Blind to reality
The Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ mash note to Stalin and the Gulag made it into the Telegraph:
Students at a leading London university have been condemned as blind to reality after defending the system of Soviet Gulag labour camps where thousands perished as “compassionate” places of rehabilitation.
Trans rights campaigners at Goldsmiths University described the Gulags as benign places where inmates received education, training and enjoyed the opportunity to take part in clubs, sports and theatre groups.
In fact most historians agree they were a brutal network of labour camps used by Stalin’s Soviet dictatorship to incarcerate internal opponents and so-called ‘enemies of the state’, resulting in the death of more than an estimated 1.05 million people.
But they did it with love.
Paradoxically the thread was written as an apparent justification for an earlier post by the same group which threatened to send a political opponent “to the gulag”.
The threat was made against Claire Graham, a special education needs teacher, who wrote objecting to LGBTQ Goldsmith’s threat to target feminist academics who they claimed were prejudiced against transgender individuals.
The thread has now been removed so it’s useful to have the screenshots.
Goldsmiths Students’ Union has now suspended the group and withdrawn its support for its activities, saying the Gulag threat – and subsequent refusal by the group to apologise for it – clearly breached the students’ union code of conduct.
In a statement backed by Goldsmiths University the students’ union said: “We condemn the abhorrent content of the tweets and they are in complete opposition to the views and values of the Students’ Union.”
Members of Goldsmiths LGBTQ refused to comment when approached by The Daily Telegraph.
They’re busy re-educating each other.
I’m sure they’re actually busy wallowing in mutual self-pity and victimisation.
From a comment tiggerthewing wrote here 3 days ago about the smear campaign against academic women orchestrated by Goldsmiths lecturer Natacha Kennedy:
Also, The Telegraph followed up their news piece with an opinion piece, “Students defending the gulags is a new low in the hard Left’s rewriting of socialist history.”
And I don’t know anything about this, but this 2011 music video Rainbow Stalin has the trans flag colors in the background.
Interestingly the Wikipedia article on gulags generally follows the consensus that they were terrible but then in several places it notes more people were released from the gulags than died in the gulags:
WTF? That’s a pretty low bar.
Then other parts of the article are quite clear about the brutality. Solzhenitsyn Is cited, then his wife’s claims are cited to counter him, then it’s noted that her alleged claims may have been KGB misinformation, then that is disputed…what a mess.
It must be noted that, while the gulags are not exactly country club prisons, even people who are put in country club prisons do not wish to be there. Being imprisoned is being imprisoned, period. Being imprisoned for a thought “crime” or disagreeing with an ideology is worse than being imprisoned, it is being told how to think, how to feel, what to believe, and that is more than just prison. A prison can lock up your body, but these people wish to do more. They wish to lock up our minds, as well. (Or bash us with baseball bats…I suspect they prefer that option, judging from the rhetoric).
https://www.amazon.com/Never-Remember-Searching-Stalins-Gulags/dp/0997722967
@#2:
I hate that the left is defined by the right so as to include intolerant anti-feminists. What do they have in common with communists, socialists, social democrats, etc.? Such people are ofen identitarians. Why not put them on the hard right with other identitarians such as Richard Spencer?
Ben, the left is defined by the right as “people I don’t like”. The right is defined in a similar manner by portions of the left, who self-define the left as whatever position they hold, and claim that feminists are somehow fascists or other nasty right wingers.
Even most of the young “left” that I know have no idea what “left” means, other than being tolerant of LGBTQ and minorities.
The worship of Stalin, or the various 2.0 versions (Mao, Ho, Castro, Hoxha fer chrissakes) persists in the pseudo-left. Its like Lost Cause neo-Confederate bullshit. The lie never dies.