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So since I've retired and my head space has cleared considerably I decided I was going to read something "meaty". My first choice was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" but those motherbitches at B&N didn't have it...yeh I know about ordering it, getting it digital and all that horseshit but can a brother just do some old school shit and buy a book with pages and just read it? So second choice was "Atlas Shrugged". Stay tuned for questions all you literate, low-t fuckers.

Shapecharge wrote: ↑Sat Dec 18, 2021 8:49 pm So since I've retired and my head space has cleared considerably I decided I was going to read something "meaty". My first choice was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago"

I could not bear to read anything written by Ayn Rand. She is too verbose. If you did not like my rambling posts in the past, you will hate her book.

Solzhenitsyn is fun. Lots of ironic humor. A good introduction to him is "The First Circle". (ISBN 978-0061479014, or https://www.biblio.com/9780061479014 ) This book is about Soviet Sharashkas, a place where talented engineers, scientists and technicians are enslaved to serve the State.

The Archipelago books... There are three volumes, Shape. Book 1, Book2 and Book 3. I call them the gray, black and gold books. This site does not list Amazon but you can find them through the ISBN number.

Volume 1 is ISBN 9780061253713 or https://www.biblio.com/book/gulag-archi ... 1436576244

Volume 2 is ISBN 9780061253720 or https://www.biblio.com/book/gulag-archi ... 1420835696

Volume 3 is ISBN 9780061253737 or https://www.biblio.com/book/gulag-archi ... 1354506110

Things get better after the middle of Volume 2. Volume 3 discusses camp mutinies.

A good book, Shape, if you like grim reading is "Into that darkness: an examination of conscience" by Gitta Sereny. This was based on a series of interviews with Franz Stangl, former commander of the Treblinka camp. She met him in the prison where he was serving out a life term. He died shortly after they completed their interviews.

There was a wicked genius at work in the Nazis, Shape. You see some of it explained here.

ISBN 9780394710358 or https://www.biblio.com/book/darkness-ex ... 1439623110


One that I just finished is "Belzec - Stepping stone to genocide" by Robin O'Neill. Inspector O'Neill formerly worked for Scotland Yard. He went to Poland, visited the Belzec site, investigating as a detective. He looked at things as a police officer and recorded his impressions. Definitely worth anyone's time to understand how it was done.

ISBN 9780976475934 https://www.biblio.com/book/belzec-step ... 1123322381

Belzec was where the first stationary gassing were done. The SS did not yet know how to cremate bodies on open air "roasts". The results were hellish. Later most of the bodies were dug up and burned along with fresh victims.

Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were death camps, solely intended to gas people and then dispose of the bodies. The SS worked to mentally cripple the Jews, to make their shipment painful, to give them temporary relief, and to make them docile. By the time that they were in line waiting for the gas they were naked, afraid, hungry, and often shit themselves. The "helpers" beat them with whips.

No human being deserves to be treated this way, but it did happen, and no one should forget it.

Right on Gene, thanks for the recommendations. The "Into the Darkness" book seems particularly interesting.

People are awfully selective about what they choose to label as evil. Is abortion evil? A lot of people who count themselves among the righteous would say it's just a woman's right to choose, and that's that. Were the camps guards evil?. Many were, but some got caught up in it. Oh, no, you didn't say that. If I had been there -- if you had been there you'd have done the same thing, or else gotten killed, like a lot of dissident Germans.

There have been more books written about the holocau$t than about the rest of the war put together. Whether that's literally true or not it sure feels like it. Where are the docs about other atrocities? What about the bombing of German cities when there was no military need for it? How about the deal with the USSR to send Russian POWs to Russia and straight to the camps? No one expects the Japanese to put on sackcloth and ashes for all eternity over Changi, or their massacre of 250,000 Chinese civilians after the Dolittle raid.

Back to the Shoah. Everyone always says six million. They never talk about the non-Jews who were killed "wait, that was a hard J!".
'No it wasn't Charlie."
"I think it was Mac."
"Have some more wine in a can."

, which were about as many.

But wait, there's more. We talk about atrocities, war crimes, etc., like they're different from the other parts of the war.. Oh, but those people killed and maimed and tortured people that way. As opposed to the normal civilized moral ways, like bombing and shelling and machine gunning. You know, like proper Englishmen.

The Martyr Made podcast has a long program about the Soviets' slaughter and dehumanization of the Germans during WW2, and descriptions of the atrocities as the Soviet army rolled into defeated German. Raping women to death and crucifying the bodies and leaving them nailed to houses and barns were a commonplace occurrence.

Jocko goes over the book Rape of Nanking in an early podcast.

As Americans, we don't get to learn about American atrocities in war unless we want to dig them up.

With regards to the Holocaust vs the other atrocities done in WW2? History was written by the victors. The average US citizen didn't want to hear about the communist atrocities, since we'd allied with them and ran through our own issues with communists and anarchist in the early 20th century.

The nuance is that the Holocaust was a planned operation, deliberately fashioned to scapegoat the Jews and eliminate them from the face of the earth. Arguably, the Soviet Union did worse but it was more of corrupt, chaotic type of massacres, as opposed to the lawful and scientific approach of Nazis.

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers by Bryan Mark Rigg

Wiki Bio

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Mark_Rigg

They leave out he's part-Jewish (idk if matrilineal) and his military and IDF history.

Physiognomy is real. He just looks like an honest dude.

I'd say slavery in the South was as bad as the holocaust, and it wasn't a war time thing. Just everyday life.

Shafpocalypse Now wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 3:04 pm History was written by the victors.

History is written by those that control the victors. The people that do the fighting and the people that do the controlling are two different parties.

nafod wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 4:37 pm I'd say slavery in the South was as bad as the holocaust, and it wasn't a war time thing. Just everyday life.

Slavery was a constant from time immemorial. Do you really believe that all of human history was "as bad as the holocaust"?

Re: Atlas Shrugged.

Remember to Find+replace Ellsworth Toohey with Harold Laski

Ayn Rand was a complete fraud, why torture yourself reading that garbage?

Fat Cat wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 5:19 pm

nafod wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 4:37 pm I'd say slavery in the South was as bad as the holocaust, and it wasn't a war time thing. Just everyday life.

Slavery was a constant from time immemorial. Do you really believe that all of human history was "as bad as the holocaust"?

I think slavery in the south was as bad as the Holocaust. Treating humans like animals from cradle to grave, breeding and selling, raping the female slaves, lynchings and bearings and whipping, separating mothers and children .

Genocide has been around too, yes.

nafod wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 5:50 pm

Fat Cat wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 5:19 pm

nafod wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 4:37 pm I'd say slavery in the South was as bad as the holocaust, and it wasn't a war time thing. Just everyday life.

Slavery was a constant from time immemorial. Do you really believe that all of human history was "as bad as the holocaust"?

I think slavery in the south was as bad as the Holocaust. Treating humans like animals from cradle to grave, breeding and selling, raping the female slaves, lynchings and bearings and whipping, separating mothers and children .

Genocide has been around too, yes.

So you're an anti-Semite promoting holocaust equivalence now? Interesting.

https://besacenter.org/holocaust-uniqueness/

Shapecharge wrote: ↑Sat Dec 18, 2021 8:49 pm So since I've retired and my head space has cleared considerably I decided I was going to read something "meaty".

In the early 1930s the US Public Health Service started an experiment called the Tuskegee Men's Syphilis study. Syphilis could be cured in the mid 1940s with one shot of Penicillin. The "experiment" continued until the 1970s. The guys in the study, their wives and kids, were also studied.

Part of the appeal was "free health care". Subjects also got rides in fancy looking cars to their doctor's appointment.

Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment ISBN 978-0029166765

https://www.biblio.com/9780029166765


The River: A Journey of the Source of HIV and AIDS. ISBN 978-0316372619

https://www.biblio.com/9780316372619

Speculative novel about a source of AIDS. Polio vaccine grown in Chimp Kidney cells in the Congo. The Author and Rolling Stone got beat over it.

Koprowski swore up and down that he did not use chimp Kidney cells. Hooper had evidence that someone was sending kidneys out of chimps for some purpose to Westar Institute in Philly.


Biohazard - Ken Alibek's book on the Soviet biological weapons industry. ISBN 9780316372619

https://www.biblio.com/9780316372619

Dr. Alibek goes into detail his career, testing at Resurrection Island and his work with Vektor.


Biowarrior: Inside the Soviet Russian Biological War Machine. A Doctor's personal Journey 978-1591020936

This is not available on Biblio. It is available on Amazon. This is more a primer on how to endure idiotic bureacracies. Dr. Domaradskii describes a "chimeral" bacteria that induces auto immune reactions. The infectious agent contains proteins from nerve fibers. The guinea pigs became sick, got well, then their back legs quit working.


Raven: The untold story of Jim Jones and the People's Temple. 978-1585426782 Biblio.com doesn't seem to have it. Amazon does have it.

This is kind of the gold standard of the Jonestown fiasco. The author worked on the fringes of the Temple, went in on the day of the mass murder and then got shot at the Pt Kaituma Airport and was nearly killed.

Reiterman wrote a nice big book on that bunch, most of whom were decent people with great ideas. Jones and his scumbag Planning Commission were the ones who needed killing, not them.

I read AS twice, about ten years apart, and thought both more and less of it the second time. A few thoughts --

It's overly long. Many scenes are redundant.
A lot of the writing is on the nose, as they say in the screenwriting biz. Especially most of the scenes with the villains.
But a lot of people, deliberately or otherwise, think all of the prose and dialogue is leaden. It's not. There are many scenes that are very well done:
Including the radio speech that a lot of people criticize. I did too at first, mostly because I had been primed to think that. But there are some passages which got to me.

People want to think things about the book because they don't like the author or what they mostly misunderstand about her. In what other areas do we do this? Do people say that Bobby Fischer wasn't good at chess because he was a selfish maniac? Think how many great athletes are great, or even good, people. Almost none of them. Does that mean they aren't any good at their sport?

motherjuggs&speed wrote: ↑Sun Dec 19, 2021 1:34 am There have been more books written about the holocau$t than about the rest of the war put together. Whether that's literally true or not it sure feels like it. Where are the docs about other atrocities?

I don't recall the source but Mengele is supposed to have said that the greatest enemy of "Aryans" were the Jews. The Aryan and Jew were the two leading races of the world. The Jews had to go first because they were the greatest threat. The Nazis ran out of time before they could kill more non Jews.

Jews were not permitted to own property in some parts of Europe. They focused on trade, crafts and Talmudic law. They became a scholarly people. So they wrote books about their greatest pogrom. I remember one Rabbinical student telling me that there were hundreds of pogroms all through Europe.

Here is a BBC project about bodies found in a well in the UK. They had DNA of "middle eastern" origin. Men, women and children. Jews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylyEgM8-8wU

A little light reading for a change of pace. Okay, the title is a little click bait-y:
Leather-Jacketed Coke-Snorting Jews in the Soviet Secret Police Torturing, Raping and Killing Gentiles: The Evidence

Gene wrote: ↑Thu Dec 23, 2021 7:44 am The Aryan and Jew were the two leading races of the world.

Followed by the Amish

I need to read Atlas Shrugged again. Whether or not it is a great book, it changed my view of things. Made me think. I didn’t drink it’s koolaid, but there was no going back to the “before”.

Shapecharge wrote: ↑Sat Dec 18, 2021 8:49 pm So since I've retired and my head space has cleared considerably I decided I was going to read something "meaty".

"Up from Slavery" - Booker T. Washington 9780486287386 https://www.biblio.com/9780486287386

Written by a former slave. Describes his world after Slavery ended. Big emphasis on education, in the fundamentals and trades. Very well written, clear, but has a lot of deep ideas. It's worth reading just to see how to express deep ideas in clear English.

Washington helped to found the Tuskeegee Institute. The goal of this school was to train teachers and to train people in trades. Booker ends the book by asking whites to give "the Negro a fair chance".