Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, by Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova. 2000. M. E. Sharpe, New York, London

Labor Camp Socialism: Communism and Its Reincarnation in Cultural Marxism

This book is timely because too many new books variously soft-pedal the 1944-1947 Communist takeover of Poland, misrepresent it as some kind of internal Polish matter, or falsely treat it as some sort of a bad cold (as by spelling Communism with a small “c”). A new round of Jewish attacks on Poland accuses Poles of habitually killing fugitive Jews and rely on the August Trials that had been conducted by the postwar Communist courts. These are deliberately and conveniently distorted as real and objective trials.

A SOVIET-IMPOSED AND SOVIET-IMITATING SYSTEM TRIED POLES FOR ALLEGED KILLING OF JEWS

Ivanova elaborates on the entire Communist security apparatus, which later made arbitrary accusations against Poles, including that of alleged Nazi collaboration, as one of the outcomes of the August Decree. This was anything but justice.

She writes, “The successes of the Red Army brought NKVD activity to the territory of Eastern Europe. Powerful internal-affairs subunits followed hard on the heels of the army, rooting out and destroying national organizations and groups that opposed the Communist regime. NKVD officials also participated directly in the formation of national security services in a number of countries. In Poland, for example, where the NKVD divisions were headed by L. A. Serov, a security organization called the Urzad Bezpieczenstwa (UB)[Bezpieka] was created. Its leader, Stanislaw Radkiewicz honestly admitted in a conversation with Arthur Bliss Lane, the U. S. ambassador to Warsaw, that ‘the Russians had sent him two hundred NKVD instructors to help create the Polish security police on a Soviet model. NKVD activity in Poland definitely followed a ‘Soviet model.'” (p. 158).

Even Polish Communist leaders recognized the scripted and orchestrated policies of the Soviet-imposed government. Ivanova comments, “In May 1945, at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party, Gomulka admitted that he had lost control of both the UB and the NKVD: ‘No one likes the security organs, but they seem to be turning into a state within a state. They conduct their own policies, and no one is allowed to interfere. In our prisons, they treat the prisoners like animals.” (p. 158. Emphasis added).

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I now examine how the policies of the Communists live-on in today’s cultural Marxism. It is being imposed on the West.

LABOR CAMP SOCIALISM: NO REWARDS FOR PRODUCTIVE LABOR

Ivanova writes, “The Gulag’s baleful influence extended beyond purely material losses. The camp’s economy instilled a negative attitude toward labor in millions of Soviet citizens. ‘Chiseling’ (tufta–decoded by the zeks as ‘techniques for recording fictitious labor’)–became the norm for production activity not only in the Gulag but in the country as a whole…The Gulag instilled in Soviet society the thought that people could work without receiving any reward for their labor and trained the Soviet people, particularly scientists and specialists, to reconcile themselves to beggars’ wages and not to demand acceptable working conditions.” (p. 125).

Something like this exists in the cultural Marxist system that increasingly rules the USA. Success and achievement are bad. In many civil service occupations, both competent and incompetent workers are paid equally. Students are rewarded not according to the fruits of their studies, but in accordance with their membership or lack of membership in some favored “victim” group.

LABOR CAMP SOCIALISM: PUNISHMENT FOR DEVIATING FROM LEFTIST IDEOLOGY, NOT FOR DOING WRONG

Ivanova makes these sobering comments, “The country of colonies and camps owes its birth to the Bolshevik regime, which institutionalized violence as a universal means of attaining its goals. The policy of extrajudicial repressions dissociated a person’s life and liberty from his specific actions and intentions. Quite often people were doomed to suffering and death simply because their origins, profession, political convictions, or social or family ties placed them in a special category that had been identified by the Bolshevik leaders as ‘enemies of the people’, ‘class enemies’, “Rightists,’ ‘suspicious,’ ‘members of the wrong families,’ and so forth. Legal notions of ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ lost their primarily meanings. The overwhelming majority of so-called political prisoners had committed no actual illegal acts and consequently could not be considered criminals. They were innocent victims of class struggle, lawlessness, tyranny, and terror.” (p. 185. Emphasis added).

Now, in today’s cultural Marxism, we have much the same thing. Anybody who is not a white, Christian, cis-gendered male is a victim. White people are privileged and must be punished in some way. We have hate crimes (against leftist-favored groups that is). More broadly, we have political correctness, de-platforming, cancel culture, censorship, and loss of job for disagreeing with some item of left-wing ideology. We have businesses pushing left-wing causes instead of making a better product or service. Where will it end?