Yesterday Harold pinter declares that the United states, with 2 million incarcerated civilians, is similar to the Gulags of the Soviet Era?
It was said on Newsnight last night on BBC2, so what do ordinary Americans and Europeans think about this opinion?
Harold pinter is a writer who over the years has had an increasing dislike of the United States.
A British writer with an increasing dislike of the United States? Well, knock me over with a feather.
Sorry, it’s true!
I think that anything any writer with an obvious axe to grind says should be taken with a large pinch of salt, particularly when it’s a colourful but meaningless phrase like this one.
As disgusting as our prison system is (the free for all, law of the jungle, rape, etc), it is NOT nearly as bad as the gulags. I’ve seen documentaries on the Soviet prisons. I know someone personally who spent time in the gulags.
They’re something else entirely.
I think a safe rule of thumb is that when an unfavorable comparison is made between a western democracy and either fascism, nazism, communist Russia or China, or Middle Eastern dictatorships, there’s a 95% chance the author is full of crap.
Jeff
So thats why BBC 2 is dedicating a whole night of him in celebration?
How was the Gulags different entirely (not comparing it to us prison in anyway, please don’t take offence)
My 200th POST!
Go read some Solzhenitsyn and come back afterward.
Or find out if Pinter had an explanation.
More people died in Soviet gulags under Stalin alone than died in Nazi death and concentration camps. Roughly 15 million people perished in the gulags, usually by freezing, starvation, exhaustion, or execution. Many of the prisoners were political dissidents, ex soldiers (surrendering to Germans in WWII got you sent to the gulags), and other various types of peoples undesired by Stalin (kulaks, ethnic minorities, Ukrainians, intellectuals, etc). Only ten percent of those interned ever survived.
At one gulag alone (the name eludes me, but it was on an island north of the USSR mainland), about 3 million perished. In its history, more than 20 million people were murdered in the gulag system.
Life was short and brutal. Work days often exceeded 10 hours a day in subzero temperatures with sometimes a scant one layer of clothing. The dead were buried in mass unmarked graves. Any form of insubordination resulted in a gunshot to the head, without question. Those who ran the gulag wielded the final say.
Most of the gulags were located in remote regions of Siberia, thus making escape essentially a pipe dream.
To surmise this, to equate the American penal system with the Soviet gulag system is more than a mere misnomer; it’s downright libel. To say an American prison is almost akin to comparing a Canadian prison with Nazi death camps. It’s just something horribly inaccurate and ultimately inflammatory.
Books of interest:
“The Black Book of Communism” by Stephane Courtouis
“The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Perhaps Pinter’s point wasn’t that the conditions within an American prison were as bad as those in the Gulags, but that the vast number of people incarcerated in America is reminiscent of the Gulags.
The usual wisdom these days is that most American inmates are in prison for non-violent narcotics crimes. The usual corollary is that, although violent criminals represent the minority, there are enough of them in any one prison to “harden” the rest of the inmates so that when they are released they are less, not more, able to function in society.
No, the American prison system is not as bad as the gulags. Scarlet Fever is not as bad as smallpox. We have nothing whatever to be proud about in the comparison. We take men who have committed crimes, usually drug crimes. In order to make them better people, we place them in an environment where pathological violence is a survival skill. And when they are returned to us as monsters, we blame them.
If there is a crime that deserves anal gang rape, what crime is that? Stealing a car? Selling a dime bag of crack? Writing bad checks? We throw young men who are not old enough to legally buy a beer in a bar in with savage animals and tell ourselves that they deserve it.
If they never forgive us, can we blame them? We will, of course. They are criminals. Not human, like us.
Where do you think creatures like Charlie Manson come from? Day care centers? We have special breeding grounds for monsters, places carefully and precisely calculated to bring out the worst in men. There are only two options permitted, pitiless brutality or servile submission to that brutality.
But no, no gulags. After all, we are civilized. Are we not?
The U.S. prison system/culture speaks for itself millions incarcerated for extended terms at the cost of about $20,000 per year per prisoner depending on jurisdiction.
Your right tracer he probably meant it like that, people incarcerated for non-violent drug offences and other mishaps is reminicent of a Gulag system.
In which case, he was probably making the comparison not as a meaningful argument, but as an excuse to compare the US to the USSR under Stalin. Meaningful criticism of the US prison system is certainly possible using just the basic facts. Talking about gulags or concentration camps or whatever is only going to hurt your case, because rational people will dismiss you, knowing that however bad US prisons are, they aren’t gulags.
Hey, I didn’t compare tham to the russian death camps, he did.
Harold Pinter is the greatest living English language playwright, a writer whose use of the language is comparable to Shakespeare. He has also been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which will probably kill him fairly soon.
Read, or see, his great works, such as The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and No Man’s Land, and understand why the BBC dedicates a whole night in celebration.
JDM
Everyone keeps bringing up prison rape. How common is it, anyway?
Once is too many.
Harold pinter then is a latter-day william shakepeare with obvious political learnings
Well, no kidding. But that doesn’t really help me get an answer to my question.