Archive for February 12th, 2005

Americans in the Gulag

Saturday, February 12th, 2005

This fascinates me. I’ve always been interested in the gulag, and this adds a new facet to an already complex place. I personally would be suprised if there were “hundreds” of Americans in the gulag system proper — the gulag was at its peak during Stalin’s rule, and were greatly scaled back afterwards. I rather suspect Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would have written about American POWs held in the gulag if he ran across any, and residents of the gulag would have passed that sort of information around. I wouldn’t be suprised if there were individual camps set up for American POWs, but I doubt very many made it into the broader camp system. With all the literature on the gulag that has come out since the fall of the Soviet Union, SOME mention of a sizeable presence of Americans would have been almost inevitable. We’ll have to wait and see what this group comes up with.

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Eason Jordan

Saturday, February 12th, 2005

I’ve had my reservations about the coordinated blogosphere attack on Eason Jordan — his comments were stupid, yes, but that sort of thing is being said by other media organizations as well. This is all nothing new, and I think the blogosphere has to be careful about taking down public figures who say something stupid. I mean, it’s not like Jordan could go back and erase the offending statement and call it a correction. He did the closest thing he could to that however (not that it was necessarily TRUE that he ‘didn’t really mean it,’ but at least he bothered to admit that there was something wrong with what he said. Unlike a certain Dan Rather I could mention). If we removed all the people who ever said stupid things from influential positions, everybody would be leaderless. Not that I’m complaining too much — in my mind it’s just as well that he’s been held accountable. I’d recommend INDC Journal’s post on this for reference, and Charles’ commentary on the resolution (or is it?) of the whole affair.
UPDATE 2/12/05 5.15 PM: This is a good point too.

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