(07-07-2020, 12:11 AM)peregrine Wrote: 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.
Leaving aside doing referrals all the way back to freaking Genghis Khan is white supremacist narrative that plagues Angloamerican literature in order to equate the Eastern Bloc with 'evil' and therefore trying to delegitimize them by advocating guilt by association because it cant bring economic arguments against them, and Genghis Khan has nothing to do with Eastern European society or ethnicity...
Quote: 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.
...if you go back that much as you did, you would find William the Conqueror massacring 40,000 people in a go after having conquered England. It would start from there, and go all the way to how Anglosphere establishment eradicated entire North America, almost eradicated Australia and was on its way to eradicate various other segments in Africa until modern times caught up.
English establishment just declared that the Native Americans were 'not human' and it was ok to kill them - and it was even for their own good!
Eradication - there is no other such examples of genocide in history.
There is no known case of invasion/occupation/conquest in history in which the conquerors totally eradicated the natives one by one and took their place after exterminating them. This includes early indo-European invasions in bronze age, Genghis Khan's conquests, and any other example that can be pulled out of history.
Conquests always took the form of conquering the local population and establishing oneself as the elite while going on to intermingle with the population. There are no exceptions to that.
Even the supposed eradication of Britons by Anglosaxons as counted by Bede turned out to be false narrative - it was another case of intermingling, and to a level much lesser than what was thought.
Genghis Khan in particular - the deal was simple: Join us, or die. If you joined, you were conquered like any other conquered society.
Native Americans didnt have such a choice. They were declared non human and they were eradicated.
If you try to go that far back, things go very bad for the argument which you very flimsily tried to make.
Quote: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.
The above argument is unintelligible. "There were Boyars and serfdom back in Eastern Europe in Middle Ages."
That is your argument against healthcare in Eastern Bloc?
That does not sound sane, im afraid. Or you are grasping at straws.
Quote:Sorry to go on like that, but your passage above stood out to me as being absurd.
What's absurd is making referrals to ~1000 years earlier in an attempt to invalidate free healthcare in Eastern Bloc. That does not make any kind of sense.
Quote:The portion pertaining to the US, however, I will not dispute.
Then your argument was invalid from the start and it did not even need making. You talked about freaking Genghis Khan and medieval kingdoms in an attempt to vilify Eastern Bloc because free healthcare or guaranteed jobs were too strong arguments against contemporary American society.
(07-06-2020, 09:14 PM)Black Dragon Wrote: At least in the early days, the USSR had people killed and imprisoned for political bullshit reasons.
The reasons were not bullshit at all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_int..._Civil_War
~18 countries of the 'free world' invaded Russia under the leadership of '(then) leader of the free world' Great Britain, in order to repress the people and reinstall Tzar and aristocracy.
This was accompanied by internal proto-fascist elements which are grouped into 'Whites'.
When the invasion failed because there was zero support in those countries for a new war after so many died in World War I, the 'free countries' started giving funding and weapons to the fascists in former Russia in order to have them take over.
Even still, only a fraction of white leaders were prosecuted as such, and most were integrated into later Soviet society, and many from the positions which they have occupied before the revolution - clerks, engineers, managers and other positions. Those who were in leadership positions were rarely spared of course.
Especially people like 'Admiral Kolchak', who was the leader of the White Army in the East, who was so very much lauded in British press as a 'freedom fighter', who was hanging entire villages from telegraph poles if they did not agree to his demands. You can understand how the Soviet armies which liberated their own regions, their own villages, felt, after seeing their relatives hanging from telegraph poles. There was little mercy for those who did such acts.
Neither such crimes are 'bullshit crimes'.
You can go to prison for less in US today. US president has the right to kidnap and indefinitely hold anyone without showing any reason at all. This is an open, known, actual law. No other country's president or pm has such an open legal right.
But things appear the other way because hypocrisy plagues Anglosphere establishment - lies like Iraqi WMDs are not new things, neither an entire establishment could maintain such a lie for 8 years unless entire establishment was created, trained, and geared for doing that - not one single media outlet or one single major politician broke the ranks during 8 years and contested the lie of nonexistent WMDs. Not one single of them. Each and every one of them pushed the lie in lockstep fervently.
Now they are not talking about that in order to have it forgotten. But, it will not be forgotten this time, because we have internet. If we didnt, it would have been forgotten like every single case of lying and misrepresenting before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoot_Suit_Riots
There. So much as wearing the wrong size of pants would get you shoved into prison in 1930s US, the exact same period with early USSR. Because, you would have shown that you were 'uppity' despite being from a 'lesser' ethnicity. Latino, in that particular case. The supposed freedom pertained to the 'right demographic' and among them, the sufficiently wealthy. Not to anyone else.
Nobody knows this better than Blacks, who were already shoved into prison system as slave labor after slavery was reconstituted through the prison system after Civil War.
Only to be interrupted by the manpower needs of US during World War 2 and the following Civil Rights movement, those who are of the 'right ethnic background' took initiative into their own hands by launching the 'War on Drugs' to reinstitute slavery through prison.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nixon-ad...019-7?IR=T
And lo and behold, today there is actual slavery through the prison system now. And this time, it does not even discriminate based on color - any person of any color is profitable as slave labor for the owners of the prison system and the corporations which utilize them.
How about that for psychopathy? Implementing a society-wide slave labor system justified through 'law and order'. Targeting the opposition demographic which prevented them from waging war abroad.
And yet, Soviets are the bad people for persecuting actual armed combatants who took arms against their own country with the backing of foreign invaders and massacred their own countrymen as if they were animals. To bring back a brutal, repressive aristocracy which lived in extravaganza on the backs of their people who perished in poverty.
The level of hypocrisy and deceit which accompanies the sociopathy in Anglosphere establishment is unparalleled in history. Im making this as a statement based on actual history - even the most sociopathic social constructs in society did not deceitfully portray themselves as democratic or freedom-loving. Thats what separates Anglosphere establishment from every single existing establishment including Francophile, German, Italian, other western establishments and historical establishments. The level of sociopathic deceit is unparalleled.
The only analogy that can be made is how Nazis also declared many different peoples as sub human and eradicated them.
But...
Even Nazis declared those people sub human - not 'inhuman'. That is what the Anglosphere establishment did to Native Americans, Aborigines and others. They did not see them fit even as slave labor. They considered them animals which need eradicating.
There isnt another example of this in history.
(07-07-2020, 09:07 AM)Spaced Wrote: I don't see where Unity100 said any of those things. He was talking about the USSR, not the Tsardom, Khans, etc.
In an amazing display of the effectiveness of establishment propaganda, peregrine just repeated what the openly white supremacist segments of Anglosphere literature used for a century to vilify their Cold War enemy - 'Genghis Khan'. Despite it does not make any sense to any educated or well read person who does not have racial superiority tendencies - so, Genghis Khan was a bad person - what does this have to do with Eastern Europe, and what does that have to do with USSR.
But if there is any tendency in someone to feeling of superiority or adherence to the concept of 'races', then guilt by association transfers from Genghis Khan to 'Eastern Europeans who mixed with Mongols' (thats another 'bad word'), and then it transfers to Russians per 19th century propaganda by British establishment, and then it transfers all the way to Soviet Union because, well, 'race'.
This is an example of how negative manipulators use feelings of superiority or 2d-remnant sentiments of race when 3d entities still adhere to them.
"Us versus others"
Quote: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.
He went further than that - he advocated peace with Nazi Germany, expressed support for fascists during Ww2 even as those Nazis massacred 13 million Soviet civilians.
When fascist regime ended in Spain, he went on Spanish TV and urged Spaniards to not let go of fascism.
That's when the Western establishment stopped using him as a propaganda device against Eastern Bloc - he just went too far bonkers for them to be able to use them.
Quote: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.
That was the point which he unwittingly carried from Angloamerican propaganda literature.
Quote: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.
Indeed, and...
Quote:i don't think we gain anything by villainizing them.
We dont have anything to gain from that. We have a lot to lose.
But...
Those elite who own the Western establishment, especially Anglosphere establishment, have much to gain:
Through that vilification USSR is vilified, and through vilification of USSR socialism, communism etc are vilified, and through that, any policy that would better the lives of the people by reducing the power and wealth of the elite is vilified
This way US ended up with a healthcare system that makes profits by leaving people to die.
Its a situation inexplicable in any given society in any given point in history - no one could ever justify letting large segments of population to die despite having the means to save them. Many societies in history would see that as delirious, because it reduces your population and weakens your society. "You have the medicine to save them, why are you withholding it"...
Quote: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/
Because 'Chicago Boys' pushed neoliberal 'freedom economics' to Russia. 3 million Russians are estimated to have died in the ensuing 'free market' in which people had to eat pigeons to live.
As a result ~60% of Russians, ~64% of East Germans want communism back.
Even as in today's Russia, people are not just left to die when they cant pay for healthcare. Their socialized healthcare system is weak, but it still does not just let people to die for profit like in US.
And all that sociopathy in US is justified through, well, 'freedom'...
Freedom for whom...