Crazy Christian Ranting About the Gulags

http://www.therealitycheck.org/?p=11924

“Communist Russia’s concentration camps were in reality, huge ’scientific’ laboratories where brutally sadistic mind control experiments were conducted using mind-altering drugs, electric shock, and other forms of physical and mental torture.

Along with destroying man’s awareness of God, a necessary order of business was to destroy Christian sexual ethics. Toward this goal, obscene pornographic sex-education ‘therapy’ was forced onto children who had been forcibly removed from their parents. Some researchers put the number of these children in the millions.”

The woman who wrote that quote is a paranoid fundamentalist who rants about the evil atheist communists and how a push for gay rights is a push towards causing men and women to lose the identities that make them separate. I’m constantly amazed by the idiots that are out there. I’m even more surprised by their ability to use a computer. You’d think it would go beyond their level of intellect to properly use one.

Note: I’m not in any way defending the Russian concentration camps (Gulags) let’s be clear on that. My goal here is to simply address Kimball’s extraordinary claim.

First off, Kimball offers no citations for her claim regarding the Russian concentration camps which makes it difficult to independently verify her claim. Either she’s lying or she believes any dirt she digs up on the evil atheist communists and is willing to run with it without first checking the source. As previously stated Kimball’s claim is extraordinary and thus requires extraordinary evidence. The burden of proof lies upon her to produce evidence that will validate her claims.

Here are some facts regarding the Gulags:

“Living and working conditions in the camps varied significantly across time and place, depending, among other things, on the impact of broader events (World War II, countrywide famines and shortages, waves of terror, sudden influx or release of large numbers of prisoners). However, to one degree or another, the large majority of prisoners at most times faced meagre food rations, inadequate clothing, overcrowding, poorly insulated housing; poor hygiene, and inadequate health care. The overwhelming majority of prisoners were compelled to perform harsh physical labor” (The Gulag Collection: Paintings of Nikolai Getman )

“Andrei Vyshinsky, procurator of the Soviet Union, wrote a memorandum to NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov in 1938 which stated:

Among the prisoners there are some so ragged and liceridden that they pose a sanitary danger to the rest. These prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings. Lacking food . . . they collect orts [refuse] and, according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs.” (Jonathan Brent. Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia. Atlas & Co., 2008 (ISBN 0977743330) pg. 12 Introduction online)

In general, the central administrative bodies showed a discernible interest in maintaining the labor force of prisoners in a condition allowing the fulfillment of construction and production plans handed down from above. Besides a wide array of punishments for prisoners refusing to work (which, in practice, were sometimes applied to prisoners that were too enfeebled to meet production quota), they instituted a number of positive incentives intended to boost productivity. These included monetary bonuses (since the early 1930s) and wage payments (from 1950 onwards), cuts of sentences on an individual basis, general early release schemes for norm fulfillment and overfulfillment (until 1939, again in selected camps from 1946 onwards), preferential treatment and privileges for the most productive workers (shock workers or Stakhanovites in Soviet parlance). (Leonid Borodkin and Simon Ertz 'Forced Labour and the Need for Motivation: Wages and Bonuses in the Stalinist Camp System', Comparative Economic Studies, June 2005, Vol.47, Iss. 2, pp. 418–436.)

In reality, as in that based on evidence and not the so called “reality” of Kimball’s blog, the camps were used primarily for hard labour. The conditions were brutal but there appears to be no evidence for what Kimball is claiming. It is possible that Kimball is referring to the Sharashka:

“Sharashka (шарашка, the goofing-off place) were in fact secret research laboratories, where the arrested and convicted scientists, some of them prominent, were anonymously developing new technologies, and also conducting basic research.”

However, these experiments focused on “scientific and technological problems for the state” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka). I don’t know if Kimball is lying but she is certainly misrepresenting the truth whether she knows it or not.

Her blog gets worse from there going on about some type of evil conspiracy among atheists, Satanists, Liberals, gays etc. to kill God and destroy Western Civilization. The insanity of the religious will never cease to enrage and amaze me.