Surviving the Gulag

No guarantees, of course.

§  Your best chance to escape is before you get to the Lubyanka. You’re healthy and you’ve got no walls and fewer guards than you ever will again.

§  Lie to your interrogators. Remember nothing at all. If you build them a story you’ll get tripped up in the details.

§  Sign absolutely nothing that they give to you.

§  Don’t trust the thieves.

§  Spend what time you have in the transit prison sleeping. You’ll be thankful for it after a tour on general labor.

§  If you want to survive your ten-ruble note then do whatever you can not to get out on general labor.

§  The thieves are going to get all the trustee positions.

§  It’s not the short ration, but the long ration that kills you. (The bonus ration is given to shock-workers who overfulfill the norm. You spend more calories earning it than you get from eating it.)

§  Don’t bother petitioning Stalin to release you. He wants you right where you are.

§  Don’t believe the rumors of a general amnesty either.

§  Gorky won’t tell the world about your prison conditions. Gorky depends on praising the state to maintain his livelihood.

§  Gorky will end his days in the camps anyway.

§  Tukhta: A word for the difference between the work you do and the work you tell your commissar you do.

§  If you get your Tukhta past the commissar then he’s going to be invested in maintaining the illusion to his bosses. He doesn’t want to end up behind the wire.

§  When the godfather recruits you to inform on your comrades laugh in his face.

§  Knife stoolies.

§  To escape requires constant observation, meticulous planning, and a willingness to immediately seize whatever chances fortune throws your way.

§  Study up on geography now; you’ll be thankful when you’re trying to cross the Kazakh steppes.

§  When you’re dying of thirst in the desert it doesn’t help to stab your comrade to death to drink his blood to survive a little longer. He’s also badly dehydrated and won’t bleed much at all.

§  Lie to the commissars. Tell them what they want to hear.

§  When they let you out they aren’t actually letting you out. They’ll arrest you again and slap another tenner on you.

As a rule, it’s better not to live in a country that maintains a gulag. 

https://ricochet.com/549015/on-finishing-the-gulag-archipelago/

Link at http://americandigest.org/wp/escaping-from-the-gulag/

The part about “Stalin…wants you right where you are” reminds me of a book about Cuba published in the early 1970s. Many Cubans, faced daily with corruption and inefficient officials said, “If only Fidel knew this sort of thing is going on.” Those Cubans would not have believed it if told, “Fidel does know. He set up the system.”

Remember when Schwarzenegger brought fascism to California?

You don’t? Camille Paglia does, and that’s why we should elect Bernie Sanders for president.

“I am still amazed at the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to governor—a man who has never held political office and who participated in only one serious debate. It is a disturbing sign in any nation when politics have become so inefficient and corrupt that the people turn to an outsider as ‘strong man’ for leadership. This is how fascism is born. Because it is Schwarzenegger’s machismo—represented on a superhuman scale in his films—that California voters want to attack the entrenched special interests in Sacramento, his behavior toward women was irrelevant. Or rather, his behavior actually reinforced his virile image as a forceful personality who pushes through barriers.”

https://ricochet.com/camille-paglia-donald/

Who is Camille Paglia? Wikipedia says she is “an academic and social critic.” I’ve known academics who occasionally drifted into social criticism when not doing academic things – teaching. But to make a living at being both, one must have friends in Established places.

Anyway, the point of that being at Ricochet is that as with a number of other Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy sites, Ricochet has become angrily anti-Trump. For years, those organizations – Red State, Never Yet Melted, Flopping Aces, Hot Air – railed and rent garments and poured ashes in anti-Clinton 1 and Obama and We need a Conservative Republican to Save the Republic. Or, when donning a patriot, non-party demeanor, a True Conservative, and the Republican Party is closer to True Conservatism than those other guys.

But now … Now those organizations don’t run the Party, and they don’t know what to do.

This guy Trump … He says he’s a Republican, but he’s not one of us! He doesn’t listen to us! Doesn’t he realize we are the Party?