“For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall they do in the dry?" (Luke 23:31)

Years ago, while I was visiting in Alberta, my friend Elvira brought out her genealogy. I was intrigued. Her Mennonite ancestors had emigrated from Germany into the Black Sea region of Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great, to bring modern farming methods to the Russian serfs. There they had multiplied and established thriving communities. They had set up mills and brought prosperity to their neighbors. It was a fruitful success for both the immigrants and their hosts.

But then I encountered the story of Elvira’s grandmother. As a little girl, Hannah would watch each evening for her father to return from the fields. On one sunny day not much different than any other, as he was walking along the hillside path, a group of horsemen overtook him. Hannah saw a quick flash, her father fell to the ground, and a mysterious object tumbled and rolled down the grassy slope beneath him. In horror Elvira’s future grandmother realized that the flash was the glint of a saber, and the tumbling object was her father’s severed head.

The Soviets, because they viewed these “Volga Germans” as a threat to their regime, had released the common criminals from the Tsarist prisons and commissioned the most violent of them to exterminate the property owners and collectivize their farms. These Christian “kulaks,” though peasants, had by their efficiency and thrift become quasi-capitalists, and thus ipso facto enemies of the communist state. Over the next dozen years, the majority of Elvira’s ancestry from that generation was summarily executed or sent to the GULAG concentration camps, never to return. The remainder fled to Canada and South America. This was Mother Russia’s introduction to Bolshevism.

Just breaking! In entirely unrelated news, three reporters covering the “mostly peaceful” Antifa riots in Portland have been assaulted during the past few days in separate incidents, and though the perpetrators have been identified in each case, so far only the reporters themselves have been arrested. Video journalist Nick Sortor was shoved by rioters into a planter bed after he quenched an arsonist’s flaming American flag. Because he defended himself after that assault, Sortor was led away in handcuffs under a charge of disorderly conduct while police ministered to the whimpering assailant and the rioters assembled Molotov cocktails beside their perennial campfires. This morning Mr. Sortor was assaulted again.

A Post Millennial video on X this morning shows another Antifa man’s sneaky and unprovoked kick to the groin of a second journalist, evidently because the victim was filming the organized chaos while wearing a Charlie Kirk “Freedom” shirt. In that video we see the feckless assailant laid out by a counter right cross, whereupon a squadron of Portland’s finest, arrayed in full body armor and bearing clear plastic shields, swarms down on the reporter while a reserve battalion renders aid to the perpetrator. Again, the journalist is led away in handcuffs.

A few days ago, yet another journalist, this time a woman by the name of Katie Daviscourt, was struck in the face by a rioter and suffered a prominent black eye. Daviscourt pursued the assailant for half an hour and ultimately identified that individual for police, but no arrest was made. In fairness to the City of Portland, administrators did send a “dialogue officer” to console the bewildered Daviscourt. The perpetrator was last seen dashing toward a nearby Antifa “safe house.”

If this all seems insane, that is because it is. One commentator opined that “Antifa is now running Portland; the police merely serve as their security detail.” And there is even speculation—at this point it doesn’t seem that far-fetched – that Portland police are collaborating with Antifa on site to contrive state charges against Ice agents performing their federal duties. I offer this with some confidence, because this morning mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago signed an executive order creating “ICE-free zones,” intended to bar entry to Federal officials. It appears that Portland is taking the same action, but less formally.

Under Vladimir Lenin, the Soviets were determined to create a “new socialist soul.” Key to this mission was the eradication of crime, which they saw as resulting from capitalist exploitation. Where else to start, except with the prison system. “Class enemies” (i.e. Capitalists) were rounded up and provided the opportunity to reform under a regime of manual labor which, it was tenuously hoped, would subdue their recalcitrant greed and render them amenable to the newborn proletarian society. Needless to say, if you operated a lemonade stand you were a capitalist.

The Soviets saw themselves as design engineers, endowed by history with the right and honor to reform “raw human material” i.e. human nature. They divided society’s criminals into two distinct and seemingly contradictory classes. The first, those regarded as allies of the working class and likely to ultimately become good Communist citizens, consisted of those who had committed common crimes from rape, murder, and robbery down to petty larceny and shoplifting. These miscreants, the supposed victims of the capitalist system, were further divided into two categories, the blatnye (petty offenders) and the urki (professional criminals). Both of these classes were seen as “socially friendly” and susceptible to rehabilitation.

The second class of prisoner consisted of “counterrevolutionaries” and “enemies of the state.” These were the political prisoners – members of opposing parties, priests, “profiteers,” bureaucrats from the government of the executed Tsar, and anyone else who, even inadvertently, may have strayed from the ephemeral party line. Family members of such political offenders were also routinely incarcerated. Such individuals were seen as “socially hostile” and unlikely to reform. Consequently, they were treated more harshly. One half to two thirds of the Gulag camp population, at times containing as many as two million prisoners, consisted of “politicals.”

The professional criminals, identifiable to each other and to the world by their tattoos and body ornamentation, were afforded preferential treatment. They received the best food, and more of it. During most of the Gulag era they were not required to work at all. In fact, those who did work were identified by the prison gangs as suki (“bitches”), and excluded from the benefits they would otherwise have been afforded. The actual criminals, and especially the worst and most violent of them, were for example allowed to shop at the commissaries (using money they plundered from the political prisoners), receive visitors, and control the distribution of food and the work assignments of the “sloggers” (politicals).

For all practical purposes, professional crime gangs ran the prisons, preying at will upon the politicals (whom they called byelorutchki or “white hands”—a reference to their actual innocence), despoiling them of all their goods, raping them whether male or female, and even killing them with impunity. This was, Solzhenitsyn summarizes in The Gulag Archipelago, “better for the business of oppression. The thieves carried out (this cruelty) much more brazenly, much more brutally, and without the least fear of responsibility before the law.” For such atrocities the gangsters were often rewarded with early release, and according to Solzhenitsyn the professional criminals “became just like an internal camp police, camp storm troopers.”

This differential treatment of offenders was no accident. The politicals (referred to as “former people” under Article 58 of the criminal code) were considered “bourgeoisie” and least likely to be re-socialized. Within the Gulag such prisoners were referred to as “Fascists,” (and this was before anyone had thought to call their terror organization “Antifa”). The politicals served the longest sentences under the worst conditions and were least likely to survive. Merely for being a perceived potential threat to the “revolution” they were often sent to the “Katorga Works” (remote sites in harsh locations with little in the way of shelter or provisions), where death was almost certain. In fact, under NKVD Order Number 00447, “the most vicious and stubborn anti-Soviet elements in the camps” were specifically targeted for execution by ordeal.

By contrast, “All criminals coming under Article 35 of the Code (that is, guilty of actual crimes), all social miscreants and women, were to receive the best and most humane treatment.” What we would call the “real criminals” were often awarded positions of authority such as administrators and camp guards. This naturally enhanced their power over the politicals.

To reinforce this distinction, in 1935 an ominous bulletin went out to the camps. “The NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) labor camps hold large numbers of extremely dangerous counterrevolutionaries: spies, terrorists, and other anti-Soviet and anti-Party elements who are bitter enemies of the Soviet regime with nothing to lose and who are always ready for the most counterrevolutionary action.” Subsequent to this notice, the politicals struggled to maintain a desperate animal existence while those few remaining restrictions on the professional criminals were lifted.

After all the horrors of the last century, mere numbers scarcely tell the story any more. With roughly 100 million slaughtered under the various socialist regimes, what are another few millions, more or less? According to Stalin, these souls are nothing more than “a statistic.” But in defiance of that statistic, you should know that approximately one and one half million political prisoners were worked and starved to death in the Gulag, and another eight hundred thousand or so were summarily executed.

So, what was the rationale for this insanity. Well, according to Lenin, common criminals were “our allies in building communism.” As such, their assistance in suppressing class enemies such as “bankers, merchants, and other speculators,” whom Lenin identified as a “kind of harmful insects” was seen as invaluable. And this was not an unreasonable position from his point of view. If nothing else, it greatly augmented the terror that held the regime together. After all, the Soviets had robbed, raped and plundered the entire producer class of Russia. So, more than anything else, they dreaded a resurrection of those “Fascist insects.”

Now let me ask you fellow Fascists a question. Of those who celebrated the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, how many would be in the least hesitant to send you off to the Gulag if they had the power to do so? How many of those would like to see you executed? How many would show any compassion at all toward you, their “class enemy,” were they to succeed in overthrowing our constitutional system? In the words of Rodney King, no wonder we can’t just all get along.