In another episode of Gulag apologetics, an LGBTQ activist group at Goldsmiths University in London has said the Soviet-style camps were a “compassionate, non-violent course of action” for bigots who opposed their agenda.
According to The Telegraph, the LGBTQ group had a bizarre Twitter exchange with a special education needs teacher named Claire Graham, who had objected to the group’s denunciation of feminist academics that view transgender women as not being actual women, which therefore makes them undeserving of female privileges, not to mention shared bathrooms. Such feminists are often referred to as TERFS by activists – Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism.
“The ideas of TERFS and anti-trans bigots literally *kill* and must be eradicated through re-education,” said LGBT+Goldsmiths on Twitter.
Graham responded: “I said that I thought their choice of language, in talking about lists and purging people was intended to shut down debate about trans people and the law. I then received unpleasant and dehumanizing threats about being sent to the Gulag. I feel bad for other trans people because this kind of response by some makes them seem so extreme and intolerant.”
It was here that the LGBTQ activist group then explained that Soviet-style Gulags were a “compassionate” measure that would politely make the subject a better person — non-violently, of course.
“The penal system was a rehabilitatory one. The aim was to correct and change the ways of criminals,” said the group. “Much like wider Soviet society, everyone who was ‘able’ to work did so at a wage proportionate to those who weren’t incapacitated and, as they gained skills, were able to move up the ranks and work under less supervision.”
“Educational work was also a prominent feature of the Soviet penal system. There were regular classes, book clubs, newspaper editorial teams, sports theatre and performance groups.”
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The group even went as far to say that such Gulags were slandered by the CIA as part of a vast conspiracy. Somehow the vast number of mainstream historians who have denounced Stalin’s Gulag system as one of the most oppressive prison systems ever constructed were all in on the conspiracy. To repeat Obama’s words: “We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society.”
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Contrary to this gross historical revisionism, the Gulags were anything but a government-sponsored vacation. Just ask Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who survived eight years in one such Gulag and wrote of it in his book, “The Gulag Archipelago.”
Historian Anne Applebaum, author of “Gulag: A History,” said: “It was an incredibly brutal system designed to eliminate Stalin’s’ enemies and terrorize the wider population. Most of the inmates were innocent of anything we would regard as a crime.”
An estimated 1,053,829 people died in those camps between 1934 and 1953.
The group has since been suspended by the Goldsmiths Students’ Union for refusing to apologize for the threat of Gulags against their enemies. The union said in a statement: “We condemn the abhorrent content of the tweets and they are in complete opposition to the views and values of the Students’ Union.”