Wardens of the Gulag

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by Pedro Blas González (March 2026)

Conversations (Ben Shahn, 1958)

 

In Russia, “duck,” aside from its normal meaning, is a term for disinformation. ‘when the ducks are flying’ means that the press is publishing disinformation. —Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy Chief of Soviet Foreign Intelligence, Special Tasks (Memoirs), 1994

 

The steam came out of her head, her temples to be exact, like steam coming from the Hudson River in wintertime. Her nostrils flaring like a mare in heat; she burned with the sting of corrosive radical ideology. Watching the radical ideologue professor writhing in the form of diffused anxiety and anger that only ideological fanatic fervor can bring about, I thought that the rabid woman had rabies. People do get rabies, don’t they? If so, I imagined that her malaise was an indication that she was a carrier of that zoonotic viral disease.

The grandiose and vulgar spectacle that the emotionally and psychologically distraught woman put on display was alarming to any sane and well-grounded onlooker. The radical woman was apoplectic, ‘boiling mad.’ I thought she was going to have a cerebral hemorrhage. Well, at least a hemorrhage of some kind.

The extremist woman celebrated the terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, murdering 2,753 innocents. She sided with the terrorists and blamed America, as something that America had coming. Yet, the radical ideologue woman thought of herself as the quintessential Professor of Ethics.

One must witness demonic hate firsthand to understand why the young girl in William Peter Blatty’s novel, The Exorcist, becomes transformed into an image of evil. How is the hate of the rabid radical ideologue woman any different? Darkness Visible, Milton calls this in Paradise Lost.

The sound in the head of the tormented tenured professor must have been deafening; the sound of cascading pangs of radicalized hate. Is that what radical ideologues hear when they try to emote? Tormented and tortured by the anguish of Marxist ideological fanaticism, the professor fumed with social-political outrage, though, she referred to it as social justice in action. I thought about Shakespeare’s dissemination of the essence of a rose: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” In other words, the radical ideologue woman’s essence is rotted to the core, a victim of her own ignorance. Her deep-seated radicalization exposed her self-serving affectation, hypocrisy, and moral malignancy in flagrante delicto.

If I looked a little closer, I might have seen drool oozing from her mouth. That woman was then, and still is today, a poster child of lowly animal perceptions, affected sentimentalism that must be turned into social-political action … or else. If left unchecked, her distorted and misguided notion of human reality will deliver her and the rest of us into an abyss, a gulag built for the people she suspects are her enemies. Marxist ideologues don’t think, they merely bloviate, while spewing vile notions of how the end justifies the means.

One must witness Marxist ideological obsession firsthand to make sense of how the sinister the end justifies the means becomes the full-blown destruction that social-political possession ushers. This is why Marxism ultimately culminates in what radicals consider ‘justified’ violence.

One must know the mind and values of Marxist-ideology-spewing-activists to understand their twisted perception—not conception—of human reality. Lucky is the person who has been in proximity to these late postmodern, pathologically tortured, ground-dwelling entities. Only then can one understand what happens when the human psyche becomes twisted in the quest for power.

The question is a reoccurring one: how do grown men and women become members of, and worshipers at the temple of Marxists ideology? Marxist ideologues in late postmodernity must be identified as cult members. The cult leaders are the credentialed, university degree-carrying priests of the temple of Marxist ideology. They are the puppet masters of the street urchin foot soldiers responsible for creating mayhem and destruction.

Make no mistake about it; Marxist ideological zealots will kill on demand, when the conditions of their quest for power become favorable. They are content to become wardens of the gulag. The twentieth century, the century of the gulag, has already proven this.

The wardens of the gulag will put people who they suspect to be their enemies against a wall and execute them, while getting high on their anxiety-calming psychotropic drugs. Bolshevik criminals massacred Catholic nuns and priests and burned down Catholic churches, and icons during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). They committed enumerable atrocities in the name of Mother Soviet Russia, the cradle of international communism-to-come.

 

Marxist Suspicion

Suspicion is the word; leftists themselves will tell you so. First comes suspicion, and then comes the designation of persona non grata. The wardens of the gulag are fanatical in their quest to eradicate thought crimes. This means that thought proper is a threat that must be controlled, cancelled, and censored, given that thought proper is the sworn enemy of Marxism.

Thought crime is an invention, the creation of power-seeking Marxism. Orwell demonstrated this in Animal Farm and 1984. Arthur Koestler achieved the same in Darkness at Noon; Czeslaw Milosz dissected the mindset and values of communists in The Captive Mind like few thinkers ever have. Leftism is obsessed with the question: how are you going to change the world? The answer? With a hammer, of course.

Bolshevism exterminates its alleged enemies, people who stunt the progress of the long march to communism. And what is their cause, we ask? Their cause is power, raw, inebriating power that brings meaning and purpose to otherwise pointless and dysfunctional lives. Do not let them fool you with social-political theories and abstractions. Power for power’s sake is the extent of the statecraft of Marxism, Bolshevism, Maoism, communism, socialism, leftism, and cronyism in late postmodernity. Power is the fuel that motors late postmodern Marxist ideologues. Marxism seeks to perfect techniques of power that neutralize free thought and free thinkers.

Marxism is pathological projection, much like 80% of criminals who admit on exit polls, upon their release from prison, that getting caught was their biggest mistake. Redemption? No. Don’t look for it. You won’t find it in that mindset.

Lacking the moral compass that enables thoughtful people to undertake soul-searching that leads to making responsible choices, which create a better life, leftism merely seeks power for the sake of power. Let us be sincere about what Marxism brings to the table in late postmodernity: Marxism and its attenuated fervor elicit the energy of mentally deficient people to do the devil’s work.

Man, oh man…what energy and fervor do Marxists posses to do the devil’s work, given that they have no other reason for living. According to Marxist ideologues, all aspects of human reality must be politicized…everything. I stress that one needs to know these characters firsthand to truly appreciate the horrifying inner workings of duplicitous, affected, and dysfunctional lives. In the future, people will judge late postmodernity as a time when mentally and emotionally ill and depraved people ruled the world.

What Marxist ideologue in late postmodernity believes in anything? Certainly not the legions of lapsed, garden-variety progressive Catholics. The motto of these hypocrites: pay attention to what I say, not what I do. God help us. Affectation is the thing that moves late postmodern hypocrisy. What is worse than the devil himself? Pseudo believers who pretend to believe only for public consumption, for the sake of woke ideology. Late postmodernism has been turned into Puppet Theater, a circus where social-political Lilliputians come for their ration of ideological bread.

Late postmodernity is an age of hyperreality, when appearance rules over reality proper, and truth has been subsumed to the whims of Marxist narcissists … and opportunists. What about progressive Protestants? What do they believe?  These entities are merely interested in manning activism centers.

Conviction? Who professes convictions in late postmodernity? Unbelief is the thing, man. Postmodernity professes unbelief. Unbelief is the pinnacle of chic. Once one perfects the technique of unbelief, one can become the master of the universe. Only in late postmodernity does unbelief substitute genuine religious belief with violence and corrosive Marxist ideology…and justifies it. Marxist zealots claim late postmodernity as a time of ideological fanaticism.

Marxist fanaticism is social-political messianism of the-here-and-now. People who embrace so-called progressive causes are entitled to justify their dysfunctional behavior; everyone else must check their traditional, objective values at the door. One needs to live through this form of censorship to understand how it works.

The wardens of the gulag groom wardens-of-the-gulag-to-be. In turn, trained wardens of the gulag groom others of their same ilk to man the gates. This is a vicious cycle of indoctrination. That is what living in an age of Marxist ideology means.

Realists, people who have their feet firmly grounded in the soil, people who respect the distributive justice of human contingency, do not bother with Marxist ideology. They simply accept the conditions that space and time have in store for the human species. Scientists call this the constants of nature. Realists understand that the big picture does not bend to human demands and personal whims. As people say in the street today, human reality ‘is what it is.’

Though Marxist zealots hate themselves, their lot in life, and everyone who does not take part in their self-loathing, they feel entitled to project their vile corrosive ideology to the universe. For radical ideologues, God, creation, being, and human existence are the ultimate offenders.

The question that Marxism continues to pose in late postmodernity is: how to universalize hate, resentment, and envy, while disguising it as love and social-political action (praxis)?  Remember, suspicion is nothing other than rationalized Marxist ideological hate. Marxism has been perfecting the efficiency of the gulag for eons.

While Marxism achieved torture and censorship throughout the twentieth century and continues to perfect the technique of power in the twentieth first through artificial intelligence, the next installment of their world-wide gulag will be unprecedented … a total production of horror … astounding … something akin to Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, though, in a perverse depiction of hell on Earth.

Usurping science and technology, which free thinkers have created, cultivated, and nurtured, late postmodern Marxism continues to poison the human psyche with anti-philosophy and the alleged need to deconstruct human reality.

The late postmodern world is sick. The French philosopher of existence, Gabriel Marcel, is correct that the late postmodern world is a broken world. The asylum has overflowed into the streets, and into institutions that once kept the human person sane and whole. Marxism and its many variants ripped the lid off Pandora’s Box. Who is going to inform Marxists and their attenuated forms of false values, disinformation, affectation, hypocrisy, opportunism, and cronyism that Marxism is a cancer—the definitive disease that defines late postmodernity? Marxist ideologues aim to corrupt thoughtful people and discredit life-affirming, objective values that are not in keeping with Marxism’s power grab. Isn’t that the strategy?

Raymond Aron, the French philosopher, offers a devastating appraisal of

Marxism in his seminal book The Opium of the Intellectuals (L’opium Des Intellectuels):

The condemnation of private ownership or capitalist imperialism, the conviction that the market economy and the rule of the bourgeoisie tend towards their own destruction and the advent of socialist planning and the power of the proletariat—these fragments detached from the doctrine are accepted not only by Communists or fellow-travelers but by the immense majority of those who call themselves progressive. The so-called advanced intelligentsia, even in the Anglo-Saxon countries where it has never read Das Kapital, subscribes almost instinctively to these prejudices.

Aron published his deleterious indictment of abject Marxism in 1955. Since that time, the fetishism that Western intellectuals display for all things Marx, Marxism, progressivism, and all the spindly, attenuated ramifications that that corrosive radical ideology has for life in late postmodernity, have morphed into a staple of hate for Western Civilization. The fetishism for all things Marx that well-paid and pampered Western intellectuals and university professors hold dear has surpassed the limits of theory. For one, intellectually honest and self-respecting thinkers quickly dispose of theory once a theory has proven to be a dead-end—a failure. Marxism and its wispy values have proven to be nothing more than a colossal failure that has set the human condition back into times of slavery.

 

Marxist Catchphrases: Intelligentsia, Bourgeoisie, Proletariat

Consider what has become of some of the favorite catchphrases of Marxism and progressivism: Intelligentsia, Bourgeoisie, and the proletariat.

Because Marxism and progressivism are techniques for the attainment of social-political power, the infallibility of the party, that is, the Marxist-progressive group-think cult, cannot, and will never admit that it is wrong—a failure. Remember, the end justifies the means, and the long march of communism must continue, no matter what forms of torture, oppression, disinformation, and manipulation of the masses and truth are required for its final victory.

The infallibility of the party line (Marxism and progressivism) means that the party cannot afford to allow free thinkers to roam free…and hold important positions. That explains why Western Marxists, progressive intellectuals, and others who are mere opportunists, do not have a clue about what it means to be an intelligent free thinker. Yet these people make up the Marxist intelligentsia. That is the extent of intelligence in Marxism and progressivism.

What about the bourgeoisie? In late postmodernity, Marxism is the bourgeoisie. This is plain and simple. Marxism and progressivism are the ruling elites who run Western Civilization. Marxist, progressive, and opportunist elites have appropriated wealth that is used as the bulkhead of disinformation that serves to strengthen Marxist hegemony in Western democracies. The wealth of the Marxist bourgeoisie is used to censor its alleged enemies.

So, how does the corrective to unsustainable Marxist ideology in late postmodernity come about? How can the opprobrium that thoughtful and well-informed people have for Marxism and its web of corruption, disinformation, and well-crafted lies be exposed once and for all? How can the colossal failure that is Marxism and its alleged progressive notions of human reality be made explicit to mass man in late postmodernity?

These are questions that young people will be asking themselves in the coming generations, especially as Bolshevism and Marxism continue to grow their wealth and perfect the use of artificial intelligence as the ultimate weapon of disinformation.

Sane people in the future will answer this question with the horrid realization that the damage done to the human person in a sick age, as is late postmodernism, must be reversed. The cancer of Marxist ideology must be excised, just like physicians excise malignancy. Only, pmaeople in late postmodernity will experience much unnecessary pain and suffering in the meantime.

In late postmodernity, the ducks are flying en masse.

 

Table of Contents

 

Pedro Blas González is Professor of Philosophy in Florida. He earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy at DePaul University in 1995. Dr. González has published extensively on leading Spanish philosophers, such as Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno. His books have included Unamuno: A Lyrical Essay, Ortega’s ‘Revolt of the Masses’ and the Triumph of the New ManFragments: Essays in Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy and Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega’s Philosophy of Subjectivity. He also published a translation and introduction of José Ortega y Gasset’s last work to appear in English, “Medio siglo de Filosofia” (1951) in Philosophy Today Vol. 42 Issue 2 (Summer 1998). His most recent book is Philosophical Perspective on Cinema.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast 

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3 Responses

  1. Is the author suggesting that we pay attention to the hundreds of millions of victims of Marxist ideology? The hounds will cry Marxophobia! And point out that those previous attempts at applying Marxist ideology to the real world were deviant. Once the formula refined and reapplied, we will reap the benefits. Well, maybe not on the first attempt, but eventually we will get there, and once there, new millions will not have to be slaughtered; they will be humanely relocated to concentration camps, where they can concentrate on their errors of thinking. Let’s get with the program! Utopia is within reach!

  2. Although I have read a few of the books mentioned in this work.( I am too ignorant to know if this would be considered an essay or a treatise or what in actuality.) This work was a brilliant explanation of some of the themes touched on in those books that I was truly unable to grasp until reading this work. Many thanks to Pedro Blas González.

  3. Islamic “progressive” Hasan Piker’s “Swastika Sword” and Fascist “Grey Wolf” —All While Posing as a “Humanitarian” Ah yes, Hasan Piker—the internet’s self-appointed moral authority—once again reminding everyone that the rules are very strict… unless they apply to him. But the latest most glaring issue isn’t just a symbol—it’s the spectacle in Cuba. Because nothing says “humanitarian” quite like turning a struggling nation into a personal content studio. Critics argue that Piker is effectively using the suffering of poor Cubans as a backdrop to promote himself and his political brand, all while pushing a familiar ideological narrative. The uncomfortable reality, they say, is that this kind of “aid activism” often does little to challenge the власти in power—and may even indirectly benefit the very regime responsible for the crisis. Resources, coordination, and access tend to flow through official channels, raising serious questions about who is actually helped and who gains legitimacy. So while ordinary Cubans struggle with shortages of food, electricity, and medicine, influencers arrive, cameras rolling, messaging polished, and optics carefully curated. The result? A trip that looks less like meaningful relief—and more like political theater. Revolution—but make it influencer-friendly. This is the core contradiction: the branding vs. the behavior. Piker presents himself as a champion of the oppressed, yet critics contend that his actions in Cuba suggest something else entirely—leveraging hardship to amplify his platform while sidestepping the harder truth about the system behind it. And of course, pointing this out is quickly dismissed as bad faith criticism. But the question remains: if the goal is truly to help people, why does it so often look like the primary beneficiary is the influencer? References New York Post article: Tone-deaf activists flock to Havana… https://nypost.com/2026/03/21/world-news/tone-deaf-activists-flock-into-havana-staying-in-5-star-hotels-while-island-in-crisis-mockery-of-cuban-people/

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