Funny how every one of these ardent anti-coms will fail to describe these prisons as sounding anything worse than a pretty regular prison (and far less horrific than prisons in the US), and they always have some ancestor who “suffered” in them, but tells stories like this about how it was unpleasant, but not exactly the “all murder all the time” that anti-coms like to imply.
I’ve thought about why they scream “GULAG!!!” so much, and I think it is because concepts like imprisonment and innocents are so heavily manipulated in western thought. Prisoners in the US “deserve” pain and suffering because they are “bad people” so that makes their conditions ok. US good, therefore people put in prison for going against the US status quo are bad. The USSR was the opposite, they were an “evil” country, which means people opposing that country were automatically “good” and therefore “innocent.”
I notice literally every single one of these gulag shrieking anticoms fail to mention why anyone was ever locked up, and if they do, it’s always a vague “opposing the evil soviets.”
And every time you look into their history, you find that their “opposition” was more along the lines of “supporting the nazis as a 5th column.”
While I agree with your last line in spirit (the West demonstrated many times that they would uphold literal nazis as innoncent victims of communism if it served their propaganda purposes), it is important to note and repeat anytime it comes up that 95% of gulag inmates were ordinary, non-political criminals, according to the CIA:
No worries, and to be clear the point you ended up making isn’t unimportant either - we shouldn’t hyper focus on the 95% statistic and thereby seem to acknowledge the lib idea that any actual “political prisoner” in the USSR was an innocent saint. Counter-revolutionary actions naturally can and should be punished (depending on severity) in a socialist society.
Funny how every one of these ardent anti-coms will fail to describe these prisons as sounding anything worse than a pretty regular prison (and far less horrific than prisons in the US), and they always have some ancestor who “suffered” in them, but tells stories like this about how it was unpleasant, but not exactly the “all murder all the time” that anti-coms like to imply.
I’ve thought about why they scream “GULAG!!!” so much, and I think it is because concepts like imprisonment and innocents are so heavily manipulated in western thought. Prisoners in the US “deserve” pain and suffering because they are “bad people” so that makes their conditions ok. US good, therefore people put in prison for going against the US status quo are bad. The USSR was the opposite, they were an “evil” country, which means people opposing that country were automatically “good” and therefore “innocent.”
I notice literally every single one of these gulag shrieking anticoms fail to mention why anyone was ever locked up, and if they do, it’s always a vague “opposing the evil soviets.”
And every time you look into their history, you find that their “opposition” was more along the lines of “supporting the nazis as a 5th column.”
While I agree with your last line in spirit (the West demonstrated many times that they would uphold literal nazis as innoncent victims of communism if it served their propaganda purposes), it is important to note and repeat anytime it comes up that 95% of gulag inmates were ordinary, non-political criminals, according to the CIA:
https://medium.com/@QueenDystopia/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia-dfcd9f4d223b
Yeah, good call. That was kind of my point, that most of them were criminals but it kind of got away from me there, thanks for clarifying!
No worries, and to be clear the point you ended up making isn’t unimportant either - we shouldn’t hyper focus on the 95% statistic and thereby seem to acknowledge the lib idea that any actual “political prisoner” in the USSR was an innocent saint. Counter-revolutionary actions naturally can and should be punished (depending on severity) in a socialist society.