Literal Obliviousness
Porter / 2 days ago January 24, 2017
In 1918 Russia, leftist Bolsheviks conducted a campaign of murder so vast and depraved that media and entertainment organs committed themselves to forever shielding the public from its horror. The Red Terror was a starburst of logical conclusion liberalism that has persistently evaded capture in American museum dedications and feature films. Though this omission was certainly not from a lack of enthusiasm. Of its many publicly-mute recountings I thought Wiki’s entry captured the spirit of the occasion well. Please do read it all.
At Odessa the Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; in Kharkiv, scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims’ hands to produce “gloves”; the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Dnipropetrovsk; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of the clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Orel, water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kiev, Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim’s body in an effort to escape.
Executions took place in prison cellars or courtyards, or occasionally on the outskirts of town, during the Red Terror and Russian Civil War. After the condemned were stripped of their clothing and other belongings, which were shared among the Cheka executioners, they were either machine-gunned in batches or dispatched individually with a revolver.
Those killed in prison were usually shot in the back of the neck as they entered the execution cellar, which became littered with corpses and soaked with blood. Victims killed outside the town were moved by truck, bound and gagged, to their place of execution, where they sometimes were made to dig their own graves.
According to Edvard Radzinsky, “it became a common practice to take a husband hostage and wait for his wife to come and purchase his life with her body.” During Decossackization, there were massacres, according to historian Robert Gellately, “on an unheard of scale”. The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a “day of Red Terror” to execute 300 people in one day, and took quotas from each part of town. According to the Chekist Karl Lander, the Cheka in Kislovodsk, “for lack of a better idea,” killed all the patients in the hospital.
In October 1920 alone more than 6,000 people were executed. Gellately adds that Communist leaders “sought to justify their ethnic-based massacres by incorporating them into the rubric of the ‘class struggle'”.
Members of the clergy were subjected to particularly brutal abuse. According to documents cited by the late Alexander Yakovlev, then head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, priests, monks and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice. An estimated 3,000 were put to death in 1918 alone.
Estimates of the dead range from five figures to seven. But they were only Cossacks, after all. Nevertheless you would think such innovative carnage might warrant a brief classroom mention between elegies of black men who were once called ******. Though admittedly that would consume time otherwise devoted to far more sacred and politically useful events.
Of course Soviet liberals were hardly content to commit only one forgotten eradication. So 14 years later they intentionally starved to death millions of Ukrainians. The story of whom could never quite find space in the Hollywood release calendar between Iron Man installments.
And that certainly wasn’t all. Historian Robert Conquest believed in total Stalin may have stuffed his stat sheet with up to 30 million souls in a quixotic, but ultimately futile, quest for Western infamy. Alas, he chose his victims poorly. So poorly in fact that he killed people by the bushels who don’t even have American advocacy organizations. Which, as far as education and media organs are concerned, may as well have been killing no one at all. As a result, he’s no more than a fading historical footnote whose name rarely attracts an accusation of being literally Stalin.
Though poor Joe is in poor company. China’s leftist Chairman sent some 45 million shuffling off the Earth, and yet no one is ever literally Mao.
The petite Cambodian was a relative piker in absolute numbers. But given the clay with which he had to work, his butcher’s bill was probably as high a percentage of the population as any leftist in modern history. Which is beating a field of extraordinary depth. But still, he languishes without a single literally Pol Pot.
An earlier and entirely unremarked upon vintage was the 1804 Haitian massacre.
Squads of soldiers moved from house to house, torturing and killing entire families. Even whites who had been friendly and sympathetic to the black population were imprisoned and later killed. A second wave of massacres targeted white women and children.
Given precedent I presume that American schools systematically browbeat black students about their inherited guilt for this racial atrocity. Despite this, practically none of them ever suffer accusations of being literally Dessalines.
And that’s a shame. Because being a literal historical villain grants very dumb and programmable drones the moral license to physically attack their political opponents with a clear conscience.
This being a course the world’s few circumspect ****libs may want to reconsider before continuing. Because history’s pantheon of literal leftist monsters is absolutely brimming with choice. Social justice retards may or may not consider themselves literal Bolsheviks, but it’s not their evaluation to make. And if a literal nazi can be attacked on the streets to media cheers, then the people who literally used to peel hands into gloves and feed nuns molten lead have a very modest moral defense against suffering a similar experience.
The left is going down a sure path to mutual misery in implying a man’s legal protections cease once a gaggle of yard-sale fanatics sees a mustache in the clouds. Never comprehending what faces others recognize in them. But at least there is one country that will never forget the Red Terror. Unfortunately, that country is Ethiopia.