They'll literally talk about feeding millions of people alligators or put on theatrically staged shows of tying people up to chairs with bags on their heads and executing them via gunshot to the back of the head among other monstrous acts but will cry crocodile tears enough to flood the Great Plains with an ocean and accuse you of being a monster in human skin if you don't want basic human rights for everyone.
It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible
Quote by 
A maximum sentence in the worst Soviet prison in the Stalin era is a kindness to these people.
It is obviously impossible for two things to be bad!
Solzhenitsyn, one of the most influential figures in the western perception of the gulag system, had his cancer treated there and it saved his life. His book is mostly rumors and folktales written as though they were things he had witnessed, which is why editions in some languages call it what he did, a "literary experiment," and his wife further clarified in an interview for NYT decades later that these were folklore. Solzhenitsyn was also an antisemitic freak who somewhat bought into the "Judeo-Bolshevism" thing and was arrested for writing a letter about how the USSR needed to be overthrown while he was an officer in the Red Army on the Eastern Front, favoring an Eastern Orthodox theocratic monarchy.
Robert Conquest, probably the other most influential figure in this perception, claimed more people died in the gulag system than had ever even been entered into it (as we discovered when we gained access to the Soviet archives). This joins the list with other discredited theses from him, such as his thoroughly-debunked idea that the USSR's Great Famine of '32-'33 was a deliberate "terror famine" and a Holocaust-like event. He also preceded his work as a "historian" by working for 8 years in post-war British intelligence as specifically an anti-Soviet propagandist.
Just some fun facts.
Who fucking asked you, shitlib
Oh no I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings in this public post you made!
Here's my trade offer;
You can A) Read through all the first-hand primary source info on the Soviet penal system in this post and come back with a nuanced response and even make an intrllectual critique of it if you see fit.
Or B) make a
shitlib snarky one-liner and be banned from the instance.
I seriously doubt that someone who’s immediate response was to attack and dismiss my post, calling me a “shitlib”, which I’m sure means something to you, is interested in a “nuanced” discussion of any kind.
And if your so called primary source is an American journalist who was allowed to visit some prisons, then I would ask you if you really believe they would allow her to tour the majority of facilities?
I am suspect of propaganda in all its forms. And I’m in no way defending the fascist shithole that the US has become. I am simply pointing out that the US being shit is not a defense of Siberian labor camps, as your post implies.
damn it's so lucky for you that western media is objective and doesn't have any sort of agenda so you can accept it uncritically
Holy shit, an actual unironic pontemkin village claim in the wild. I am in awe of your great intellect mighty sir, have a reddit gold:
lol, lmao
But not suspect of all the western propaganda about Soviet gulags, apparently.
Yes because the rest of her, and Callcott's books both discuss their first-hand investigation of Soviet prisons across the union.
We live in a country that constantly spins outright lies about so-called enemies to justify the crimes against humanity it commits against everyone within and without its boarders.
I am not implying that I am defending the Soviet penal system. I am speaking the truth.
Alright you pass since you put in the effort
Gives a non nuanced, downright moronic, oneliner and then is surprised by the response they get... Many such cases!
It's over folks. Pack up, she wasn't given access to the hiper-gulag hidden in Tselinoyarsk and all the real victims were given wedgies and shoved into lockers so she couldn't interview them...
who would the soviets be putting in prison?
do you think the united states propaganda machine that is responsible for your background vibes based opinion of the gulag system is more or less reliable than literally any other source?
Actually educating yourself about the things you seemingly strongly believe in is a good thing to do, even if you don't think someone on hexbear.net is going to be cordial to you (and it's not exactly like you started out the conversation in a way that screams "good faith argument").
More importantly, if you just assume everything that contradicts what you already believe in is propaganda and not worth looking at you're really just making sure you'll never escape any propaganda or incorrect assumption you've fallen for in the past.
Hey dis u?
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19936948
Alaskaball linked you to an excerpt of an interesting book, and if you wish to read the entire thing I made an epub of it: https://comlib.encryptionin.space/epubs/this-soviet-world/
(I also made an epub of the mentioned Russian Justice)
We can obviously agree that prisons in the soviet union were bad during certain periods of Soviet history. It rose out of the tsarist system and became formalised during one of the most brutal civil wars in history, and its most famous and most explored period was during the most brutal invasion and land war the world has ever seen. But I venture to say that there is a pretty significant difference between electing not to feed the nazis first during a famine, and doing ethnic cleansing tourism.
Good point, here's my reply, gonna spoiler it since it might offend hexbear:
spoiler