The Gulag

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics began the final stage of its collapse in the autumn of 1989 as all its eastern European satellite countries began rebelling simultaneously. The number of people living under the enlightened umbrella of Communism who daily walked with only the clothes on their backs into the evil Capitalist world kept increasing, until finally thousands were crossing the border every day from Czechoslovakia into West Germany. Then the Berlin Wall was torn down, and West Germany and East Germany were reunited once again, physically but not yet officially and legally for another year. As the news of this “liberalization” spread throughout the Soviet empire, more and more people everywhere were tempted to do likewise, and soon the hemorrhage of people crossing borders or otherwise clamoring for liberation from the Kremlin’s yoke became an unstoppable torrent. Then we began hearing of whole countries denouncing and renouncing their loyalty to the thugs in Moscow, and Moscow was not replying with any great assertiveness. Then the 16 non-Russian “republics” that constituted the U.S.S.R. began leaving their Union, until the only republic left was holy mother Russia. Finally in December 1991 the Moscow thugs signed documents officially dissolving the Soviet Union and declaring Communism now illegal.

The first grand experiment in state Communism had lasted 74 years from its revolutionary beginning in late 1917. The Russian Empire, begun several centuries earlier by the Tsars, had also collapsed, leaving only Russia. There was great euphoria in the air and in the minds of many people who were no longer behind any Iron Curtain.

Six years after all this happened, in June 1996 I finally left the Worldwide Church of God. Almost the very last words I uttered to my former church pastor were “I think the leaders in Pasadena should take appropriate legal steps to dissolve the church, give all its assets to some other charitable institution, and quit pretending that this is a real church.” He expressed shock at my change in attitude, and I got up and left the little meeting in his house where I finally decided I had had enough.

Shortly after this I began to see similarities between what was happening to the huge number of people leaving this fake church and those who had lived under the oppressive government in the U.S.S.R. when it collapsed. I began to feel great empathy with and pity for the huge number of Russians, perhaps 200 or so million, living in what used to be the core republic of the U.S.S.R., as they must have had some severe mental trauma as everything they had believed in for 74 years had collapsed. Their belief system was proven wrong, worthless, and useless, implying that everything they had done with their lives from birth up to that moment had been wasted. I realized that these people were going to suffer profound mental problems. I concluded that the same mental problems would beset ex-WCGers, including me, but I took some solace in the fact that there were only 100,000 or so who could ever become ex-WCGers, whereas there were several hundred million in Russia who were now having to pick up the pieces of their lives and start all over building new lives after their empire and national political system collapsed.

At least this would be true for all the true believers in the Soviet Union, meaning those who were loyal comrades, stalwart Communists who studied the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin every day (just as we true believers were studying the Bible and reading all the writings of the true writers at headquarters every day). I knew that only a small percentage of the total population in the U.S.S.R ever became members of the Communist Party, so perhaps only two or three percent of the people were true believers and had all their dreams and idealistic beliefs shattered. But the other 97 % of the people were suffering just the same. Perhaps they didn’t have any hopes and dreams shattered, but they were suffering along with all the true believers as their economy began to implode.

Most people living under such totalitarian systems learn very quickly how to survive, which means mentally as well as physically. You learn never to trust anyone else, especially a government official. You learn never to volunteer to do anything. You learn to pretend to be working when someone else is looking. You learn to watch what you say. You learn that in order to get anything in life, to get ahead, to have a slightly nicer job or apartment, you must lie, connive, or bribe someone. You learn that everything you hear from your leaders or see in the news is propaganda. In short, you learn that the whole society is criminal, corrupt, and based on countless lies.

That’s what the majority learn. The minority are the true believers in Communism, and who continue to think that human selfishness can be gotten rid of by enough education and group pressure, that the masses will someday learn to live altruistically, that everyone who has more than he needs will freely and joyously give of his excess to those who do not have enough, that the walls of Capitalism will come tumbling down, and that the magnificent belief system you believe in will grow and expand and fill the whole world as the waters cover the seas. In other words, you expect that human beings can be filled with the Spirit of God and exhibit the fruits of the spirit in their lives without ever having any contact with God.

Then it all comes crashing down around you. You realize you were lied to, manipulated, bamboozled, cheated, hornswoggled, hosed, and fooled big time. People whom you trusted as having been led by the true revolutionary spirit turn out to be clueless, vain, corrupt, on the take, on the make, and only looking out for themselves. You begin to see how gullible you were to swallow all those horse feathers without question. You get angry at those who are still in charge. You get angry at your nation’s revolutionary founding fathers, the Bolsheviks. You get angry at yourself for being so stupid. You get angry at having your whole life stolen from you, and now you have almost nothing to show for all those wasted years – no accumulated wealth or property, no life savings, no retirement nest egg. How will you live for the next 20 or 30 years until you die? The state will not help you any more. The state is bankrupt. Your relatives and friends cannot help you, either. They are all just as penniless as you are. The national currency is worthless, no one wants it, and everyone wants only U.S. dollars. Hyperinflation in the Ruble begins, and all your savings are wiped out in short order. Your anger, disillusionment, and resentment grow daily.

Back to the church analogy (but for the astute reader, I never left it): when the church changes almost all its teachings almost overnight and you finally get enough courage to leave in disgust, when you willingly turn your back on everything you have believed in your whole adult life, when your entire belief system is shattered, you realize that you have just been pulled up short, had a reality check, and now you suddenly realize how vulnerable you are. You are no longer “special”, one of the “chosen people”, no longer “protected by God”. You understand that if God did not choose to protect His whole church from collapse that there is no logical reason why God would choose to protect little old worthless you. After all, you are just another individual chump now that you have left the safety of “God’s one true end-time church”, have gone “out into the world,” and are now hopelessly caught up “in the bonds of Satan.” These are phrases we were all brainwashed with for decades whenever an isolated person would leave every once in a great while and he would be condemned from all the pulpits in the land. But then that isolated person turned into a constant stream, and that once in a great while turned into every day.

I recently read an online speech discussing the gulags in the Soviet Union and the huge negative impact these had on the economy and thinking of that entire nation. I would like to discuss some of the points in that speech and show their analogy with what happened in the WWCG. As in any analogy, not all the points are similar, but enough are uncannily similar that I just had to share this with my mentally liberated brothers.

The transcript of the speech can be found at http://www.heritage.org/Research/RussiaandEurasia/HL-800.cfm. It was given by Anne Applebaum, a columnist and editor for the Washington Post newspaper as well as a historical author. She gave this speech on 16 October 2003 at a meeting of the Heritage Foundation to discuss her most recent book, published in 2003 and titled Gulag: A History. Her speech was titled “Gulag: Understanding the Magnitude of What Happened.”

I would suggest that anyone reading this article of mine should also read at least her speech and perhaps her entire book. If you do so, remember as you read to substitute mentally the phrase “church member” whenever you see her use the word “Communist” or “prisoner”, “church” for “camps” or “Soviet Union”, “HWA” or “the church leaders” for “Stalin”, etc., and you will easily see the analogies.

I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume epic work The Gulag Archipelago many years ago. In it he opined that it would take Russia about 200 years to recover from what Stalin did, not just in terms of the tens of millions of his own people whom he had murdered or worked to death in his labor camps but also because of the economic catastrophe he perpetrated in the name of liberating the Soviet peoples from selfishness and the national way of thinking that everyone developed automatically by living under such an insane system. Applebaum corroborates Solzhenitsyn’s dire prediction in her analysis of the gulags of the U.S.S.R., which is the thrust of her recent book.

How long does it take those of use who were under HWA’s tyranny to recover our minds and lives? When we start over and build a new life after liberation, most of us will never be able to live long enough to get back to where we would have been if we had not been “called by God” to join in His great end-time work of plundering all our wealth and raping our minds. We gave all our excess money to those thieving bastards for years and years, we believed their lies that we did not need to have any retirement funds for ourselves, that the whole world would soon be destroyed. So when we finally get out from under the Armstrong belief system based on lies and plunder, we typically have nothing of our own and have to start life all over again, not as a young adult but now as a much older, sadder but wiser adult.

First a little background on the phrase “gulag archipelago.” An archipelago is a long chain of islands somewhere in the ocean. Most archipelagos today belong to only one nation. E.g., the nation of Japan consists of a chain, or archipelago, of about 3,000 islands. The U.S. state of Hawai’i is an archipelago of about 200 islands, only about 7 of which are inhabited, and stretching over a thousands miles across the Pacific Ocean. The Caribbean Ocean is crossed from northwest to southeast by yet another archipelago of islands which belong to 20 or 30 different sovereign nations. The nation of Indonesia consists of about 17,000 islands. Then there are the Philippines, the Aleutians, and many other archipelagos.

The word “gulag” in the Russian language is a quasi-acronym meaning “chief administration of corrective labor camps”. For the exact Russian phrase see http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=gulag. One of the publicly promoted reasons for these labor camps was to give political indoctrination to enemies of the state, thus “correcting” them. The word “corrective” also implied imprisonment for some kind of crime, as we use now in the U.S.A. with our phrase “correction facilities”.

Lenin seized power in late 1917, and then began building concentration camps across the Soviet Union in 1918 to house his political enemies. After he died in 1924, Stalin seized power and in 1929 began greatly expanding the number of such camps in order to house the millions of people whom he forced to become slave laborers in his insane efforts to modernize the U.S.S.R. as rapidly as possible by fulfilling his fanciful five-year plans for growth. If you were to pinpoint the location of each such camp on a map of the whole U.S.S.R., you would begin to see the resemblance to a string of islands in a long archipelago stretching across the sea. The analogy is even more striking with all the camps that were in Siberia, as that vast area is extremely unpopulated. Each camp would be isolated from the next camp by a great distance filled with an almost impassable forest or tundra, just as in the ocean an island that is part of an archipelago is separated from the next island in the chain by a large amount of open sea.

Here are some excerpts from Applebaum’s speech that I wish to use to point out the parallels between “the abundant life” in the Worldwide Church of God under Herbert W. Armstrong and life in the Soviet Union under the murderous Stalin.

(1) “…both the economic and the moral legacy of the camps [church] continue to distort Russian and East European society [ex-members] today. One might say that Stalin [HWA] is dead, but his last, terrible gaze still casts its shadow.”

Even though HWA is dead and gone now for almost 18 years, his angry outbursts and hideous jowl-shakings still cause us to want to obey those over us as if we were obeying the Lord himself. We still hesitate to question authority when that is precisely what we need to do in order to free ourselves from our self-imposed mental tyranny.

(2) “We know that the vast majority of prisoners in them were peasants and workers, not the intellectuals who later wrote memoirs and books.”

The vast majority of people whom HWA sucked in with his colossal scam were simple, gullible, trusting, innocent, common people, not the great intellects whom God had specially chosen to head his church – towering, intellectual giants like Raymond McNair (Hah!), Herbert Armstrong (who constantly condemned higher education), Joseph Tkach Sr., and Roderick “Spanky” Meredith. I’m not saying these men were stupid or had no talent. Au contraire, they had great talent in the fine art of plundering the masses, in manipulating and scamming people, and in keeping their FILTHY conduct hidden from us all. But they were not intellectually gifted. A very few were, and their intellects were warped by their desire to please the boss.

(3) “Problems were solved by calling for more workers. … the camps also distorted the way people in the lands of the former Soviet Union think about economics…”

HWA and his minions continued bamboozling us for decades with the myth that God’s work was growing at 30% per year. It may have had that much increase in the first several years when the total number of members was very small, but sooner or later that annual percent increase becomes impossible to sustain. E.g., the highest membership ever claimed by the church was about 100,000 around 1985, I think. If you continue growing at 30% per year and you start with 100,000 people, at the end of 35 years you have 8.5 billion people, which would be just about everybody on earth by then. Then how do you grow by 30% the next year when there are no unconverted people left to convert and the world’s population is only growing by one or two percent per year? What has to happen then, of course, is that “God withdraws his blessing from the church” and growth plummets back down to match the population increase. No matter what number is used, you cannot have compounded annual growth at that same constant percentage number forever, because sooner or later you have generated a number that is greater than the whole planet.

Another reason the 30% per year growth factor was misused was that since the church had grown by that much for X number of years, and since we were told over and over that we had to continue growing at that rate or else we would disappoint God, therefore whenever the growth rate started to slack off HWA and his minions whipped us, so to speak, so we would give even more money in order to get the income back up to the arbitrary growth rate of 30%. This sounds a lot to me like Stalin and his arbitrary five-year plan after which the great Communist state would have grown by 20%. Our church leaders used the myth of the 30% annual growth rate as a self-fulfilling prophecy. We HAD to grow at that rate or else. Anything less meant we were becoming just another church of Satan. 30% was a myth not because growth was not occurring at that rate (in fact, there were years when that was true), but it was a myth because it had nothing to do with God. There were and still are many other organizations or entities in history that have grown at that annual rate, so are they all being blessed by God too?

Our ability to think rationally and plan for the future was terribly distorted by such myths. We were taught to base our lives on faith rather than cold, hard, rational thought processes. Faith would have worked if there really were a god who cared about our faith and answered our prayers, but we now see that that was a pipe dream. Herbie conned us into smoking opium from his theological pipe, and we all dreamed the same fake dream.

Please use your mind and reread the previous paragraph. I did not say that there is no god. I said there is no god who cares about our faith and answers our prayers. These two statements are very different. But for all the good it did us, we might as well have put our faith in a specific rock, tree, or a cat.

(4) “I would like to ask why the Gulag, about which historians now know so much, and whose economic impact we now understand so much better, is so seldom debated and discussed by Russians. …10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been no trials, no truth and reconciliation commissions, no government inquiries into what happened in the past, and no public debate.”

Why don’t people still in the WWCG discuss and debate what happened? When will the current leaders hold official inquiries into what went happened so that the same wrong things won’t happen again?

(5) “… many experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union [church] as a personal blow. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel, but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad.”

If we don’t think about it, maybe it will go away. This is thinking based on faith in an obviously failed belief system rather than thinking based on rational logic.

(6) “… the most important explanation for the lack of debate is not the fears and anxieties of the ordinary Russian [church member], but the power and prestige of those now ruling the country.”

Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, so we must never allow ourselves to question anything our leaders say. There may not be very much income left with so many having left the ranks of the true believers, but when you are the top dog and you only have to divide the loot with three other guys you can still make an awful lot of money. I say this because the last time I checked there were four top leaders. That is why I like to call them the “Gang of Four”. Another reason why that name is appropriate is because this was the name given to a certain group of tyrannical leaders of that other great Communist state, the People’s Republic of China.

(7) Brainwashing, which is not mentioned in Applebaum’s speech, is especially noteworthy for the dissimilarity. The vast majority of people living under a despotic Communist system learn that everything they hear is propaganda, so they rapidly become immune to being brainwashed because they know all messages from the government are lies. The majority of people in Communistic states are not true believers. Only the tiny percent of people who are loyal, die-hard Communist true believers will accept state propaganda as truth, and when their beloved system finally crashes all around them their mental shock is far worse than that of the non-believer majority.

The opposite was the case in the Worldwide Church of God, where all the people at low levels in the hierarchy were true believers. The only non-believers were the scammers at the very top of the food chain. They knew and believed only in maintaining their grip on power so as to keep the money rolling in. And they had plenty of advance warning to get their financial affairs in order before the crash, which meant to arrange for pensions, golden parachutes, early retirements, buy-outs, or other forms of financial scams to keep them in big money for the rest of their lives, even though they were no longer associated with or employed by the Church. The very best deals in such cases are often arranged by those who know the deepest, darkest, secret scandals of those higher up, and their “pensions” are often in reality hush money. All of us true believers down at the bottom level kept believing it was all real when it crashed. We were the ones left holding the empty bag, the ones still standing when the music stopped, the only ones who did not have a “Get out of jail free” card. So our mental shock was abrupt and thus severe.

How to get over it and cope with having all your dreams destroyed in one instant? I believe in going cold turkey, as you have to do if you want to break the habit of using an extremely addictive drug like heroin or crack cocaine. Some others prefer to taper off, to use evolution rather than revolution, and they stay in the same system even though they no longer believe the messages they hear. They stay in the WWCG for social reasons, because all their friends are still there, because they have been in so long they can’t bear to think about leaving, because they are afraid to start being responsible for their own lives. It is so much easier to keep on pretending to believe in a magic sky god that will somehow bless his steadily decreasing church, and that will protect his loyal pack of trusting fools. After all, everybody around you still believes in the same magic sky god, so it must be real, mustn’t it? My solution is to get out right away, as soon as you come to your senses and realize that being in the Worldwide Church of God was a REALLY BAD IDEA right from the start. So why stay in just because they have changed their teachings? They have not yet changed their CORE BELIEF, which is that the masses must be manipulated into believing whatever silly crap the leaders come up with next and that the masses of sheep exist only to be fleeced.

What do professionals make you do if you are trying to kick a drug addiction? What do deprogrammers tell you if you have been in a manipulative cult? They tell you to move, change your lifestyle, get an entirely new set of friends, and quit going to the same old places where you are likely to run into your old associates in the drug world or in the cult you were in. Work hard at staying away from your former associates. Do the exact opposite of what you used to do. Instead of blindly believing everything you hear from anyone in a position of authority, start questioning all authority. If you decide that one particular form of authority is legitimate, as it well may be, then accept it as an authority over you. But if it fails the test of legitimacy and passes the test of usurpation, then take steps to reject it or to minimize its influence over you. Become as CYNICAL as you possibly can ABOUT POWER and authority. As H. L. Mencken said once, “The cynics are right nine times out of ten.” You can still love individual people who are close to you, and still give others the benefit of the doubt, but not if they are in any position of power. You should assume by default, that, until proven otherwise, ALL PEOPLE IN POWER will lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, rape, plunder, and murder. POWER IS EVIL. Why? Because power corrupts, as was pointed out by Lord Acton. Power is the greatest force of evil on earth today.

Read widely. Read as much as you can on many different subjects. Read about the processes of mind manipulation, of human behavior, psychology, how cults work, how to recognize propaganda. Read ancient history. Read modern history. Quit accepting the life of an uneducated, acquiescent couch potato. Get some intellectual curiosity. Start educating yourself. Get on the Internet. Read what real thinkers and great writers have to say. Start learning how to discern the wheat from the chaff in the free marketplace of ideas. Turn off the TV set for a while. Learn about memes, myths, superstitions, faith, earth mother goddesses of the past, male sky gods of the past and present, logic, rational thinking, how to prove an argument, how to tell when someone else is trying to manipulate you.

Realize that one of the many reasons you got sucked into Perbert’s cult was because you have a strong Messiah complex. We all wanted to save the world. I know I did. So did Marx and Engels, Cecil Rhodes, Mikhail Bakunin, Theodor Herzl, Lenin, Trotsky, Franklin Roosevelt, Mao, Hitler, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Pol Pot, Jim Jones, Mother Teresa, Robert Mugabe, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and all true believers in Christianity, Islam, Democracy, manifest destiny, the white man’s burden, Capitalism, Communism, Bolshevism, Socialism, Zionism, Leftism, Rightism, and on and on. Millions and millions of us for centuries have heard and answered the call, stood at attention, saluted, and started marching forward to save the world. As Max Shulman wrote in his 1953 novel The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, we all find irresistible the charismatically preached message about “…strong, bronzed laborers clapping each other on the back, walking arm in arm up the people’s way into the sun…” All of us millions of true believers have either lived out our lives in true belief for a noble cause and then died without ever knowing it was all a load of hooey, or else we have seen our hopes and dreams for all mankind dashed to pieces on the rocks of reality as our noble movements implode, crash, dissolve, or disappear. It happens most often when the original founder of a mass movement dies. It also happens a lot when the virtuous leader of a mass movement gets arrested for theft, corruption, or is found out for some other scandal. I know I have the Messiah complex, and I am constantly fighting to keep it under control.

Oh, yeah – one more thing. Read Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer. Read it again and again every few years. Read articles about getting rid of ALL the wrong beliefs and myths you have unquestioningly swallowed your whole life up until now. Read Matthew Alper’s book The “God” Part of the Brain. Read Acharya S’s book The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. Learn about memes, how they infect our minds, make us prone to deception and manipulation, and make us give in to mass hysteria just as viruses infect our bodies, give us physical illness, and plunge us into vast epidemics of disease. Read about the history of how the Bible was put together at angry conferences and councils by selfish men all vying for leadership, power, and control over ever-increasing numbers of superstitious and gullible sheep. Read about how our U.S. government and almost all our media are manipulating us now, and constantly doing little experiments on us to perfect their methods of mass mind control so they can milk us of all our wealth and convince us to go along with one egregious illegal war after another. Turn off your television set and start surfing the Internet for things to read. If you find an article that is controversial, historically revisionist, or that goes against everything you have ever believed in, it’s probably true, so be sure to read that one. Even if you don’t ever accept anything you read on the Internet, at least you will have been exposed that much less to the constant barrage of mindless swill on the television, so you will be far better off for all the hours you spend surfing the Internet. And “mindless swill” on television includes all the so-called news, too. And you have to use the Internet, because what you need to get into your mind is to be found nowhere in the popular press or on any TV channel in the U.S.

Learn to think for yourself and to reject both the fake leaders we have and the mob all around who are still enslaved by their myths and their need to let a strong leader solve all their problems for them.

If you have anything you would like to
submit to this site, or any comments,
email me at:

Do not duplicate, copy or redistribute in any form without prior written consent.

Disclaimer