The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

by Michael Malice

Yet unlike Sartre or Dreiser or virtually all of the “400 leading Americans,” Vice President Wallace had visited the Soviet Union personally. And not only did he visit, he toured the Siberian Gulag town of Magadan himself. “Over 40,000,000 people have taken the place of the 7,000,000—mostly convicts—who miserably existed there under Imperial Russia,” Wallace explained. He compared the Siberian growth in population to how “America after the Civil War developed her wild West, pushing triumphantly to the Pacific and creating what Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Denver mean today.”[cccvi] One might think that perhaps the climate and therefore livability in Los Angeles would in and of itself make the comparison to Siberian development a reach, but that was hardly the worst of it. Wallace credulously reported his Russian contact telling him that, “Twelve years ago the first settlers arrived and put up eight prefabricated houses. Today Magadan has 40,000 inhabitants and all are well housed.”[cccvii] Wallace helpfully explained that “urban growth in northern Siberia is a proof that the climate is not an insuperable obstacle to settlement in the Arctic,” as if a bunch of adventurous families had all decided to pack up and try to make their claim in Siberia. He was just blown away by these plucky Russians: “The remarkable fact is that this Siberian urban growth is taking place in advance of rail and motor-road communications.”