(07-07-2020, 12:11 AM)peregrine Wrote:(07-06-2020, 06:58 PM)unity100 Wrote:Quote:USSR was hella corrupt
That's the propaganda on the other side of the pond. An empty, undefined term 'corruption'.
USSR was not a country which let its citizens to die if they were not able to pay for healthcare. Or left its people homeless. Or without education. Or without a proper retirement at a proper age.
US system literally kills people if they cant pay the hospital.
When you legalize corruption like in US, you dont have corruption - all legal. Funny how that works huh...
Oh, yes, Eastern Europe has long history of egalitarian liberty going all the way back to the Tsars, Genghis Khan and various other kings, smaller warlords and potentates. Free land and health care for all people has been their hallmark. Each tribe embraced the other as its brother and all sang songs about it together in 4 part harmony.
Uh, wait.....................that may be all made up.
Actually, maybe the Boyars and their counterparts in neighboring areas didn't really take such good care of their slaves--uh--serfs? Maybe each ethnic tribe who wanted land had to butcher a neighboring tribe to get it. But that's not corruption, is it? After all, it was common practice, which is sort like saying it was legal.
Could it be that Russia went from Boyars to modern oligarchs but had a corruption-free period in the 20th century? Was it really a worker's paradise? From reading Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents, that's not impression I got.
Sorry to go on like that, but your passage above stood out to me as being absurd. The portion pertaining to the US, however, I will not dispute. The vices of one group are not more desirable than the vices of the other, in my view.
I don't see where Unity100 said any of those things. He was talking about the USSR, not the Tsardom, Khans, etc. I'm sure he would agree with you about them being corrupt. Your source Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, had nothing but praise for the Tsars and the Russian Empire, which he found far preferable to the liberalism of the West.
This is just a strawman argument you pulled out to prove, uhhhh, that Slavic people are intrinsically corrupt? I'm not sure what point you were trying to make.
I'm not gonna pretend there were no flaws with the soviet system, but it's a fact that the lives of millions were improved under that system and that the Soviet Union did the lions share of the work in defeating the Nazi regime. After WWII the Soviets thought they had earned the respect of the global community and instead we shut them out leading to deep entrenchment on both sides and an incredible waste of resources on a never-ending arms race. One of the saddest things in modern history is that is we had all come together after the war we could have vastly improved life on Earth and ushered in the harvest on time. I don't think we gain anything by villainizing them.
When the USSR collapsed, crime and corruption skyrocketed. You can find countless studies showing that the majority of Russians felt life was better under the Soviet Union https://www.levada.ru/en/2017/12/25/nost...-the-ussr/