America’s Gulag is Born
Imprisonment without legal due process...
Joseph Stalin was the dictator of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. His regime was marked by widespread repression, political purges, mass executions, and forced labor camps called “Gulags.”
The acronym "Gulag" stands for "Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei" or Main Camp Administration. Millions of people were imprisoned in these camps from the late 1930s through the 1940s. Inmates were subjected to extreme weather, starvation, and brutal treatment from guards. The most notorious gulags were in the northernmost reaches of frozen Siberia.
The primary aim was to detain and punish those perceived as threats to the state, including political dissidents, poets, intellectuals, and journalists. Facing censorship, surveillance, propaganda, and oppression, Soviet citizens lived in perpetual fear of being sent to a gulag.
Prisoners were typically held in gulags thousands of miles from their villages, leaving them isolated, helpless, and hopeless.
Now, a few thousand miles from our nation’s capitol in El Salvador, the Trump administration is establishing an American Gulag.
It started with agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rounding up hundreds of people in America and flying them to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a super-max prison established two years ago in El Salvador built to hold 40,000 prisoners. None of the deportees was provided legal due process as guaranteed by our Constitution.
At least one man, Kilmar Ábrego García, who was in America legally, was deported due to an administrative error. Despite a unanimous Supreme Court decision directing that he be returned, the Trump administration says it won’t comply. El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, who refers to himself as the "world's coolest dictator,” says he won’t either.
Meeting with President Nayib Bukele yesterday in the White House, President Trump told Bukele that “home-growns are next” and that El Salvador would “need to build about five more places” to hold American citizens.
Historian Timothy Snyder, known for his work on totalitarianism and contemporary authoritarianism, put it this way, “So the president of the United States proposes, on camera, to deport Americans to foreign concentration camps.”
Eighteen million Soviet citizens were condemned to gulags. More than 1.5 million of them died under the harsh conditions.
Nazi Germany sent over 1.65 million prisoners to concentration camps, with about a million of them dying during their imprisonment.
Trump characterizes the Americans he would send to the foreign prison as “threats to the state.” This is what Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler said as well.
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Resources:
The Terror Of The Gulags: Stalin’s Iron-Fisted Control Over Soviet Society ~History Skills
How Did The Nazis And Their Collaborators Implement The Holocaust? ~Holocaust Encyclopedia
El Salvador President Bukele Says He Won’t Be Releasing A Maryland Man Back To The Us ~Associated Press
The Invisible Fire of Cultural Cleansing ~Perspectives
I am so angry about this. Thank you for highlighting it. Tomorrow during the morning commute, I will be on Third Street with a sign that says FREE KILMAR. Anyone is welcome to join me.
Apparently, there are many ways to skin the cat of dissent. Thanks for being on top of this Brad. I fear for our union.