I hopped in my truck yesterday and turned on the radio to the words of some New York professor-type discussing Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn’s Gulag Archipelago. My ears perked up, as Stalinism is one of my favorite topics, academically speaking.

After going on for several minutes about the untold millions of people who had been sent to fester and die in the Siberian gulags, the speaker asserted that the age of the gulags did not end with the death of Stalin or even Brezhnev, but continued up until the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989. Interesting, I thought. Maybe he’s talking about a book he’s written with some new information.

Alas, no — and my first hint should have been that the info in the above paragraph was prefaced with “we are led to believe . . . ” The next words out of this guy’s mouth went something like:

“And if this is true, that these gulags kept millions of people locked up until the Soviet regime fell, then where were all the millions of freed innocent prisoners with stories to tell? Where was the flood of reunions with loved ones?”

He went on to describe how Vaclav Havel had inadvertantly released thousands of hardened criminals he had mistaken for political prisoners, “assuming that if the Husak regime had locked them up they must be innocent.” This, according to him, led to a crime wave.

As I struggled to regain control of my truck, the broadcast went to a station break: “You are listening to Michael Parenti on Progressive Radio at 89.7, KLCC.” Progressive, indeed. This “intellectual” would apparently have us progressing right to the collective farm — and that’s not hyperbole.

Practitioners of Holocaust denial receive instant and vehement opprobrium from all sides of the political spectrum wherever they go. And rightly so; we should censure these creeps. Holocaust denial turning up on the KLCC airwaves is simply unthinkable.

Gulag denial is cut from the same cloth. Parenti’s question “where were all the millions of freed innocent prisoners?” is no different than, say, David Irving or Mel Gibson’s papa asking “where are all the Jews with loved ones who were killed?” The truth, on both counts, is that there are plenty. There are also mass graves. Lots and lots and lots of them. And just as a Holocaust denier can ascribe all the mountains of evidence to the contrary as “lies of the Jewish media,” so too will Parenti chalk Gulag evidence up to the “lies of the capitalist media.”

So why is a local radio station willing to give air time to Michael Parenti’s Gulag denial? And why are leftist broadcasters filing his bloodstained lies under “progressive”? It’s disgusting.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2004 at 15:00 by danimal and is filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.