freedom and reason

Although it appears that Rick Warren, in anticipation of giving the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration, has removed from the Saddleback web site his extended thoughts on the matter of god and science (although he left up the important questions of whether our pets will be with us in Heaven), the Internet has preserved some gems.

“If you’re asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is no, I don’t,” said Pastor Rick to Newsweek, April 2007.

Concerning dinosaurs, Pastor Rick was asked (this was in a different interview), “How do they fit in with the idea that God created the world rather than the world evolving on it’s own? Why doesn’t the Bible talk about dinosaurs?”

Here’s Pastor Rick’s response:

The Bible tells in Genesis 1 that God made the world in seven days, and that he made all of the animals on the fifth day and the sixth day. All of the animals were created at the same time, so they all walked the earth at the same time. I know that the pictures we all grew up with in the movies were that dinosaurs roamed a lifeless, volcanic planet. Remember these are just pictures drawn by someone today! The Bible’s picture is that dinosaurs and man lived together on the earth, an earth that was filled with vegetation and beauty.

Warren insisted that the Bible does mention dinosaur-like creatures. “The Bible uses names like ‘behemoth’ and ‘tannin.’ Behemoth means kingly, gigantic beasts. Tannin is a term that includes dragon-like animals and the great sea creatures such as whales, giant squid, and marine reptiles like the plesiosaurs that may have become extinct. The Bible’s best description of a dinosaur-like animal is in Job chapter 40,” he said.

He then provided from evidence (Job 40:15-19), “Look at the behemoth, which I made along with you and which feed on grass like an ox. What strength he has in his loins, what power in the muscles of his belly! His tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are close-knit. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like rods of iron. He ranks first among the works of God.”

Perhaps the interviewer had a puzzled look on his face, for Pastor Rick commented, “This should not sound so strange. After all, God tells us that he created all the land animals on the sixth day of creation, the same day that he created mankind. Man and dinosaurs lived at the same time. There was never a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth. From the very beginning of creation, God gave man dominion over all that was made, even over the dinosaurs.”

Warren had not always believed that the Bible and science were incompatible. This is because, according to him, he had not made a full study of the Bible:

I found that, although I’d understood the science side of the equation, I needed to take some more time to read what the Bible really had to say about this subject. Not having taken the time to really read the Bible, I was very ignorant about what it had to say. Let me give you one example. I discovered that the problem of sin, as addressed in the Bible, was much more serious than I had previously thought. When I realized that the world was clearly a perfect place as God created it, and that this perfection was ruined by the sinful choice of Adam and Eve, it really started me thinking. Did the Bible teach evolution or did it teach the creation of a first man and woman named Adam and Eve? If we evolved, which human being would have made the choice that brought sin into this world? Since God clearly says that it is our sin that brought death into our world, how could there have been death for billions of years before the arrival of the first man who sinned on the earth? As I asked questions about this issue and studied what the Bible had to say, I found it to be one of the greatest times of learning in my life as a new believer. My prayer is that you will have this same experience!

Don’t pray for me, Pastor Rick. This is what understanding the “science side of the equation” looks like? If God first made the world perfect, then how could Adam and Eve make only the biggest blunder ever in the history of the universe? Yahweh created man and woman to fuck everything up? What definition of perfect are we working with here? Did Yahweh do this so that some of us could burn in everlasting hellfire for refusing to believe this bullshit story? And he gave this fuckup Adam dominion over everything, including dinosaurs? Why don’t interviewers interrupt these asshats and point out the idiocy of their opinions?

Mike the Mad Biologist’s comment is perfect, “Radiometric dating is probably something homosexuals do, anyway.”

I’m guessing all these questions are above Obama’s pay grade.

People are horrified to learn of the practice of human sacrifice by the Triple Alliance in modern-day Mexico, of the thousands of persons—criminals, slaves, and war captives—fed annually the god Huitzilopochtli to keep the sun rising every day, to make the giver of life victorious in its eternal struggle with the forces of darkness. Some claim that Cortés exaggerated the numbers of those sacrificed to justify conquest. Some claim the killings never took place, that it is a racist lie.

Of course, the killings did take place, as the historical record plainly shows. For the sake of making a point about how we should think about these deaths, let’s assume that Cortés’ figure of “three to four thousand souls” annually. Charles C. Mann, in his book 1491, which chronicles the history and prehistory of the Americans before European arrival, offers this fascinating passage putting the human sacrifices in Mexico into perspective:

Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris – Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds. London, the historical Fernand Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year at Tyburn, just north of Hyde Park. (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a good view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg for mercy, he wrote, was a crowd of “at least 12 or 14,000 people.”) In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings. “The corpses dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes standout against the sky, in so many old paintings, are merely a realistic detail,” Braudel observed. “They were part of the landscape.” Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historical V. A. C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At the time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortés estimated for the empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to Braudel. In their penchant for ceremonial public slaughter, the Alliance and Europe were more alike that either side grasped. In both places the public death was accompanied by the readings of ritual scripts. And in both the goal was to create a cathartic paroxysm of loyalty to the government – in the Mexica case, by recalling the spiritual justification for the empire; in the European case, to reassert the sovereign’s divine power after it had been injured by a criminal act.

Apologists for colonialism exploit the accounts of human sacrifice in ancient Mexico to justify European conquest of the Americas. I have before been asked to reflect upon the thousands of human beings saved by the gallant efforts of Europeans to Christianize the native peoples of Mexico. The Europeans were, from the perspective of the rulers of civilizations throughout the Americas, seen as enemies; but, from the perspective of the victims of these indigenous empires, the Europeans were—or at least should have been—viewed as saviors. But examining the practices of the Europeans in their homelands, leaving aside the brutality of the European conquest of the Americas, the descendants of Europeans are confronted with an awful truth about their own history: Europeans engaged in human sacrifice of their own people, as well.

The thousands of executions that took place annually in Europe—of single and menopausal women, Jews, homosexuals, heretics, the disabled, and a myriad of others—were sacrifices to a powerful god, Yahweh, the creator of the sun and stars, and his representatives on Earth, the mighty sovereign figures moving with power derived from Heaven. What insanity can be attributed to the inhabitants of Mexico during fifteen hundreds can be attributed to the inhabitants of Europe during the same century (and beyond)?

The lesson to be learned is not that Europeans were more civilized than their savage contemporaries in the Americas, but that absolute power rationalized by myths of the supernatural and cloaked in elaborate popular rituals represent a certain and deadly threat to human beings. Debunking the myth of European superiority requires sober assessment not only of the practices of the colonized subject before conquest, but of the colonizer himself.

In a op-ed supplied below, conservative pundit Pat Buchanan is claiming that Obama is a socialist because he is advocating a progressive income tax. He backs up his argument with a quote from the Communist Manifesto: “A progressive or graduated income tax.”

It is true that Marx and Engels advocate in the Communist Manifesto a progressive or graduated income tax. It is a recommendation in a list of ten which includes these that have also been achieved in modern capitalist society:

Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.”

You will note that these ideas – progressive income taxation, public education, and so forth – have been folded into capitalism with no movement towards socialism, which is defined as a social system that involves the redistribution of productive assets from non-producers (capitalists) to producers (workers).

This is because these items are not particularly socialistic. Think about it. Do Americans reject public education because two communists recommend it? Do Americans reject child labor because communists said we should reject it? Shall we return to child labor so as not to be socialist?

Moreover, other items on Marx and Engels’ list are not particularly socialistic:

Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

All of these are compatible with capitalism and have functioned to preserve capitalism in crisis (and could function to entrench capitalism). State ownership of banking, for example, has been necessary to preserve the financial system attendant to capitalist production.

Just as saying that the progressive income tax is socialist is nonsense, so, too, is the claim that nationalization of banks is socialist. Nader’s claim that we have socialism for the rich while we have capitalism for the poor is thus inaccurate. While it would be true that such nationalization would be socialist in a society based upon a socialist mode of production, in a capitalist mode of production, such nationalization is capitalist.

Some of the other items on Marx and Engels’ list are more arguably socialistic:

Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

If land is publically owned and proceeds from the value of that land are distributed to the public, then this is an example of a socialistic arrangement. The assumption in all these things in the Communist Manifesto is that they concentrated in the hands of and administered by a workers’ state and this really is the key to understanding Marx and Engels’ argument.

Then there is this slogan: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” What should we make of this? Does this follow from Obama’s “spread the wealth around” idea?

The line comes from the Critique of the Gotha Program, which Marx penned in 1875 in response to a document produced by representatives of the contemporary socialist movement. In fact, Marx did not coin the spirit of this phrase. It is found throughout socialist literature going back to the 1840s.

Early variations on the theme of a different model of redistribution are found in the work of Saint Simon, whom we have talked about in this class (he was Comte’s mentor). Saint Simon argued that what citizens receive in wages should reflect the value of their productive output.

Marx assumes that Saint Simon’s formulation is appropriate to socialism, the lower phase of communist society, whereas his statement of principle in the Critique of the Gotha Program concerning distribution based on need is appropriate to the higher phase of communist society.

Here is what Marx writes about “the higher phase of communist society,”

[A]fter the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Marx is talking about the world after the socialist transformation takes humankind to a higher level sufficient to free individuals from particular and necessary labor in order to explore labor efforts in the creative realm, to achieve self-actualization, something capitalism systematically precludes for the majority.

In the early stages of the transformation – what Marx refers to as socialism – “The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.” That is Saint Simon’s formulation. Marx explains further in this passage:

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

Marx sees this as a problem to overcome in the socialist phase. He notes that

these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

To summarize, under communism, once the highest phase has been achieved, citizens redistribute the social product on the basis of need. If a family has ten members, then it will require a larger dwelling, more food, more energy – in short, a larger social provision – compared to smaller families. This is because the need is greater. A solitary man does not need the same provision that a family of ten does, therefore he will receive less (this is the way it was in ancient society).

What will be required from all, if they are able bodied, is to produce the social surplus; but, with that production put to the task of need, technology will be put in the service of freeing citizens from most necessary labor.

Finally, it has always been of particular interest to me, having grown up in the church (my father was a Church of Christ preacher, as was my maternal grandfather), that Marx’s slogan resembles most closely passages found in the New Testament.

In Acts 2:44-45, it is written:

And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.

In Acts 4:34-35 it is written,

Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.

These passages are found in the description of the principles and character of the first Christian church, which was a commune in which all members held property in common and distributed the proceeds from that wealth on the basis of need not productive effort. In fact, these passages contain the case of a man and his wife who withheld from the church a portion of the wealth derived from the sale of land and were executed for their crime by church members (clearly, the early Christians were serious about their redistributive scheme).

Christian socialists have argued that Marx’s formulation is a secular version of the Christian principle that lays emphasis on sharing of wealth, indeed of afflicting the comfortable while comforting the afflicted, a principle that finds its expression through the New Testament in the condemnation of concentrated wealth and privilege.

Ironic, isn’t it? What would the author of the op-ed I have supplied below say if we were to note that the slogan upon which he so enthusiastically heaps piles of scorn comes from the gospels he so enthusiastically embraces?

Demagogues have long depended on the failure of adherents to foundational texts to actually study the texts about which they so faithfully adhere.

“It’s kind of hard to figure how Warren Buffett endorsed me, Colin Powell endorsed me, and John McCain thinks I’m socialist.” —Barack Hussein Obama

This is how brainwashing works. Let’s take the example of a prisoner of war—his name is Tom—kept in isolation from his comrades for many days. The enemy wants to make Tom believe that the enemy’s cause is greater, that the enemy’s system is superior, and that the POW’s cause and system are wrong. The enemy tells the POW all sorts of things in an effort to break him, but Tom resists because he knows it is the enemy telling him these things. Tom knows what’s going on. Tom is his own man.

For months, we have heard that Barack Obama is a “transformational figure,” a leader who has come to take us all to higher ground. Many of Americans have resisted the man and the message because they are suspicious of both. Of course, Republicans and conservatives are suspicious. How can a progressive Democrat represent their interests? But some progressives were suspicious. How can a centrist Democrat represent progressive interests? The media continued to hammer away the Obama narrative. The man and his message are everywhere.

Then Obama rolls out the Warren Buffetts, the Colin Powells, and the Bernie Sanders—men from the right and the left, businessmen, generals, labor leaders, conservatives, liberals, and social democrats. Powell says, “Obama is a transformational figure.” Like our POW Tom, the sentiments of those who were suspicious of Obama were transformed. So many different sorts of figures, appealing to so many different sorts of people—all elites, of course—rolled out in a massive propaganda campaign represents a deft brainwashing campaign of historic proportions.

Obama’s half hour propaganda special, which appeared last night one several channels, was another key aspect of the brainwashing campaign. Did you see the way the people were responding to Obama? One man kept muttering in a whisper, tears in his eyes, “Thank you … thank you,” as Obama told him he would save his pension. The old man looked like an enraptured zealot at a Benny Hinn anointing, hands clasped together, “Thank you, sweet Jesus…. Thank you, sweet Jesus.” 

The Obama campaign believes—and given the ground of religiosity of this country, their assumption is not far off the mark—that Americans will fall for a politician who is every bit the image of an evangelical faith healer, especially progressives who want a religious leader even if they reject organized religion. Obama is pitched as a liminal figure on a divine democratic mission to save America from decay and pollution. The clouds will part and the seas will recede—he told us this himself—and a righteous leader will step through the breech to take us all to higher ground. He is “the One,” the special man who will unify his people—class, gender, racial matter no more—and lift the nation to new heights. We will be saved. Reborn in a New America.

If the ruling class succeeds in pulling off this moment, the United States political system will have entered into a political phase, one closely paralleling—of course, in its own unique American way—the personality cults of Nazi Germany and North Korea. For this reason alone, we should hope for its failure.

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Note: This post was migrated from my old platform. I have added to it an image generated by Sora.

What do we mean when we say something is designed or is the product of “design”? To design something is “to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan,” “to conceive and plan out in the mind,” “to have as a purpose,” “to devise for a specific function or end.”

For example, if we wish to make a hole in a wooden plank, we create a tool or machine, such as a drill, to accomplish that end. The drill is the product of design. It allows us to achieve some end, not accidentally, but rather on purpose. The functionality of a thing is insuffient to suggest design. Design requires creation or creative alteration with purpose, with intent. This is telic behavior – that is behavior tending toward an end or outcome.

Clearly the design of the drill is the product of intelligence. Something that appears to be drill-like or functions as a drill is not the product of intelligence. Such a thing may be used as a drill, but was not designed for that purpose – in fact, it wasn’t designed at all. An example would be the bill of a woodpecker. It functions to make holes in wood (and its functionality is not limited to making holes in wood), but it was not designed for this function. Its functionality is the result of evolution.

What is “intelligence”? Intelligence is the ability to learn from experience, to change behavior in an intentional way to adapt to environments, to demonstrate the capacity to reason, to acquire and apply knowledge, to solve problems, to comprehend or understand situations and respond appropriately and meaningfully. Intelligence is essentially a faculty of reason and thought.

That which is the product of design is presumed to be the act of an intelligence. It seems to me, then, that the idea of “intelligent design” is a redundant expression. Design presumes intelligence. Moreover, since design presupposes an intelligence, then things that are the products of design are things that are the product of intelligence. Please know that I am not making an argument here. I am merely defining terms. The bottomline is that things which are the products of design are things that are created, constructed and executed according to plan with an end in mind.

The mind is a product of social interaction and relations that root in a biological capacity that has emerged from a long evolutionary process. Natural and social histories represent an interlinked process that has produced an intelligence capable of identifying and elaborating that process.

Because the emergence of consciousness has been gradual, grasping the process was not initially accurate and remains incomplete. The methods and meaning systems used to understand the process evolved over time, eventually producing science, the most successful method for explaining the process. Early methods yielded the notion that there was an intelligence behind everything. It confused function with purpose. The modern method – the scientific method – demonstrates that most things were the result of a non-intelligent process, that function was the result of evolution, not design and purpose.

Although science has not answered every question, it has managed to properly distinguish the difference between function and purpose. This is arguably the major breakthrough in human consciousness. So-called “intelligent design,” even if we grant that it is not veiled creationism (which, of course, it is) is retrograde because it wishes to deny, retard, even reverse the progress of consciousness.

This is why, while science has yielded a wide array of applications, intelligent design has yielded nothing.

I continue to find curious this whole Obama-is-a-closet-Muslim thing. Obama’s stepfather was a Muslim. Obama lived in Indonesia, a Muslim majority country for six years. Obama was enrolled in school as a Muslim, where he learned a curriculum that included Islamic studies. Obama attended Mosque. The record indicates that, during a significant stretch of his life, Obama was recognized as a Muslim.

I don’t have a problem with Obama having been recognized as a Muslim. His experiences with Islam could actually be a selling point; we need politicians who understand Islam. Moreover, I don’t have a problem with right-wingers trying to figure out exactly what Obama’s experiences with Islam are; Obama’s characterizations of his experiences are clearly deceptive. He invites skepticism.

What I do have a problem with is Obama’s constant touting of his Christian faith and denials of any significant involvement with Islam. He is downplaying perhaps his strongest selling point (there is not a lot to recommend him, frankly) while, at the same time, fueling the Islam-is-bad theme. Why, if Islam is a respectable religion, is it so terrible for Obama to have been identified as a Muslim while living in Indonesia?

Of course, context is everying. I predict that, if elected, Obama’s experiences with Islam will become a major selling point to the international community in the project to re-legitimize US global hegemony. Indeed, I suspect this is the plan: elect a black man with African roots, a popular Arabic name (Hussein), and a life history of significant experiences with Islam. Why else would the establishment get behind a half-African candidate with radical southside Chicago ties.

This brings me to the overwhelming condemnation of Jerome Corsi’s book Obama Nation and how weak the arguments are. On Larry King Live, Frank James dances around the subject of Obama’s experiences in Indonesia, treating something that is not controversial in itself as a smear that must be denied, though without any rational refutation of Corsi’s interpretation of the facts. Paul Waldman, who also appears on the program, does no better.

What becomes clear is that Obama backers realize that the facts at the core of Obama’s Indonesian experience, along with facts beyond Indonesia (his claim that he is a life-long Christian is contradicted by his own statements on faith), undermines Obama’s claims about his life-long religious experiences. What is controversial is the manner in which Obama has distorted his personal history on this matter. The corporate media is working overtime to make Obama’s deception on this matter appear innocent.

Finally, there is this example of twisted logic and the most vile type of ad hominem attack from James:

One of Corsi’s claims to credibility is his doctorate in political science from Harvard University. His Ph.D appears after his name on the cover and title page of the book.

But a Ph.D. isn’t necessarily proof that your worldview is well-grounded. Anyone who doubts that need only consider Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, a University of Michigan Ph.D in mathematics.

As Frank himself notes, Kaczynski had a advanced degree in mathematics. This makes Kaczynski an expert in mathematics not politics, which is a key area of expertise at issue in a political campaign. Corsi’s degree is in – drum roll – politics. This makes him an expert in the field in which he is writing! Second, Frank is comparing Corsi to a serial murderer, and, while Corsi may be many things (e.g. apparently a bigot for having criticized the way the Catholic church covered up the widespread molestation of youth by its priests), he hasn’t been sending mail bombs to the US postal service.

I am still waiting for Obama to simply say the following: “I realize that some 12 percent of US citizens believe I am a Muslim. To them I say, ‘That’s fine,’ and then ask, ‘Vote for me anyway, since there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim.” Obama running away from a rumor that he is a member of a respectable religious movement (isn’t that we are all told?) is the problem here, not books that document the facts of Obama’s experiences with Islam.

 

In Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler writes, “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator.” He also writes, “I am doing the Lord’s work.” He writes this, as well: “I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.” Persons of faith wishing to distance themselves from Hitler’s deeds insist he was an atheist. It doesn’t seem so reading the pages of Mein Kampf. It seems he saw himself as chosen by God to lead Germany back to a glorious (imagined) past. History indicates that it’s a lot scarier for a man to tell the world he’s on a mission from God than it is for a man to admit he doesn’t believe in one. Indeed, the man who doesn’t believe in supernatural things isn’t scary at all. At least not for that reason.

This appealing to God—to being God’s agent, to aligning one’s actions with God’s will, to doing God’s work—is what is so troubling about the Obama campaign’s Kentucky flier (see below). Obama is standing at a pulpit with a giant lit cross in the background. “Faith. Hope. Change,” reads the title. In it, it reads, “My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want,” says Obama. “But I won’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I go out and do the Lord’s work.” In a private letter to God left at Jerusalem’s Western Wall in the summer of 2008, Obama writes, “Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will.” (The controversy over his words has not been about his desire for God to make him an instrument of his will, but the fact that a newspaper published what he wrote, which is supposed to be just between Obama and God. In other words, he wasn’t just pandering.)

In the campaign literature below, “Barack Obama: Answering the Call,” echoing the story of Jesus as a boy, Obama writes that he “knew the Scriptures” but that he was “removed and detached” from the Lord. Obama was challenged to attend church by the community he was working in and, there, “learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, He would accomplish with me if I place my trust in Him.” He writes, “I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth and carrying out His works.” The title of this section is “Called to Christ.” In the section titled “Called to Bring Change” Obama compares himself to Moses, who at first was unsure of himself, but “[t]he Lord said, ‘I will be with you…. I’ll show you what to do.’” In the section “Called to Serve” Obama is said to be “[g]uided by his Christian faith” and is, therefore, trustworthy. And, in the section “Committed Christian,” Obama is quoted as saying “I believe in the power of prayer,” that found in this power is “the will” to act.

Readers of the blog will recall that Bush’s establishment of a Faith-Based Initiative by executive order in January 2001 was deeply disturbing to liberals and progressives. Marvin Olasky, author of the 1994 book The Tragedy of American Compassion, who inspired Bush’s “compassionate conservative” theme, was a chief architect of the program. John DiIulio, Jr., a political scientist known for coining (or at least popularizing) the term “super predator” that spread popular fear of black youth, was its first director. Now we learn that Obama is intent on keeping the program. On July 1, 2008, he said, “I’ll establish a new Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The new name will reflect a new commitment. This Council will not just be another name on the White House organization chart—it will be a critical part of my administration.” [Note (1.28.2009): Obama has tapped DiIulio to adapt the initiative under his presidency. He appointed pastor Joshua DuBois to head the new program.]

In a campaign stop in Lebanon, New Hampshire, on January 7, 2008, Obama told his audience that on election eve “a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany … and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama.” At his nomination victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 3, 2008, he told the throng that “generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when … the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we … secured our nation and restored our image … when we came together to remake this great nation….”

During George W. Bush’s administration, there was concern about the degree of religiosity expressed not just by those around him but, most troubling, by the president himself. (I wrote about this in 2003 in a piece titled “Faith Matters: George Bush and Providence” in The Public Eye Magazine. I was asked to speak about it at the United Nations University in Amman, Jordan in November 2006: “Journey to Jordan.” I adapted this speech for my 2007 blog entry “Christian Neo-Fundamentalism and US Foreign Policy.”) Bush believed he was chosen by God to lead the Christian world against the Axis of Evil. The press made a big deal of this. Where are the questions from the press about Obama fulfilling God’s will by doing God’s work? Where is the popular concern that Obama prays to be the instrument of God’s will? Why are liberals and progressives so apathetic about the question of church-state separation when it comes to a candidate for the Democratic Party? The hypocrisy is astounding.

Note in this piece I had not yet recognized the problem with progressivism. (comment: July 3, 2024)

The United States is a capitalist country. This means that the state is a capitalist, or bourgeois state. The two major political parties—the Democratic and Republican—are bourgeois parties and, for the most part, represent the interests of the capitalist class and its cadre of managers, as well as the capitalist system as a whole. 

As a socialist, neither one of these two major parties represents my interests. Moreover, since most citizens are working people, neither one of the two major parties represents the interests of the majority of persons living in the United States. Working people have political parties representing their interests, but these parties are small and working people for the most part are falsely consciousness of their interests. This is because of capitalist and nationalist ideologies. 

However, within the constraints of the system, there are differences between these two major parties. Usually, one of the two major parties is worse for working people. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln was relatively better for working people mainly because of its work in limiting the spread of slavery and, ultimately, winning the war against the slaveowners that freed the slaves. This was good for the working class because it created the structural conditions for building a mass-based working class movement. Later, the Democratic Party took up the mantle of progressivism and the Republicans became the more troublesome enemies of the working class. 

Third parties have a rich tradition in the United States. In 1892, the Populist candidate polled 1,026,595 votes, or 8.5 percent of the total vote. in 1904, the Socialists won 402,810 or 3.0 percent. In the next election cycle, the socialist won 420,793 (2.8 percent). They did even better in 1912, taking 901,551 votes, representing six percent of the total. The Progressive party did even better, coming in second (ahead of the Republicans) with 4,122,721 (27.4%). The Socialists took 590,524 3.2% in 1916 and 913,693 3.4% in 1920. In 1924 the Progressives took 4,831,706 16.6%. In 1932, Socialist 884,885 2.2%. In 1944 Progressive/American Labor 1,157,328 2.4%. 

Progressives are told that if they vote for progressive politicians and parties they will help elect the regressive candidate. They are instructed to vote for the party that is more progressive in contrast to the party that is least progressive. If you vote for a third party, you are throwing your vote away. Were people in 1892 or 1912 told this? Did not those voting for the Socialist Party vote their conscious and their principle? They had good reason to know that their man wouldn’t win. So why did they cast their vote in a way that would weaken the relatively more progressive candidate? 

Is it not curious that the more we have been swayed by the don’t throw away your vote by voting on principle and conscience argument the fewer and smaller the opportunities to vote for those who represent your principles? Is it not curious that the more we are told to work within the confines of the two party system the more conservative the relatively more progressive party becomes? Does is not keep the Democrats interested in working class interests for workers to vote for socialists? It is in the interests of Democrats to do this, obviously, since they need votes to win. If they can count on progressives to reflexively vote for Democrats, then what incentive do they have to address working class and progressive citizens? Clearly, they have very little, since they have move steadily rightward with the decline of third parties.

There was an article published many years ago in The Insurgent Sociologist concerning propaganda materials produced by corporations and right-wing academics for use in elementary schools. The propaganda was used in the indoctrination of children in free market ideology. The material discussed the benevolent firms that generously give families food, clothes, televisions, and, of course, jobs. The exploitation of labor power was conveniently left out of the materials, as was the widespread environmental destruction and poverty caused by capitalist relations. The reason for the omission was obvious: why would capitalist-produced propaganda explore exploitation and environmental destruction?

My recent conversation with Steven Barnes, an assistant professor from George Mason University who specializes in the GULag, moves me to write this entry. Barnes takes issue with my posts criticizing Solzhenitsyn. Recall my entries on conservative economist Walter Williams, the man who asks his students exam equations drawn from Old Testament material. Walter also works at George Mason University. So do a large number of right-wing intellectuals. George Mason University is a magnet for right-wing moneybags and is highly influential in producing the propaganda used by bourgeois elites to misdirect Americans. (You can read the record here: Source Watch: George Mason University and here: Media Transparency: George Mason University).

Does this mean that everybody who works at George Mason University is a right winger? Of course not. However, people choose the institutions with which they affiliate, and the ideological character of institutions is relevant in considering the ideological bent of any particular intellectual working there. I chose the department in which I was tenured because it is a critical historical social science unit concerned with progressive democratic politics, civil rights and social justice. One would be right to consider this fact when assessing my politics and scholarly approach. As I always emphasize: consider the source.

In learning about who Steven Barnes is, I ran across a teacher’s workshop, conducted in the spring of 2008 at Duke University (a private religious college), designed to teach high school and middle school teachers how to, in turn, teach students standard anti-communism by comparing the Soviet prison system to the Nazi death camps. I discovered this program because Barnes is on it, his presentation titled “Behind Barbed Wire: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society.” In participating in the workshop, Barnes is fulfilling one of the thrusts of George Mason University, specifically to organize public schools in the teaching of scientific and historical materials, such as standardized materials approved by the Virginia state legislature. Close to Washington DC, George Mason University helps design the elements of thought that become embedded in national educational standards. Hopefully you can see where I’m going with this; the Duke program reminded me a lot of the corporate materials presented in The Insurgent Sociologist article I mentioned.

Barnes discusses the character of the April 5 Duke event in his comments to this entry, so I will leave him to tell you about that. I wasn’t present at the workshop (I would have been a nuisance), so I am not going to characterize the content of the contributions. What I am interested in is the program description and the way in which it distorts history for ideological purposes. I suppose I could engage in criticism of Barnes for participating in the event, but it is his area of specialization, he is building a record towards tenure, and the event in question is of the sort that his institution looks kindly upon. I won’t begrudge him career advancement. This entry is about institutions and agendas not personalities.

Here is the copy from the Duke program:

The Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Duke University is pleased to invite you to participate in a unique one-day workshop on Saturday, April 5: REMEMBERING THE GULAG.

The GULAG — the prison camp system that arose in the Soviet Union after 1929 — served primarily as a way to gain control over the entire population, rather than punish criminal acts. The incarceration of millions of innocent people in the GULAG system is correctly seen as one of the worst and most shocking episodes of the twentieth century.

Millions of innocent people were incarcerated in the GULAG, serving sentences of five to twenty years of hard labor. Prisoners in camps worked outdoors and in mines, in arid regions and the Arctic Circle, without adequate clothing, tools, shelter, food, or even clean water. We will never know how many prisoners suffered from starvation, illness, violence, and cold; an immense number of people died. More people passed through the GULAG, for a much longer period of time, than through Nazi concentration camps; yet, the GULAG is still not nearly as well known.

REMEMBERING THE GULAG is intended to introduce participants to this notorious Soviet prison system and its long-lasting effects on Russian society. We will provide middle and high school teachers who participate with the background understanding and curricular materials to introduce their students to it as well.

WHEN: Saturday, April 5, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

WHERE: Room 320 Languages Building, Duke West Campus, Durham, NC COST: No registration fee. CSEEES is able to provide limited financial assistance for participants who travel substantial distances to attend. CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDIT: CSEEES will provide participating teachers with documentation for CE credit.

The program speakers will be drawn from leading scholars and specialists at Duke and other universities. Each talk will be followed by ample opportunity for questions and answers. The program schedule will be:

9:00 a.m.–Welcome: Dr. Edna Andrews, Director of CSEEES, professor of Slavic & Eurasian studies, Duke University

9:15–“Behind Barbed Wire: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society,” Dr. Steven A. Barnes, Professor of history, George Mason University

10:15–“‘It’s Impossible to Express’: Stories from Gulag Survivors, ” Dr. Jehanne Gheith, Professor of Slavic & Eurasian studies, Duke University

11:15–Break

11:30–Documentary film: “A Trial in Prague” (2000)

1:00 p.m.–Lunch (on your own)

2:00–“Thinking about ‘A Trial in Prague’: A Discussion of Political Terror and Stalinist Rule in Eastern Europe,” Dr. Chad Bryant, Professor of history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2:45–Break

3:00–“Camps in the Classroom: Bringing Stalin’s Gulag Alive for Your Students,” Dr. Pamela Kachurin, Professor of art history, Duke University

Curricular and other teaching materials will be distributed to all participants.

You will note a several things about the program relevant to my on-going discussion concerning the use of the GULag history for pro-capitalist propaganda purposes.

First, the not-at-all-subtle idea of the program is to make the Soviet Union appear much worse than Nazi Germany: “More people passed through the GULAG, for a much longer period of time, than through Nazi concentration camps; yet, the GULAG is still not nearly as well known.” There are two claims here: (1) more people passed through the GULag than the Nazi camp system and (2) the GULag is not nearly as well known as the Nazi concentration camps.

The numbers of prisoners who passed through the GULags runs in the millions. Whenever you incarcerate such a large number of persons in a nation as large as the Soviet Union (around 210 million in 1959 just in the Union Republics – compared to 178 million for the US that same year), the number will be large. For example, with prison and jail populations of several hundred thousand running into the millions over several decades in the US, and with average prison sentences running between 2-5 years and average jail sentences six months, the result is tens of millions of prisoners having passed through the US system since the end of the second world war (most of them non-violent offenders and many of them political prisoners, victims of the war on drugs). What about those incarcerated in Nazi camps? The Nazis operated more than 15,000 camps (maybe as many as 20,000) scattered throughout Europe housing millions of prisoners between 1933 and 1945. Records show that more than 6 million, and as many as 11 million, were killed in the Nazi camps, and many millions more were imprisoned but not exterminated.

On a comparative basis, the implication that the GULag was worse than the Nazi prison system in terms of size and scope seems implausible. Taking the period from 1935-1953 for the Soviet Union, a longer period than that of the Nazi system, adding up the numbers does not indicate more prisoners. Taking into account how large the Soviet Union was compared to the size of Germany at this time, the rate becomes much, much higher for Germany than for the Soviet Union. The deeper implication, that the Soviet GULag was worse in terms of function and conditions, is unsupported by the facts and doesn’t make logical sense. The purpose of the GULag was not extermination. It was a prison system in which the vast majority of inmates were imprisoned for non-political criminal offenses. The Nazi system was for the most comprised of individuals incarcerated because of their ethnicity (most Soviet prisoners were Russian) or their political affiliation.

On the question of whether the Holocaust is more well-known than the GULag, this strikes me as hyperbole. I can’t count the number of times when the Holocaust is being discussed that somebody says, “Well, Stalin’s Gulags were worse,” with the audience nodding in approval. The intent of the claim is obvious: communism is worse than fascism. Whenever I discuss the possibilities of socialism, Stalin and the GULags are almost always raised as reasons why socialism cannot possibly work. Never are Hitler and the Nazi concentration camps cited as a reason why capitalism is a unworkable system with respect to freedom (and Nazism is authoritarian capitalism). Moreover, while people know about the numbers of Jews killed in the camps (they have learned the 6 million figure), very few people know much at all about the Nazi prison system itself. Despite overwhelming documentary evidence of the Nazi system compared to the Soviet system, people I meet everywhere know more about the GULag than about the Nazi camp system (of course, most of what they know is wildly inaccurate, which is the point of my writing about it on my blog).

The Duke program language talks about an “immense number” of people dying in the camps, but, as we have seen, the numbers, which are bad enough, are perhaps not as extraordinary on a comparative basis. The vast majority of GULag members survived (at least one to the ripe old age of 89) and were released back into society. Of course I am not saying that people did not suffer in Soviet-era prisons. They did. They still do. Russia maintains a massive penitentiary system – only comparatively larger both in terms of history and population size. Why aren’t these historians writing about this? Why are prisons only bad in socialist societies?

I also want to emphasize that, according to research required by Deaths in Custody Reporting Act (DICRA), approximately 7,000 Americans die in US prisons and jails annually, a figure that Americans never hear about. This number comes with improved prison conditions, advanced medical treatments, and guarantees of health care for prisoners. The further one goes back in time, the worse US prison conditions become. How many people in the US hear about US prison conditions between 1935-1953? In case you don’t think about these things, people die in prisons from disease and old age in the US just as people died in prisons in the Soviet Union from disease and old age. Prison rape and other forms of interpersonal violence are/were problems in both systems.

The claim of “millions of innocent people” being sent to the camps is misleading for it assumes that acts for which persons were being incarcerated were not criminal acts. One must reckon the legally-politically constructed nature of all criminal categories. While I advocate for the release of all non-violent offenders from US prisons and jails, I would never claim that the majority of prisoners are innocent. Most people who go to prison are guilty of the crime for which they were convicted. The same was true in the Soviet period. Now, if you want to argue that the laws were improper, then be my guest. I do it all the time. I don’t think there should be any criminal laws applicable to the consumption of currently illicit substances, such as marijuana and LSD. But if you get busted with pot or acid, then you’re guilty of a criminal offense.

Let me follow up on this matter of crime and punishment, because this point is always lost or ignored in these discussions. The 2.3 million persons in US prisons and jails is not troubling merely because it is such a big number. What’s far more troubling are facts about who is in US prisons and jails. More than two thirds (70 percent) of US prisoners are illiterate (65 percent never graduated high school). Two thirds of prisoners were either earning less than 5,000 dollars annually at the time of their arrest (one third of prisoners) or weren’t earning any money at all at the time of their arrest (one third of prisoners). The US prison system warehouses the poor and uneducated. This is how the prison system under US capitalism is in the service of the US capitalist system. There were poor and uneducated persons in the Soviet prison system, as well, but there was a greater proportion of affluent and well-educated persons in the system compared to the United States. This fact is often used as a criticism of the Soviet system: the system was evil because it incarcerated smart and wealthy people.

This sensibility, almost universally expressed, represents an implicit class politics in favor of the exploiter-oppressors over against the exploited and oppressed. People do not mourn for the plight of the poor and uneducated in the United States. Indeed, the poor are despised and feared. This is part of our Calvinist/social Darwian conditioning. The fact that more than seven million persons under some form of correctional control, the vast majority of which are poor and uneducated, does not disturb Americans because middle America has been trained to hate these people. That 60 percent of prisoners are non-white is a big factor in our lack of collective outrage. We are a deeply racist nation. There is little hue and cry about the warehousing of persons our society has no use for. But if white business leaders started going to prison, then you would hear about it. If white middle class people starting being controlled by the poor and minority populations, then there would protests in the street. The fact that we lock up so many poor and uneducated people reinforces the idea that crime is mainly perpetrated by poor and uneducated people.

But most crime in the United States is not committed by the poor and uneducated. Depending on accounting, street crime costs the country between 4-14 billion dollars annually (and a lot of stolen property is recovered). That may seem like a lot of money (we spend as much or more than this on the Iraq war every week), but compared to other forms of crime, it is a minuscule amount. How minuscule? Employee theft and corporate crime account for nearly half a trillion dollars a year! Another difference between street crime and suite crime is is that the wealthy educated perpetrators of the latter don’t usually go to prison. In fact, many of the most socially and personally injurious practices that occur in US society are not criminalized at all. Why? Because they are perpetrated by rich white men and not by poor minority persons. There is no other explanation for it. It’s the wealthy white men who write the criminal law. Corporations are for the most part free to act in ways that harm people and the environment. This immunity from wrongdoing reflects the character of power in the United States.

In a capitalist society, one without the social safety net of a Scandinavian country, especially one as deeply racist as ours, the criminal justice system represses poor disproportionately minority persons. This is how the penitentiary system came into existence in the first place. The criminal justice system does not serve the interests of the majority of the population in controlling those who do the most harm, namely rich white men. The criminal justice system serves the interests of the minority of the opulent: rich white men. One would therefore expect to see under a dictatorship of the proletariat not the end of prisons but a change in the composition of those prisons, a shift from warehousing almost exclusively poor persons to punishing more affluent and educated persons.

Now we get to the so-called political prisoner. The idea you are supposed to hold is that taking privileged and educated counterrevolutionaries to prison is the supreme mark of a totalitarian society. Yet those who strive to overthrow socialism and restore capitalism aim to return social relations to the practice of exploiting human labor, which is a fundamental violation of human rights. Why should workers allow such a thing to happen? Working people are right to expect that a government representing them would prevent that. Why should a people allow, under the guise of free political expression, counterrevolution that pushes the masses back under the thumb of the oppressor? What would we do to those who attempted to bring back slavery? What do we do with those who practice slavery? If we convict them and send them to prison is this a fundamental violation of their human rights? Or would the violation of human rights occur if we tolerated their actions?

Maybe you believe, like I do, that people have the moral right to organize to overthrow their government. Any law or state that does not represent the interests of the people deserves to be broken and overthrown. But that doesn’t mean that such actions should be legal. Why should they be? After all, it’s true everywhere that overthrowing the government is only legal if you are successful. If you fail, you’re a criminal. It works the same for revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces. The state represents certain interests over against other interests, and the state will always have built into it mechanisms that resists overthrow in the name of those who interests are contrary to the interests of those the state represents. The fundamental difference is that the exploiters and oppressors are morally in the wrong.

Why is this point so difficult to understand? First, people don’t operate on principle but instead are ruled by ideology. The principle is that if it is illegal for me to overthrow the government, then it is illegal for you to try to retake control after I overthrow it. Second, widespread bourgeois understanding of democracy as a competition between political parties in the context of a separation of politics and economics with citizens casting ballots distorts understanding of democratic practice. What bourgeois intellectuals call democracy is in fact liberalism. In contrast, democracy is rule of the people, and people cannot rule if a minority of the opulent is permitted to rule over the majority (and don’t come back at me with the claims of opulence among the Soviet elite. I already checked that out and the fact is that our elected officials in the federal government have much high salaries than any Soviet official did). Maximizing democracy requires socialist revolution. Once the transition to communism takes place, democracy can manifest. Democracy (or communism) represents freedom pursued to its logical conclusions. Third, too many people believe without criticism that those who aim to exploit other people have a legitimate point of view that must be given a hearing in the public sphere.

If justice were actually being served – that is, if the criminal law and enforcement covered those who commit the worst forms of social and individual harm for the sake of material gain – our prisons would look very different than they look today. But then we would be living in a different society. One cannot expect that our prisons will look like they should as long as capitalism is in place. If there were a socialist revolution, then the prison composition would begin to change, and, oh, how the wealthy would make known the tragedy of their persecution at the hands of the socialist administrators. Oh, the hue and cry when the wealthy are dispossessed. It’s a tragic occurrence from the perspective of the wealthy who live off the work of the masses. The plantation owners likewise cried about the end of slavery. Are we crying about it today? Do you feel any sympathy for the slaveowners?

The idea of the Duke workshop, like so many of these types of affairs, whether intentional or not (and I honestly believe that a lot of propagandists don’t realize their producing or participating propaganda), is to confuse people ideologically by equating the GULag with the Nazi death camp, where millions of persons perished because of their ethnic identity or political affiliations. You will recall that between 5-6 million Jews were exterminated in death camps, along with millions more members of other ethnic groups, along with socialists, communists, and anarchists. The Nazi regime started a world war that left more than 50 million human beings dead, 23 million of them Russians, and countless others injured and traumatized – all in the pursuit of capitalist expansion and entrenchment. The attempt to draw a parallel between Nazi Germany and those atrocities and the Soviet Union is deeply immoral, not only because of the hideousness of the Nazi regime, but also because of the dramatic accomplishments of the Soviet Union in raising hundreds of millions of human beings out of poverty, providing universal health care, and quality education for all. It disrespects the lives lost to authoritarian capitalist terror to paint the social system that defeated the Nazi menace as worse than Nazism itself.

When I see programs such as the Duke program, and I consider all the rhetoric in this country about democracy and freedom, I wonder where are the workshops for high school and middle school teachers to learn about the history of US terrorism in pursuit of capitalist domination? Where are the workshops that educate teachers about the perils of authoritarian capitalism and corporate control over society? Where are the workshops about Western colonialism and imperialism? Where are the workshops about the US classist and racist penitentiary system? Where are the workshops about the exploitative character of capitalism and how labor can organize in resistance to economic oppression? What is the relevance of teaching students about the GULag when the need is to prepare them to deal with capitalist oppression? The relevance is that the capitalist class must indoctrinate children to equate socialism with the GULag, communism with Stalinism (who must be depicted as the anti-Christ or else you are an apologist for terror), so that all other avenues of possible social existence are closed off to them. By systematically hiding the globally oppressive character of capitalism and exaggerating the excesses of the socialist state under historic siege conditions, educators are leading children to conclude that capitalism is the only possible way to exist and remain free. In truth, capitalism is a system of unfreedom and this bullshit they are feeding the children is bourgeois propaganda.

If researchers into the GULag cared about historical truth, they would run a series of conferences in cities around the country explaining to Americans why “facts” routinely cited by politicans and journalists concerning the Soviet-era are either untrue or wild exaggerations. Where are the high profile conferences exposing the work of Conquest, Solshentsyn, and others as erroneous and even fraudulent? Where are the conferences carefully documenting the success of the Soviet Union as an alternative mode of societal organization? Educators are missing a golden opportunity to teach young people how to carefully and objectively reason through and investigate history. They are also failing in their moral duty to teach children about alternative forms of social organizations that could liberate them from exploitation and save their planet from environmental catastrophe.

* * *

My arguments concerning the GULag are directed at those propagandists who exaggerate for political purposes the conditions, and distort the primary purpose of the GULags and who, at the same time, have no interests in condemning the use of prisons for non-violent offenders, prison conditions generally, or the execution of prisoners. My arguments concern consistency in the treatment of historical fact and moral reasoning, as well as humane treatment for all prisoners regardless of type of social system.

When anti-communists exaggerate and distort history they are engaged in the despicable exercise of manufacturing constructing knowledge with the purpose of manipulating people – the goal of which in this case is to close off avenues for historical possibilities that focus on liberating humankind from the indignity of capitalist relations. Its propaganda, and the purpose of it is obvious: communism is to be seen as the worst possible thing that can happen to people and the proof is to found in the vast system of forced labor camps in which millions upon millions of human beings perished under horrible conditions (claims that the facts refute).

These propagandists never fail to ignore the accomplishments of the Soviet people. The history is all bad, in their view. The Soviet Union was hell on earth. Even worse than the Holocaust. And anybody who publishes objective accounts of the history of the Soviet Union and of the GULags, or raises questions about the rampant inconsistencies in anti-communist fact and reason, is branded an apologist for Stalin. These propagandists do not condemn the GULag on the grounds of opposition to prisons, forced labor, or state execution. Indeed, they hold up as the ideal – the USA – a country with the largest prison system in world history (both in absolute terms and relative to the population), a country that exploits prison labor and executes prisoners (including minors and the mentally handicapped). The hypocrisy, clear to all who do not desire to be ideologues, reveals the political objectives.

Here are some facts: Prisons existed in the Soviet Union and continue to exist in post-Soviet Russia, just as prisons existed and continue to exist in the United States and elsewhere around the world. Conditions in Soviet prisons were, and in post-Soviet Russia, are, as they are in many prisons throughout the world, inhumane and deserving of the condemnation of moral persons. Most prisoners in the Soviet Union, as is the case in post-Soviet Russia, and as is the case in the United States, should not be in prison at all, but are non-violent offenders who should be rehabilitated in non-carceral settings.

Here’s the irony: If communism is to be condemned because the Soviet Union, a massive country with a large population, had a large prison system, then capitalism is to be condemned because the United States, a smaller country with a smaller population, has an even larger prison system. Are anti-communists prepared to accept that bargain? In other words, if communism is so bad because of the GULag, then how can capitalism with its vaster prison-industrial complex be better? Here’s another one: Why are those who cry loudest about the GULag the first to speak in favor of harsher punishment and treatment of prisoners? At least this seems to the true from where I’m sitting.

Finally, one of the most disturbing aspects of the anti-communist tendency is its association with anti-Jewish sentiment. This isn’t always true, of course, but the idol of the anti-communists, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (who also branded opponents of the Vietnam War as genocide enablers), is not alone in characterizing – and not too subtly, either – communism in the Soviet Union as a Jewish plot. Sound familiar? Yeah, communism is worse than Nazism, the anti-communists tell us. So Hitler’s war on the Soviet people was noble after all?

There’s something quite odd about Solzhenitsyn’s biography. It is alleged that the state took custody of Solzhenitsyn in 1945 when government authorities intercepted a private letter criticizing about Stalin’s war strategy (which ultimately led to the defeat of Nazi Germany). We are provided with photos of Solzhenitsyn in GULag garb, however these were staged photographs; there are no photos of Solzhenitsyn in the GULag. So where was he sent exactly? Because of his background in mathematics and physics, he was sent to a military research installation, often referred to as a sharashka, where he worked on secret state projects. Referred to as zeks, prisoners sent to these research stations were engineers and scientists. Living conditions were much better in the sharashka than in the camps where manual labor was said to be performed. Solzhenitsyn wrote about his experiences in the sharashka in The First Circle.

I find it quite fascinating that Solzhenitsyn was sent to a secret military research installation. This places him among the zeks who produced such weaponry as the Soviet’s atomic warheads. The reality of the conditions of the sharashka are out of phase with the image Solzhenitsyn projects in the staged photographs of his time in the GULags and in his writings. I also find it interesting that, after his release, Solzhenitsyn became a high school teacher in Kazakhstan, teaching mathematics and physics.

Given Solzhenitsyn’s personal experience, along with his penchant for wild exaggeration, several questions emerge. First, why would Soviet authorities permit a dangerous dissident – a dissident so dangerous that he was imprisoned for eight years – to work in a high security Soviet military installation administered by the Ministry of State Security? Why would authorities release a dissident who possessed extensive knowledge of highly classified state projects? Why didn’t they just kill him? He knew too much, after all. He had already been gone for eight years. They could have told his family he died of pneumonia. Yet he was not only allowed to live, but he was allowed to teach high school students math and physics. Why would Soviet authorities allow a dangerous dissident to teach high school students?

Also curious is the apparent fact that, in 1950, while at an camp in Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan (where he allegedly worked as a bricklayer, experiences that are supposed to form the basis of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), he was discovered to have a tumor which was removed. The cancer spread and, near death, he was treated at a hospital in Tashkent and was cured of cancer. He writes about these experiences Cancer Ward. Why would a homicidal state apparatus, a thoroughly diabolical machine of repression responsible for mass murder, not only have failed to execute this dangerous dissident live, but would cure him of cancer? Why not let him die? Forget pnemonia, you have the cancer-ridden corpse of the man. Send back photos and a report to his family. Case closed. Instead, a dangerous dissident is allowed to work at a highly classified state research installation, cured of cancer, released from prison and appointed to teach high school students math and physics.

Then there’s the matter of the second round of persecution. Nikita Khrushchev, in his effort to delegitimate Stalinism by “revealing” Stalin’s crimes, found Solzhenitsyn’s gift for embellishing experiences useful, and the state pushed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich on the Soviet public. How does such openness about state repression happen in a totalitarian regime? How is it possible, in a state that is supposed to have killed millions of people, that such a novel could not only appear but be actively promoted by a totalitarian state? Why would Soviet leaders make a czarist and committed anti-communist a national figure?

When Solzhenitsyn started to get on the bad side of Soviet authorities, the writer feared traveling to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize in 1970 because he believed the Soviet authorities would refuse to let him come home. It’s surprising that the Soviet state would even allow Solzhenitsyn to leave the country in the first place. Why would the Soviet authorities want Solzhenitsyn outside Russia where he would run about spreading his gospel of anti-communism? Why wasn’t he sent back to the GULag? Is it because that would be too obvious? Surely a state as evil and secretive as the Soviet state could have arranged for Solzhenitsyn to have disappeared. If the Soviet state is indeed responsible for the deaths of the tens of millions, many of them political dissidents not nearly as dangerous as Solzhenitsyn, why leave the man alive?

In 1974, with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1972, Leonid Brezhnev said that by law the state could put Solzhenitsyn in prison for treason. “This hooligan Solzhenitsyn is out of control,” he said. The state did indeed convict Solzhenitsyn of treason (the US convicts its citizens of treason, as well). However, instead of imprisoning him, they sent him to West Germany. From Germany, he moved to Vermont, USA, where he became quite a celebrity, freely bashing the Soviet system to the delight of the cold warriors.

This is quite puzzling. As a child, stories of Russian defectors were a routine matter. Athletes and intellectuals were among those escaping persecution behind the Iron Curtain and they became living testimonials to the desire of Russians to escape the daily oppression of the Soviet state. Ayn Rand told Americans that nobody smiled in Russia (she also claimed to have escape when in fact she traveled freely from Russia). All Russians wanted to get out of the country, I was told. Yet Solzhenitsyn’s emancipation from a society that had imprisoned him is treated as a horrible punishment. He was exiled. How does being let loose from the most oppressive state society in history, as the Soviet Union is typically described, come to be described as an act of state oppression? They didn’t imprison him. They didn’t kill him. They simply let him go.

Perhaps it will help to note the character of claims about the Soviet Union and then compare these to the facts in the Soviet archives, an archive that is quite extensive (massive bureaucracies are marvels of record keeping), show that during 1934-53, the GULag population varied from just over 500,000 in 1934 and just over 1.5 million in 1951. Compare these figures with the 2.3 million prisoners in the United States in 2007. The US GULag system has averaged more than two million persons for several years now. Most of the prisoners are nonviolent drug and property offenders. Most of the prisoners sent to the GULags in the Soviet Union were murderers, robbers, and rapists. The vast majority of the prisoners sent to the GULags were released after serving their time, the length of their sentences comparatively shorter than the length of sentences for prisoners in the United States, with around 80 percent of Soviet prisoners serving fewer than five years in prison. Except for the war years, which were exceedingly tough on the Russian people (23 million Russians were killed by the Nazi war machine), death rates in the Soviet GULags was comparable to the death rates in US GULags. This doesn’t say much for the Soviet GULags, but, on balance, they weren’t as bad as US prisons. Nor was their primary purpose political. Moreover, compare the actual numbers reported in the archives to Solzhenitsyn’s claims of 7-8 million toiling in the GULags annually. At one point in the GULag Archipelago he claims that one-fourth of Leningrad was taken to the camps as political prisoners.

Solzhenitsyn’s exaggerations are commonplace among anti-communists. Close examination of the archives finds that authors such as Anton Antonov-Ovsenko, Roy A. Medvedev, Ol’ga Shatunovskaia, Dmitri Volkogonov, and Robert Conquest widely exaggerate the horrors of Soviet repression. As researchers pointed out in the report “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years” (American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 4, pp. 1017-1049):

Mainstream published estimates of the total numbers of “victims of repression” in the late 1930s have ranged from Dmitrii Volkogonov’s 3.5 million to Ol’ga Shatunovskaia’s nearly 20 million. The bases for these assessments are unclear in most cases and seem to have come from guesses, rumors, or extrapolations from isolated local observations. [T]he documentable numbers of victims are much smaller.

Let’s compare claims to facts. Antonov-Ovsenko claims that that between 1937-38, Soviet authorities arrest 18.8 million people. Medvedev claims 5-7 million. Shatunovskaia claims 19.8. What do the documented numbers? Around 2.5 million. The only one who came close was Volkognov, and he exaggerates by more than a million. Conquest claims that the 1938 camp population was 7 million. Actually, it was under two million. Antonov-Ovsenko claims that the 1938 camp and prison population was 16 million. Conquest puts the number at half that. The record shows that it was one-eighth that figure (two million). Conquest puts the 1952 camp population at 12 million. The record shows that it was 2.5 million. Conquest puts the 1937-1938 camp deaths at 2 million. In fact, the record shows 160,084 camp deaths.

What about executions? Between 1937-1938, Ol’ga Shatunovskaia claims that 7 million were executed. Robert Conquest claims 1 million. Documents shows the figure is 681,692. Executions between 1921-1953, according to Antonov-Ovsenko, numbered seven million (a number exceeding the 5-6 million Jewish deaths under Hitler). The archive reports 799,455. That’s bad enough without exaggerating. The problem of course is that Hitler looks a lot worse in comparison. The propagandists need to get the death counts into the millions. They benefited for quite some time from the fact that there were no records with which to check their claims. Now we have the numbers. So what’s the tactic now? To attack those who argue from facts as Stalinoid apologists.

The Foreign Office, and its Information Research Department (IRD) was a secret worldwide British propaganda network operating against communism and mostly in the Third World. Modelled on wartime psychological warfare operations (PSY-OPS), it employed and associated with right-wing journalists and academics. It distributed its materials through embassies throughout the capitalist world. The idea was not only to prevent peoples living under capitalist oppression the opportunity to consume information about the successes of the socialist world, but to misinform them about socialism and communism. This is known as “black propaganda.” The operation paralleled that of the CIA’s disinformation campaign about the Soviet Union.

Robert Conquest, the man arguably most responsible for creating the massive distortions about the Soviet Union that are now taken as truth by a great majority of people, was a leading “scholar” for IRD. He worked with the Foreign Office until 1956. He then took his propaganda operation into the public domain with a series of books blatantly exaggerating and even inventing atrocities in the former Soviet Union. It seems that IRD proposed that Conquest combine the “data” he had gathered into a book. He produced a ready-made series of eight books called “Soviet studies.” The publisher was Fred Praeger. That’s the same Praeger who published books filled with disinformation at the request of the CIA.

Given what we know, why should we still be seeing in the press statements such as the following? “Mr Putin is a former agent of the KGB which, according to Solzhenitsyn, was responsible for the repression of an estimated 60 million people under the Soviets.” And this: “In 1945, military censors found letters to a friend in which he criticized Stalin. That cost him eight years’ detention in the Gulag camps, where tens of millions people perished.” And this: “He arrived from the east in Magadan, a northern city at the centre of the most brutal chain of camps. He bowed to touch the earth in a tribute to the millions who perished in the camps.”

Think about it. If the corporate news media was about telling the truth, we would have read very different things about Solzhenitsyn and the context in which he worked and became a celebrity. Instead we are given myth. It follows, then, that the corporate media is not about truth telling, but about manufacturing ideology.

Russian Penitentiary System

Today, Russia has over 1,200,000 prisoners serving time in it’s 840 prisons.