The Horrors of the Soviet GULAG prison-camps and the humanity that survived

A World Apart – Gustav Herling (1951)

            Horror can come in so many ways.  It could be the sudden arrival of an incomprehensible terror.  It could also be the slowly dawning realization that hope is a feeling best left dead.  In many ways, the horrors experienced by Mr. Gustav Herling while serving in a Soviet GULAG hard-labor prison run the full gamut.  For several years, the author, a Polish native who had left for the Soviet Union after Poland had been annexed by the Third Reich, experienced horrors both physical and mental, and in sharing his story he helps us understand the true evil that totalitarian government inflicts upon the entire population.

            Reading Mr. Herling’s account of his time as a prisoner brought back memories of my youth reading Animal Farm and 1984, and of wondering in indignant rage why people tolerated the obviously absurd and illogical pronouncements of the ruling parties.  As a young teen, those books filled me with a deep hate for mindless subservience and for blind allegiance to any political system, especially those of a totalitarian state.  Mr. Herling’s life in this forced-labor camp shared so much of the idiocy and stupidity that the animals on Animal Farm or the citizens in 1984 had to accept or else be destroyed by the state.

            Mr. Herling meets prisoners from all walks of life.  One is a former diva of Soviet theater who was sentenced to ten years hard labor.  Her stated crime was being a traitor to the Soviet State.  What was her actual crime?  She danced for too long with the Japanese ambassador at a gala event in Moscow.  That was it.  Several of the inmates were there merely because they were not Russian.  These were Poles who got stuck in Russia avoiding the Nazi takeover of Poland.  There were people whose jobs pre-revolution were in education and intelligentsia, and of course a totalitarian state cannot abide having anyone else be an authority on anything.  The state must the ultimate authority on anything!  How fucking horrible.  With the Soviet Union officially banning all organized religious activities, priests and nuns were also laced in these ruthless work-to-death camps.  All kinds, even those that believed themselves deeply committed to the Communist Party, found out they were worthless pieces of a machine in which they had no control.

            The life in the camp is terrible, with surreal and illogical precision running everything.  The prisoners were fed according to their crimes, and according to how much they worked daily.  Those that worked heavy labor were lucky to receive a few grams of bread and a thin barley “soup” at the end of the day.  Those that were unfit for heavy labor received solely a thin warm liquid with no meat and no vegetables.  If you were sill or injured you spent some time in an unheated “infirmary” where you received the bare minimum food portion, and minimal medical care.  If you were unable to get better enough to work, they would send you to the Mortuary, where the dying waited to die in relative peace.  Mr. Herling spent time in the Mortuary and describes the twisted sense of calm and rest combined with the foreknowledge of your impending death.  There is no comfort anywhere. The paranoia, the pain, the SMELL of countless rotting, sickly, and dying men and women, awash in their own feces, ever-seeping sores, malnutrition, night-blindness from lack of vitamins, and eventually the complete loss of their conscious ability to think all wash over the narrator, as he slides into this horror himself.  Throughout all this, Mr. Herling manages to share any and all wisdom he gained, most of it bleak, and brutally honest about what a man has to deal with when hope is gone yet life continues interminably.  It is a brutal story, and the fact that we know he managed to survive and publish this a few years later does nothing to diminish the trauma of his and all of the other prisoner’s experiences.

            Prison for actual criminals is bad enough.  When the state sets up prisons for those who do no crime other than political opposition?  Evil.  When the state punishes people pre-emptively, trying to weed out supposed traitors before they even have a chance to act?  Evil.  When the state’s own reasoning is so twisted and flawed and fucking pointless that they have to retroactively invent methods to protect their own lies?  Evil.  Under Stalin, Soviet/Russian history was turned into a pathetic joke, with whole secret government entities erasing people’s entire lives from the historical record, solely to appease the whims of the mustachioed madman controlling everything. Whole families disappeared.  Whole generations of educated people were sent to Siberia to die in labor camps.  This same shit happens in all totalitarian states, and is happening right now in Saudi Arabia (religious rule by an autocratic family of assholes), North Korea (totalitarian rule by a fat man-boy with a tiny pecker and total control of his starving population), etc.  It could happen anywhere.  It could happen in the USA.  The only thing that prevents dictators is the willingness of brave people to stand up to them, to the death.  Never expect a despot to “make sense.”

            During WWII the Germans, the Russians, and the Americans all had forced-relocation camps.  The Germans used theirs to attempt a mass genocide of European Jews, as well as anyone deemed undesirable by the Reich.  This included the homosexuals, religious leaders, Romany, mentally and physically handicapped people, and anyone else deemed as “the Other.”  Russian forced labor camps were barely any better.  Their goal was not to solely exterminate enemies.  It was to suck out as much forced labor as possible with the bare minimum of food and support, thereby killing the state’s enemies while also benefiting the state’s GDP.  In the USA, our forced-relocation camps consisted of thousands and thousands of Japanese-Americans, many of them full citizens of the nation, including children and the elderly.  They were treated as if just because they were of Japanese ancestry, they were a treasonous threat to the nation.  While they were not treated as inhumanely as those in German or Russian camps, the very existence of such places in the supposed “Land of the Free” should be enough to strike terror in the hearts of free-thinking humans anywhere.  Who knows how bad it could have gotten for the Japanese-American prisoners if the war had raged on, or if the Japanese had managed a full on attack of the USA mainland?  Totalitarianism is a slippery slope indeed.  We must be ever-vigilant against it, even if it is an unpopular stance to take.

(This book is available for download as a PDF here: https://archive.org/download/worldapart007324mbp/worldapart007324mbp.pdf )

(This book can also be purchased here:  A World Apart  )

Anaximander is my Newest Hero

The First Scientist: Anaximander and his Legacy – Carlo Rovelli (2011)

In my never-ending search for new reading material I came across the name Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist who wrote a book intriguingly titled “Reality is Not What It Seems.”  That book is about the development of quantum gravity theories.  I wanted to read it badly, but could not find a copy at my Library of choice (I am still on the hunt!  Soon!).  What I did find available was a book by Rovelli about the Greek philosopher Anaximander, a man whose ideas about us and the natural world around us were so advanced for their time that they were quickly discarded in favor of the same old status-quo.  People like to throw out the old statement that there is nothing new under the sun, usually to bemoan the lack of originality evident in some artwork or research or idea.  This is a falsehood.  There truly ARE new ideas, never before thought or spoken.  Anaximander was the earliest human that we have record of who helped create the logical and rational framework that set the stage for the scientific revolution all humans have experienced over the past 250 years.

Rovelli does a fabulous job of explaining the radical difference between the worldviews that all humans lived under before Anaximander (The Earth is below, the Heavens above. All is put into motion by the will of gods.  Everything has been the way it is now since the beginning of time, etc.), and the general worldview that most of us modern humans live in, (The Earth is not the center of the Universe. The Universe is exceedingly old. Rain clouds form after water evaporates and climbs into the atmosphere. Land animals evolved from sea animals, etc.)  He explains how big a conceptual leap it was to go from the standard beliefs of the time, beliefs which persisted through all human cultures ever studied, to the core idea that pushes scientific thinking and study.

This core idea is a very critical thing, and it is something that many people do not grasp.  In essence, it is this: Nothing can be learned from certainty, especially certainty blindly accepted without analysis.  Certainty only leads to ignorance.  Before Anaximander, most people who wished to study under a master had to wholly accept that master’s wisdom and teachings without question.  They were assumed to be infallible, due to their prestige, age, or perceived wisdom.  This does not allow for knowledge to expand.  Blind allegiance to “certainty” negates critical thinking.  The ancient sage Thales was Anaximander’s “master.”  What Anaximander did that changed the course of human history is to absorb and understand everything his master had written, and then to LOOK FOR THE MISTAKES.  Anaximander assumed, rightly, that humans are not infallible, and that new knowledge and wisdom is to be found by asking questions of those that came before.  Each new answer creates new questions.  Nothing is absolutely certain in science.  It is only as good as the current data and experiences we use to create our scientific theories.  This idea is the germ of all scientific and rational thinking about the world around us.

Critics of science and scientific thinking despise this uncertainty.  They value the certainty their religion gives them.  Unchanging, unthinking certainty is an evil.  They claim that because Isaac Newton overturned the Ptolemaic idea of the Universe then Ptolemy must have been completely wrong.  Also, since Albert Einstein and his General Relativity overturned the Newtonian idea of the Universe, therefore Newton’s ideas must be completely wrong, according to these people.  Science does not work that way.  The genius of Newton is that his theories on gravity and the Universe and matter and energy were and are correct for 99.99% of the natural world we see around us.  Einstein absorbed this, understood this, and sought out the tiny areas where he felt the great genius Newton was incorrect or lacking information, and proceeded to flesh out those areas.   Newton assumed certain things about our Universe.  Einstein showed these things to be false, and because of his work, was able to understand the relativity of location, the curvature of space time, the “speed limit” set by light, etc.  These were concepts that Newton had no way to understand, but which Einstein, by building on Newton’s work, managed to ingeniously create. 

Einstein was not 100% correct either.  NO ONE IS.  Anyone that tells you is either a liar out to steal from you or use you in some way, or they are deluded morons, trying to make you live in their blindly ignorant and simple worldview.  Either way, they are enemies of rational thought, of rational and human exploration of the world around us.  We, as a human race, owe Anaximander for this conceptual leap.  We owe him big time. 

           Anaximander lived around 600 BC.  That is a little under 3,000 years ago.  He was able to deduce through observation and rigorous thought, that Zeus does not cause the rain but that it is caused by water evaporating from the Earth, heated by the Sun, with no need for any supernatural intervention.  He understood that the Earth was a solid mass, floating in the nothingness of space, with the “heavens” in all directions.  He understood that the first land animals must have come from the oceans, and that humans are descended, along with all creatures, from the sea.  He posited that the Universe was born out of chaos, that all that happened afterwards was dictated not by the capricious will of some gods, but by natural laws.  Before Anaximander humanity was like a child, full of blind faith and certainty.  After Anaximander we have a world where a human can, by virtue of study and hard work, truly understand the causes and effects of the natural world around them, constantly building upon the knowledge of previous humans, and correcting any errors along the way.  This is the true genius of humans.  It is so sad to see that nearly three thousand years later, so much of the world is still obsessed with their religious and philosophical certainties, and willfully ignorant of the uncertain truths that science and logical thinking can provide us.

(This great book can be purchased here:  https://www.amazon.com/Anaximander-Carlo-Rovelli/dp/159416262X )

100 years ago a man wrote about the need for Noise Music! Amazing!

The Art of Noise: Futurist Manifesto – Luigi Russolo (1913)

Noise.  My favorite band is Sonic Youth.  Once, while watching videos that I had taped on our family’s VHS recorder, my dad came by and sat with me to see what I was getting into.  I was around fourteen to fifteen years old at the time.  As soon as he sat down the video for Teenage Riot began to play.  This was, and is, my favorite song.  The aural content perfectly matched the static in my brain.  I rocked out to it while my dad sat there silently.  As soon as it finished, with me exhausted from “rockin’ out,” my dad turned to me and said, “It’s just noise.”  I replied that yes, it was, and it was my favorite noise. 

            I have always enjoyed dissonance in music.  I find white noise very soothing, and have a noise machine that I run all night which helps me sleep like the dead.  I like repetitive noises, such as those of motors or machinery, and I find odd rhythms within those noises.  To this day, “normal,” tuneful, pleasing-to-the-ear songs and music leave me cold.  I prefer my music with a jagged edge I guess. 

            While studying Art History I read a lot about the Futurist movement and heard mention of a manifesto titled The Art of Noise.  I knew of the weird band that shared that name and once I read this work it made perfect sense why they called themselves The Art of Noise.  In 1913 the world had been in the thick what is now called the Industrial Revolution, as well as nearing ever closer to the War to End All Wars (WWI) which began a year later.  Philosophers and artists, as usual, were at the forefront of everything, and could sense that the worlds that the Arts had drawn from, the seemingly simple world of Nature and God and the Natural Order, had been bypassed by us humans.  We were now remaking the world.  The simple definitions which once held saw over the art world and the music world no longer seemed relevant.  They would seem even less relevant after the ensuing decades of war, strife, and horror that culminated with the United States dropping the two biggest bombs ever used in war on Japan.  The Futurists were artists and musicians that sought to explore this new world through new art and new methods of creating art.

            Sensing all of this, Luigi Russolo wrote a letter to his friend, a Futurist composer and musician named Francesco Balilla Pratella.  This letter is what has come to be known as the manifesto The Art of Noise.  In it, Russolo describes how the development of our society has created a whole new wealth of sounds, sounds that are normally categorized as “noise,” and that the human ear has evolved to accept and enjoy these sounds.  He describes the development of music itself, from pleasing, naturally occurring sounds, to sounds created by humans purely for other human’s pleasure, to the utilization of this powerful new media by the religions of the world to somehow contain and take advantage of the power of the music to transport the mind to a different state of consciousness.  From there he describes how the formal rigidity of the Greek musical system did not allow for harmonies, leading to the harmony-less church chanting and music of the Middle Ages.   From there it was a matter of adding layers of complexity and invention to reach the musical heights of the masters like Bach or Beethoven

.

            Even in 1913 Bach and Beethoven were considered by many to be old-fashioned music.  Russolo talks about how the human ear, having grown accustomed to the atonal, dissonant, and polyrhythmic nature of the sounds coming from the industrial machinery, increasingly found the old music to be aurally boring.  Even the classical composers who tried to inject the sounds of dissonance into their music could only go so far, having based their music on the normal tonal range expected by the instruments of an Orchestra.  Because of this, Russolo proposed to create new instruments which could convey the sounds/noises that were now integral to the human experience.  He saw the following categories as the “six families of noise:”

1. Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms
2. Whistling, Hissing, Puffing
3. Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling
4. Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Buzzing, Crackling, Scraping
5. Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc.
6. Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles, Sobs

He sent this manifesto to his musician friend so he could use the ideas within to create a new music.  It is odd to think that his words essentially predicted the state of the most avant-garde of music since his time.  Between the sonically harsh works of masters like Schoenberg in the classical arena, the twisted and atonal Free Jazz of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, the drone-driven and atonal rock music of the Velvet Underground, the roaring avant-noise-rock of  Sonic Youth and Suicide, the walls of 30 minute slow drones and skronk from bands like Earth and Sunn-O, the furious and near-incomprehensible noise of bands like the Locust, and the mad, erratic glitch EDM of the past ten years or so, it seems that Russolo was right on the money.  The “normal” sounds of the typical music of the past sounds so quaint to modern ears.  It can still move the soul but it does not feel urgent or currently important.  Our ears continue to evolve and our sense of what is pleasurable grows and grows.  I am so glad I ran across this manifesto as it sheds light on the music I love, why I love it, and where it may be headed in the future.  Long live the Noise!

(To download/read this manifesto in PDF format, click here: http://www.artype.de/Sammlung/pdf/russolo_noise.pdf )

These animals want to KILL ALL HUMANS!

Mort(e) – Robert Repino (2015)

One of the coolest things about working in a library is that most of my co-workers are as into books and reading as I am.  Discussing the weird work of Arthur Machen one day, a friend told me that he was reading a most unusual novel about animals waging war on humans.  He had already mentioned this to others so I had to wait as the book made the rounds and finally it came to me.  The book is called Mort(e), and it is Robert Repino’s first published novel.

What a cool story!  The main thrust is that the ants of the Earth have enlisted the aid of the animals and have waged war on humanity and everything it created.  The Ant Queen has found a way to alter animals which allows them to stand upright, grow “hands,” talk, and understand language.  The titular hero of the story, a pet cat originally named Sebastian (his “slave” name), who renames himself Mort(e) upon joining the war effort against humans, experiences so much, and suffers so much, all in the hope of finding Sheba, a dog that he loved before the animals “changed” from their old forms into their new ones.

What seems like an odd sci-fi/fantasy tale soon digs into profound subjects, as Mort(e)’s life and experiences bring up questions of identity, meaning, purpose, divinity, and obedience.  He becomes a trained killing machine, yet never truly buys in to the propaganda espoused by the Ant Queen and followed by nearly every animal he meets. 

I do not want to get too far into the actual events that take place in this book, since it is a good story, and I would prefer for you to read it without spoilers.  Suffice to say that it is a bleak, yet uplifting book, weird, yet familiar, and deeply concerned with why sentient creatures do what they do.  Mr. Repino speaks from "inside" these animals' minds in a way that truly puts the reader there, and may make you think twice about how you treat your pets! It is a quick read, and I recommend it.

(An excerpt of this novel can be read here: https://medium.com/@soho_press/the-war-with-no-name-has-begun-with-human-extinction-as-its-goal-66dca2b1bca1 )


(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

One man's journey to escape the Bolshevik revolution leads him to wisdom and experience he could never have imagined.

Beasts, Men and Gods – Antoni Ferdynand Ossendowski (1922)

            This is another book that I had read mention of in many other texts and decided to go ahead and hunt it down.  It is the account of one Antoni Ferdynand Ossendowski, and his escape from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia through the remote areas of Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet and China.  Like with most revolutions throughout history, the Bolshevik revolution was a purge, where countless families died because a member was once a Czar supporter, or an intellectual, or someone the communists labeled as an “enemy of the state.”  If they did not get executed outright, they were kidnapped and sent to Siberian work camps, or just taken into the empty wilderness never to be seen again.

            Mr. Ossendowski was an intellectual, a professor in Universities, and found himself out in a remote Russian country town when the 1917 revolution began and word spread that people were being rounded up.  With only a rifle, and a few supplies, he headed for the woods.  Nearly a year passed between this time and the time that Mr. Ossendowski was able to escape to the USA.  During that time, and with the help of many people, he managed to travel through parts of the world that at the time were so remote as to be nearly unknown to the rest of the world.  Interspersed between his stories of survival, near capture and gun battles, are amazing descriptions of the country he traveled through, the many people he met, the lamas, and the Buddhist temples and the Mongolian shepherds and the Tibetan chieftains and medicine men.  He was able to see things because of the friendships he made with high ranking Lamas that no westerners had ever glimpsed.  He wrote this account of his experiences 5 years later and the resulting book was the first time that real, eye-witness accounts from Mongolia and Tibet and upper China were available for everyone to read about. 

            Mr. Ossendowski’s escape took many months, and in the meantime the learned man changed into a rugged outdoors man, a fearless gunfighter, a skilled negotiator, and a Tibetan wise man.  It is amazing how quickly one can change and grow when the situation forces it.  The man that started this trip is not the man that ended it, and I am grateful he did, not only for the amazing information on Tibet and Mongolia and its proud peoples, but because he included all the horrors that came along with that revolution.  Traitors, informers, double agents, murderers, hired assassins, mysterious troops, wholesale warfare, massacres, and more are discussed.  It is too easy for the ugliest parts of history to be washed over by the details, but that is something Mr. Ossendowski does not allow.  He includes it all, and it all seems like more than one man could possibly undertake, but it is all true.  Some of the mystical experiences he experienced are described in a very matter-of-fact manner, but they nevertheless inspired many seekers to look for wisdom and knowledge in the high desert mountains of the far East.

This is what Mr. Ossendowski's mind looked like when he met the King Of The World

            Books like this are very important to me, as they allow a relatively unfiltered look at historical events that would otherwise be unavailable, or willfully obscured.  It is an engrossing read.  As the story goes along Mr. Ossendowski gains an inner strength, an ability to absorb the horror he experiences, and a deeper sense of wonder at the magic in the world.  Not only that, but he becomes a straight killer, ready to fight for his life at a moment’s notice.  This duality is mirrored in what he experiences in Mongolia and Tibet.  The people there live everyday understanding that the inner peace and wisdom of a monk can reside in the same body as the killer spirit of a warrior, and nature itself calls for this.  It is very interesting to see, especially as we live in a society that pretends to be all good, or that pain and hurt and war have no place, yet we kill each other, our cops murder children, and people live in fear.  Perhaps it is our unwillingness to accept or understand the darker side of human nature that keeps us enslaved and in fear of those that seek to hurt us. 

(This book is available in .pdf format here: https://ia902604.us.archive.org/20/items/beastsmengods00osseiala/beastsmengods00osseiala.pdf )