Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I associate the word more with the sense from the title of Solzhenitsyn's book, referring to a chain of islands. It was the isolation that made the gulags profoundly different from other forced-labor camps, no? And I thought that was what Amnesty was getting at. Places like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Diego Garcia are completely isolated (setting apart the occasional mortar attack at Abu Ghraib) and are beyond any normal judicial system.
|
I don't think that the gulag system was necessarily limited to geographically isolated places. The particular gulags in the book may have been, but that's not something I really associate with them. Hmmmm. I will have to look into that. The definitions cited in a comment in the blog you linked to didn't seem to mention isolation, iirc. More working and suffering.
Is Abu Ghraib really in the middle of nowhere? Assuming it is, why does that make a difference -- do you think what happened would not have happened if it'd been in a suburb of Baghdad?
ETA Really, I think the slave labor inherent in the gulag system did a lot to industrialize Russia/the Soviet Union, which was really quite backward (compared with (the rest of) Europe and the US) at WWI/the Revolution. While ultimately, communism (or whatever you call the system they had) may have slowed economic development, it's hard to argue that the more tightly controlled organization did push things forward more quickly than they had been going.
EATA, I googled (actually, yahooed) and there were more than 400 prisons. A lot of the mass labor projects were in more isolated areas -- mining, connecting distant habitable areas by building roads/railroads/canals. Not sure if it wasn't just hard to get non-imprisoned people to work those jobs . . . prison labor was cheaper. Or they felt it was.
