May 13, 2023

In the mid-1970s I and others worldwide were active in a letter writing campaign to Soviet Jewish refuseniks. Anatoly Sharansky is probably the most well-known of these dissidents.  While most of the letters were heavily censored, some did get through and it gave hope to those prisoners of conscience that the world was hearing them despite the malevolence of the communists.

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One of my treasured documents is a letter from the wife of Hillel Butman, who was falsely accused of being a spy. She wrote to me that she “wished [me] much power for I knew what to do with it.”  It was a truly incredible and profound statement that I have never forgotten.

It reminds one of the unfortunate truth as stated by John A. Stormer in his Death of a Nation (1968) wherein he wrote,

Our founding fathers were men who — from their study of history… learned that down through history whenever man got power he used it to oppress other humans beings.

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Thus, the idea that Americans known as the January 6th protestors are now languishing in prison because they exercised their G-d-given rights to protest is shocking and beyond belief.  It hearkens back to those refuseniks who were denied any justice and mercy.

The American Gulag Chronicles: Letters from Prison (2022) authored by Tim Rivers contains the letters and artwork by the latest victims of despotic rule under Joe Biden and his allies.  The editor-in-chief of this work is Marie Goodwyn, the mother of J6 defendant and video journalist Daniel Goodwyn.  Moreover, an international volunteer team of professional typesetters and proofreaders were instrumental in getting the book done.

The idea that Americans — who being assured of their Constitutional rights — unflinchingly rose in concert to demand redress of their grievances from their Representatives, must now rot in a horrific Gulag of a jail – where they are denied the most basic human rights, due process and justice because they dared to be brave and patriotic Americans — should be appalling and of grave concern to each of us.

In the early days of 2021, Americans were “arrested and often hauled away from their families to the District of Columbia, where they were held without bond hearings or due process, while they waited trial. The detained were held in an abandoned jail pod with deteriorating infrastructure facilities.

The Patriot Mail Project created a website that provided lists of the prisoners and their addresses and encouraged supporters to write letters of encouragement and support to them and thus the book The American Gulag Chronicles was born.

Anguish and anger permeate these letters.  Abuse and mistreatments by the DoJ and the D.C. Department of Corrections are revealed.  The “claustrophobia of solitary confinement” is a horror that I never imagined could happen to my fellow Americans.