horror of historical progress that gives a superiority over sentimental humanism. I myself have heard an almost identical justification from a serving NKVD officer.” (CONQUEST 13) Interestingly, the practices which both Stalinist and Bush II supporters defend as being “necessary“ for their survival, both benefit from that ambiguity under the law which separates so-called “stress” positions from “true” torture. As Robert Conquest observes in The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties: “The basic NKVD method for obtaining confessions and breaking the accused man was the ‘conveyor’ --continual interrogation by relays of police for hours and days on end. As with many phenomena of the Stalin period, it had the advantage that it could not easily be condemned by any simple principle. Clearly, it amounted to unfair pressure after a certain time, and as actual physical torture later still: but when? No absolutely precise answer could be given. But, at any rate, after even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable. After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually being physically poisoned by fatigue. It was ‘as painful as any torture.’ In fact, we are told though some prisoners had been known to resist torture, it was almost unheard-of for the conveyor not to succeed if kept up long enough. One week is reported as enough to break almost anybody. A recent description by a Soviet woman writer who experienced it speaks of seven days without sleep or food, the seventh, standing up --ending in physical collapse. This was followed by a five-day interrogation of a milder type, in which she was allowed three hours’ rest in her cell, though sleep was still forbidden.” (CONQUEST 197)
"There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution."--US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in her ruling against the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program "My French is poor, but my heart is rich. I love France- the art-making, art-loving, and art-supporting people of France." -David Lynch
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