Monday, June 21, 2010

Genderside: Men at Risk

What happened to the men who were most productive in Stalin's reign of terror in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic? They were ranked as the top of their professions and Stalin sent them to the gulags or prison camps.

What happened to them in the camps? Most of them died. Here is the story.

By 1928, Stalin was entrenched as supreme Soviet leader, and he wasted little time in launching a series of national campaigns (the so-called Five-Year Plans) aimed at "collectivizing" the peasantry and turning the USSR into a powerful industrial state. Both campaigns featured murder on a massive scale. Collectivization especially targeted Ukraine, "the breadbasket of the Soviet Union," which clung stubbornly to its own national identity and preference for village-level communal landholdings. In 1932-33, Stalin engineered a famine (by massively raising the grain quota that the peasantry had to turn over to the state); this killed between six and seven million people and broke the back of Ukrainian resistance. The Ukrainian famine has only recently been recognized as one of the most destructive genocides of the twentieth century (see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, and the Web resources compiled by The Ukrainian Weekly). The Five-Year Plans for industry, too, were implemented in an extraordinarily brutal fashion, leading to the deaths of millions of convict labourers, overwhelmingly men. These atrocities are described in the corvée (forced) labour case study. The millions of deaths in Stalin's "Gulag Archipelago" (the network of labour camps [gulags] scattered across the length and breath of Russia) are dealt with in the incarceration/death penalty case study.

Socialists cannot stand the notion that some people are superior in intelligence, talents, gifts and work habits. In socialist nations, the statistical truths contained in "The Bell Shaped Curve" are denied and fought at every turn. This meant that those who had by intelligence, hard work or family inheritance owned a far or store or had raised more hogs and cattle had to be eliminated. To the Communists it was "NOT FAIR".

What do you think about this notion?

2 comments:

dle said...

To which kingdom do Christians belong? No earthly one. Yet how is it that we continue to moan about government?

The early Church grew fantastically under some of the most awful leaders ever to grace the world stage. We can only imagine living under such oppressive regimes.

When Christians are off mission and too focused on living an extravagant lifestyle that focuses on me, myself, and I, that is when we complain most about our government. If we were as serious about the Gospel as we were about preserving the American Dream, all the orphanages would be cleaned out, no one would lack for food, and the four corners of the earth would have been thoroughly evangelized.

We need to stop complaining about government and start complaining about our willful ignoring of the practice and sharing of the Gospel.

Gary Sweeten said...

sorry you think I am complaining about our current government. My point is is to focus on the importance that men play in keeping any family, church and nation strong and that is why dictators always try to eliminate them.

Jesus said in John 10:10 "The thief always comes to steal, kill and destroy but I came that you might have life in abundance."

An abundant life is life in freedom with Christ. That is why the Early Church grew so powerfully despite persecution.

My ministry in Russia since 1991 has shown me what happens when male leaders are destroyed. Families are severely dysfunctional, divorce is rampant, abortions are common and those are not the abundant life.