The View from the Gulag

When Amnesty International recently called the prison run by the United States on Guantanamo in Cuba "an American gulag" it even outraged the Washington Post. Guantanamo offers Al Queda and Taliban scum better living conditions than most Holiday Inn's and the comparison with the horrific, brutal and inhumane treatment of Soviet labor camps is unconscionable.

Yet this episode offers further proof, as if any were needed, of the compete intellectual bankruptcy of the neosocialists who find themselves in the grip of an Orwellian nightmare where the understanding of good and evil are confused to the point that some openly support evil.

Natan Sharansky suffered 13 years in a Siberian gulag before being freed and emigrating to Israel. In the following interview he discussed one of the brightest moments from that dark time. It was a moment when the light of truth shone in upon the darkness of evil and freed the hearts of men, years before their physical captivity was ended.

The View from the Gulag: "It was the great brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed the Soviet Union an Evil Empire before the entire world. There was a long list of all the Western leaders who had lined up to condemn the evil Reagan for daring to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire right next to the front-page story about this dangerous, terrible man who wanted to take the world back to the dark days of the Cold War. This was the moment. It was the brightest, most glorious day. Finally a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell's Newspeak was dead. President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union.