Wednesday, December 7, 2005

Bush finds soul mate in Russia's bloody Beria

From The American Sentimentalist

Imagine if Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria gave a press conference. What would it sound like?

Beria, as you may remember, was head of Stalin's secret police during one of the most infamous periods in Soviet history, the Great Purge of 1938. As head of the NKVD, or Soviet secret police, he was responsible for carrying out a massive political repression that was nominally focused on a series of "enemies of the people," such as the intelligentsia, professionals and rich peasants. In reality, however, the bloody purge - and others Beria oversaw for Stalin in later years - were simply a means for Stalin to ruthlessly consolidate his power by vanquishing his political enemies through show trials, forced labor camps, torture and, when all else failed, murder.

So what would it sound like if in, say, 1938, Beria gave a press conference to detail how the Great Purge was going? Well, it would probably sound a lot like the press conference President Bush gave in the Oval Office of the White House, today, December 6th, 2005.

So you could imagine that, in a windowless room somewhere in the Kremlin in 1938 or so, with a half dozen terrified journalists hand-picked to ask Beria how the "Global War on Internal Terrorists" (GWOIT) was going, the bespectacled, balding interior minister, resplendent in his starched Red Army uniform, would likely say everything was coming along nicely, thank you. And, if one of those reporters was bold enough to ask about reports there were secret prisons buried somewhere in the basement of police headquarters, the answer would probably be something along the lines of "We don't discuss covert operations designed to protect the people." And, if the very brave reporter were to ask why people were being tortured in those prison cells, the answer might have been "We've got to take each threat seriously; we've got to stay on the offense."

Just like George Bush. Just like in 2005. Just like in the United States of America.

I have nothing to add to that.

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