Weblog von Hans-Wolfgang

The Mayor of what used to be one of the most infamous outposts of Josef Stalin's Gulag wants to charge masochistic foreign tourists £80 a day to "holiday" in an elaborate mock-up of a Soviet prison camp. The Mayor of Vorkuta, 100 miles above the Arctic Circle and 1,200 miles north-east of Moscow, says he is looking for an investor to turn an abandoned prison complex into a "reality" holiday camp for novelty-seeking tourists keen to understand what life was like for Soviet political prisoners at first hand. His idea envisages recreating a tiny part of the Gulag complete with watchtowers, guards armed with paintball guns, snarling dogs, rolls of barbed wire, Spartan living conditions - and forced labour. He wants to charge tourists between $150 and $200 (£80 to £106) each day and for them to commit to a minimum three-day "holiday". The chance of living in the Gulag as a prisoner is attractive to many wealthy foreigners. A whole trainload of people turned up in autumn last year wanting to go to such a concentration camp, for money. It wouldn't all be stylised suffering, as tourists would have the chance to fish and hunt for game. The Mayor's idea is part of a growing trend in Russia for extreme tourism. Tour companies already offer the chance to work as a Volga boatman in their holiday - literally by pulling a barge along the famous river - or to undergo basic military training overseen by veterans of the Chechen wars. In that same spirit the governor of Vladimir Lenin's native region recently floated plans to open a Leninland theme park that would also allow visitors to experience elements of the Gulag. This "Club Gulag" holiday camp would remind people of the horrors of Stalin's repression in a way that dry history books cannot. Historians say 200,000 prisoners, known as zeks, died in the camps surrounding Vorkuta, out of more than two million deported there between 1932 and 1954. In winter, the temperature plunges to minus 50C, while in summer the population of mosquitoes explodes. At the Gulag's peak 132 camps existed in and around Vorkuta. Now the city desperately needs new funds to pour into its dying economy. Eight of its 13 coal mines have shut in the past 15 years and the city's population has almost halved, from 217,000 to 120,000. Life in Vorkuta is so bleak and subsidy-dependent that the government and the World Bank are offering residents money to move so the authorities can, literally, turn out the lights.

For ten thousand years India has been pouring its whole genius into religious experiments. There is no other place in the world where religion has been so intensely and insistently explored. Christianity looks so childish compared to Buddhism that there is no need to oppose the pope.

Silence is always louder than any scream. A scream has a beginning and an end; silence is eternal.

Silence is the scream of the whole existence.

The people are so deaf that it is compassionate towards them to scream as loudly as possible; and they are so insane that they cannot understand silence.

Silence can be understood only by those who know what silence is, who have experienced silence. Perhaps screaming may reach the insane minds of the politicians and the bureaucrats and the theologians and the religious leaders -- because they are full of mad noises themselves. They don't know what silence is.

In the White House, Ronald Reagan's daughter and his son-in-law had seen a ghost -- they thought it was the ghost of Lincoln. Even Ronald Reagan was afraid to be in the White House -- because many other people had seen it, even his dog started barking when others saw the ghost. Soon the White House will be a ghost house; nobody will be ready to live in it.

Love knows to roar like a lion too. Love is not just sweet poetry. If love were just sweet poetry, it could not exist in this insane world. It has to be strong enough -- stronger than hate, stronger than anger -- it has to be a lion's roar. Even if you scream, your scream should come out of your love, out of your compassion -- so that the deaf can hear and the blind can see. Just don't forget in your anger and rage that it is love that is roaring like a lion. Basically it is love. Whatever they have done, and whatever they are doing, is just out of unconsciousness. You cannot be too angry about them: they need more pity and more compassion. Perhaps it may raise the whole consciousness of humanity. So you have to be ready for your great celebration. And it will be a good opportunity, if you can die for truth -- even dancing and singing; with joy, with no anger, just love and compassion.

Look at the world map and cut out the maps of Africa and India, and try to put them together. They match perfectly. There was a time when Africa and India were connected. It is a well-established fact that the continents go on continuously moving. Under the continents, far down deep, they are floating. Africa moved, but the cut where they broke away remained the same. The South Indian languages and the South Indians have some Negroid blood in them. That's why they are black, and that's why their languages don't have anything to do with Sanskrit. They say that life started in Africa, because Africa has chimpanzees, apes, gorillas. Because Indian monkeys are very small, they could not have become man. Mongolian monkeys are also very small; they could not have become man. It is possible that life was born in Africa, and a few chimpanzees moved to Mongolia. They prospered in Mongolia, and then with over-population they started moving towards Europe, to India. There is no contradiction in the two. There is a small fraction of scientists who say that life must have been born in different places simultaneously; it was not one place. That seems to be also relevant, because the Chinese, the Japanese, the whole East, the Far East, does not fit with any theory. Neither does the African theory fit with the Chinese. The African chimpanzees have really thick beards. Look at the Chinese beard: you can count the hairs on your ten fingers. Look at their high cheekbones, which are not seen anywhere else in the world. Perhaps in different places life arose simultaneously. There is no reason to deny it, because the differences are so clearly there. Chinese has nothing to do with Sanskrit -- not even with the alphabet; it is a non-alphabetical language. It has nothing in common with Sanskrit, and nothing in common with Africa. Chinese and Japanese and the Far Eastern people, Taiwanese and Koreans, they must have been born separately. Certainly these people have lived together some place, and it seems that place can only be Mongolia because now Mongolia is almost empty. You will find only reminders of some very ancient cities -- houses, roads -- but nobody lives there. So the people who lived there must have moved because of the scarcity of food; that also seems to be right. And the theory that life was born in Africa ... perhaps one section of life must have been born in Africa. But all these are guesswork!