watching in amazement, as the Trump years are great television, if nothing else
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
“Mark Twain hated bullies, he was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money-obsessed mania of the Gilded Age,” Conan O’Brien accepting the final Twain Prize
During his acceptance of the Mark Twain Prize, Conan O’Brien invoked the honor’s namesake. “First and foremost, Twain hated bullies,” he began, according to The Hill. “He punched up, not down, and he deeply, deeply empathized with the weak. Twain was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money-obsessed mania of the Gilded Age, and any expression of mindless American might or self-importance,” O’Brien continued, “Above all, Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He loved America, but knew it was deeply flawed. Twain wrote, ‘Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time, and your government when it deserves it.’” After his remarks, O’Brien was joined by a band of dancing Twain impersonators, where he picked up the guitar to play a song alongside Adam Sandler: Neil Young’s 1989 hit,The ceremony will premiere on Sunday, May 4, exclusively on Netflix.
“Rockin’ in the Free World.” The ceremony will premiere on Sunday, May 4, exclusively on Netflix. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/the-best-trump-burns-at-conan-obriens-kennedy-center-celebration#intcid=_vanity-fair-verso-hp-trending_45395ad4-44aa-4a26-86b4-1be66cc21d54_popular4-2
Producing City of Angels Blog since Jan. 2007, first as coverage of the pedophile priest crisis in the Catholic Church as one of the survivors, then 30 other topics at CofA 1-30
Thursday, March 20, 2025
I'm living in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I see a neighbor haven’t seen for a while and they've turned; now they too are in a zombie trance repeating Donald Trump was sent by God destroy DEI. They're everywhere. They're everywhere. I stay silent in the shadows and hope they don’t realize I'm not one of them, because, man, I really do not feel safe surrounded by people who are brainwashed into a weird state of hatred, against people like me..
Producing City of Angels Blog since Jan. 2007, first as coverage of the pedophile priest crisis in the Catholic Church as one of the survivors, then 30 other topics at CofA 1-30
While I take time off, please read previous posts of note from City of Angels Blog past seven years. First on topic of TRUMP IS A TROJAN HORSE
https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/search?q=trojan+horse
Second topic, DISINFORMATION -
https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/search?q=DISINFORMATION
I'll be back soon =ke
Producing City of Angels Blog since Jan. 2007, first as coverage of the pedophile priest crisis in the Catholic Church as one of the survivors, then 30 other topics at CofA 1-30
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Trump mass arrests are right out of 'Gulag Archipelago'; read excerpts here to see comparison of Stalin's Communism to MAGA's America now
 |
| Gulag prisoners |
(The Trump coup keeps playing out like the 1917 Communist takeover of Russia, to me. So as USA imprisons more humans without due process**, I'm running another short excerpt from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, continuing with Part One, The Prison Industry. As I read, I'm learning Donald Trump is a lot like Josef Stalin starting with these arrests, and threats of retribution for anyone critical of the President; plus AS's words are poetic and evocative, with subtle humor in the placement of a word, which makes his writing timeless. This series comparing Trump to Stalin through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn continues at City of Angels Blog.)
A continuation of
Arrest, where the gulag begins
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2025
By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Some obscure
ordinary Mortal, scared to death by epidemic arrests all around him and already
depressed for a week by Sinister glances from his chief, is suddenly summoned
to the local Party Committee where he is beamingly presented with a vacation
ticket to a fancy sanatorium..
The rabbit
is overwhelmed and immediately concludes that his fears were groundless. After expressing
his gratitude, he hurries home triumphant to pack his suitcase; it is only 2
hours until train time, and he scolds his wife for being too slow.
He arrives
at the station with time to spare and there in the waiting room or at the bar
he is hailed by an extraordinarily Pleasant young man.
Don't you
remember me? Pivanich Ivanich?
It is
difficult remembering, well not exactly, you see-
The young
man however is overflowing with friendly concern.
'Come now
how can that be? I'll have to remind you.'
And he
bowed respectfully to p's wife, 'you must forgive us. I'll keep him only one
minute.'
The wife accedes and trustingly the husband lets himself be led away by
the arm forever or for 10 years.
They take
you from a military hospital with a temperature of 102 as they did with ANS
berstein; and the doctor will not raise a peep about your arrest. Just let him
try.
They'll take
you right off the operating table as they took NM VF, a school inspector, in
1936, in the middle of an operation for stomach ulcer, and drag you off to a
cell as they did him half alive and all bloody, as konish recollects.
Or like
Nadia levitskaya. You try to get information about your mother's sentence and
they give it to you; but it turns out to be a confrontation and your own arrest
in the gastronome, the fancy food store. You are invited to the special order
department and arrested there.
Or you are
arrested by a religious Pilgrim whom you have put up for the night for the sake
of Christ. You are arrested by a meter man who has come to read your electric
meter. You are arrested by a bicyclist who has run into you on the Street, by a
railway conductor, a taxi driver, a savings bank teller, the manager of a movie
theater. Any one of them can arrest you.
END OF EXCERPT
**BACKGROUND**'
Trump’s America: Where Even U.S. Citizens Can Now Be Dragged Away Without a Trial
First, they came for the immigrants. Now, they’re coming for legal residents, tourists, and even citizens. Are you paying attention now?
See previous and upcoming posts for more comparisons of Trump to Stalin, including
This is what Stalinism looks like VIDEO
an ongoing theme here at City of Angels Blog by kay ebeling
=ke
Producing City of Angels Blog since Jan. 2007, first as coverage of the pedophile priest crisis in the Catholic Church as one of the survivors, then 30 other topics at CofA 1-30
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
This is what Stalinism looks like VIDEO
Deported. accused with no due process, members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua arrive in El Salvador yesterday
RELATED POST TODAY
This is what Stalinism looks like
Producing City of Angels Blog since Jan. 2007, first as coverage of the pedophile priest crisis in the Catholic Church as one of the survivors, then 30 other topics at CofA 1-30
Arrest, where the gulag begins
 |
| Solzhenitsyn |
(Since the Trump coup reminds me of the Russian revolution under Josef Stalin, and since USA has started arresting and disappearing people**, today's blog post is a short excerpt from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Part One "The Prison Industry")
Arrest
If you
are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this Cataclysm?
There is where the gulag country begins
Arrest
The most sophisticated and simpleton Among Us drawing on all life's experience can gasp out only, "Me? What for?"
Four white
male hands unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious
grab us by the leg arm collar cap ear and drag Us in like a sack.
And the
gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all,
that's all there is to it you are arrested.
And you'll
find nothing better to respond with than a lamb-like bleat.
"Me? What for?"
For that's
what Arrest is.
It's a
blinding Flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the
impossible into omnipotent actuality, that's all.
And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else except that in your desperation, the fake circus moon will blink at you, it's a mistake, they'll set things right.
Arrest
The sharp
nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door, the insolent entrance of the
unwiped Jack Boots of the unsleeping State security operatives. The frightened
and cowed conditions in which a human being can disappear into the void and
even his closest relatives, his mother and his wife, do not know for years what
has become of him.
The
arrested person is torn from the warmth of his bed; he is in a daze half asleep
helpless, and his judgment is befogged in a night arrest.
The State security men have a superiority in numbers. There are many of them, armed against one person, who hasn't even finished buttoning his trousers.
END OF EXCERPT
-----
**
THIS IS STALINISM from Politico yesterday
Deported Brown University professor had ‘sympathetic photos’ of Hezbollah leaders on her phone, DOJ says— Federal authorities say they deported a Lebanese doctor holding an American visa last week after finding “sympathetic photos and videos” of prominent Hezbollah figures in a deleted items folder on her cell phone. Rasha Alawieh, a physician specializing in kidney transplants and professor at Brown University, also told Customs and Border Protection agents that while visiting Lebanon last month she attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and followed his teachings “from a religious perspective” but not a political one, according to an official report on her interrogation by an immigration officer. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/17/rasha-alawieh-deportation-026038
AND
What to know about El Salvador's mega-prison after Trump sent hundreds of immigrants there
000
See previous and upcoming posts for more comparisons of Trump to Stalin, an ongoing theme here at City of Angels Blog. kay ebeling
More to come from Solzhenitsyn as I am pretending his ghost has moved into my office...
RELATED
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2025
Producing City of Angels Blog since Jan. 2007, first as coverage of the pedophile priest crisis in the Catholic Church as one of the survivors, then 30 other topics at CofA 1-30
Monday, March 17, 2025
Friday, March 14, 2025
I never read Gulag in seventies as Christian white nationalists coopted Solzhenitsyn's message
researching this now post in progress
It's
coming back to me now. When 'Gulag' was released in English in the seventies, I
was in Texas, going to college. The subject matter, of a man living twelve
years in a Russian prison and writing about it, fascinated me; but the people around
me embracing AS and other Russian 'dissidents' were political, right wing extremists.
Hmm maybe a preemptive measure by Russia- oh I don't know what I'm talking about
really.
I
worked on a daily newspaper editorial page staff at the time and these new neo right wing kids would show up, guys in tight ties, girls also buttoned up, handing in their guest viewpoints, with mesmerized zombie eyes
because Russian dissidents were somehow connected to god. Hmm, same zombie like mesmerized
eyes of my Trump supporting neighbors who believe Donald Trump was sent by God. However it originated, the religious right wing passion that immediately attached to the dissident and 'Gulag' book caused me to look the other way.
Now I think it's interesting that author AS was anti totalitarian, anti Stalin, yet today to me the right wing Trumpsters are behaving like Stalinist revolutionaries, they just don’t know it as most trumpsters barely went to school. [read previous and upcoming posts here at City of Angels Blog as this Trump / Stalin irony, to me, needs more investigating. ]
From Boston Review U.S. Christians who pray for Putin March 2022
The first in the U.S. evangelical right to recognize Solzhenitsyn’s political utility was North Carolina’s white supremacist senator Jesse Helms. Helms was at the time involved in supporting Rhodesia’s ruling white minority as a bulwark against communism. Intrigued by a 1973 report from the World Anti-Communist League, Helms pursued the dissident writer, inviting him to North Carolina and proposing that Congress grant him honorary U.S. citizenship. When Solzhenitsyn finally traveled to the United States in 1975, Helms dispatched his own translator as interpreter and escort. The Nobel laureate’s first stop was the senator’s suburban Virginia home, where the two compared notes on their respective Christian faiths and the paramount necessity of religious freedom to all other human freedoms.
The U.S.S.R’s defectors and escapees had helped shape U.S. definitions of freedom since the onset of the Cold War, but Solzhenitsyn was unique. Born the year after the October Revolution into a propertied and educated family whose land was collectivized, Solzhenitsyn later wrote that he began to lose faith in the Soviet system after witnessing Red Army war crimes while serving as an artillery officer during World War II. Letters critical of Stalin landed him in the infamous Lubyanka prison in 1945. In a politically tinged decision, the Nobel committee awarded him its prize for literature in 1970, and Soviet authorities handed the West a cause célèbre when they denounced the writer as a dupe of Western reactionaries. In 1972 he announced his faith in an open letter addressed to the Moscow Patriarch. Two years later, after the first volume of his massive, quasi-historical The Gulag Archipelago (1974) was published in the West, he was deported.
Solzhenitsyn’s invitation to speak to the AFL-CIO during the same trip came from its conservative leader, George Meany. Meany’s enthusiasm for the dissident writer derived from the labor leader’s Catholic sexual conservatism, his support for the Vietnam War, and his decades dedicated to purging left tendencies in the U.S. labor movement.
Solzhenitsyn’s visit was a success, and his message was passed among evangelical champions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Evangelical periodicals lauded his denunciations of U.S. moral degeneracy alongside Soviet criminality. He was soon swept up into the pantheon of Christian intellectuals claimed by evangelical activists dedicated to the suffering church in Russia.
--ke
Producing City of Angels Blog since Jan. 2007, first as coverage of the pedophile priest crisis in the Catholic Church as one of the survivors, then 30 other topics at CofA 1-30
Thursday, March 13, 2025
Solzhenitsyn''s politics
from National Review June 2024
'Solzhenitsyn understands the character of the Soviet regime — the destruction of human nature, the denial of rights, the lies, and the violence in pursuit of a future that always remained illusory despite its supposed historical-determinist inevitability. In Solzhenitsyn’s words, the Gulag is “the Big Zone — the Big Camp Compound — comprising the whole country.” The Russian people need to defy “the Gulag country” that has enveloped all of the USSR. They must refuse to live by lies. Every person has direct experience, at some level, of the Soviet regime’s injustice, violence, and terror. Resistance against such tyranny requires as a corollary the acceptance, if not the welcoming, of suffering in the pursuit of truth and freedom. At the end of one of the most important chapters, “The Bluecaps,” Solzhenitsyn interrelates evil, truth, and justice: “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” He emphasizes the lasting problem: “Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth.'
00
Commentary
The West “turned out to be not what we [dissidents] had hoped and expected; it was not living by the ‘right’ values nor was it headed in the ‘right’ direction.” America was no longer the land of the free but of the licentious. The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West’s likely future. Having written a series of novels about how Russia succumbed to Communism, Solzhenitsyn smelled the same social and intellectual rot among us. He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient. We have continued to follow the path to disaster he mapped. https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-warned-west/
-ke
post in progress
Producing City of Angels Blog since Jan. 2007, first as coverage of the pedophile priest crisis in the Catholic Church as one of the survivors, then 30 other topics at CofA 1-30
background on Solzhenitsyn and gulag archipelagos
00
Solzhenitsyn’s troubles with Soviet authorities began in 1945 because he referred to Joseph Stalin disrespectfully in a letter to an old friend. The author was a member of the Soviet Army at the time, stationed in East Prussia as World War II drew to a close. Agents from Smersh, a Soviet spy agency, arrested the 26-year-old, who had been decorated for heroism in battle and was at the time a loyal Communist Party member, ....A court sentenced him to eight years in the constellation of brutal prison camps across the Soviet Union that he later called the “gulag archipelago.” source Smithsonian Magazine
Andrey Kurkov: ‘At 17, I got my hands on an illegal copy of The Gulag Archipelago’
The Guardian
Producing City of Angels Blog since Jan. 2007, first as coverage of the pedophile priest crisis in the Catholic Church as one of the survivors, then 30 other topics at CofA 1-30
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)