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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

Actually, my original statement was based off the reappearing theme in many governments of "shoot the messenger". They're model was wrong and they didn't want to see what the correction was. I actually really had no comment on the populace in general and it seems they had their own disagreements.

For the purpose of the article (and my comment) it really doesn't matter how the populace felt. My second comment had some snark due to your "idiotic statements" comment. But, there is a lot of reported history of purges, removal from film (had an article right here on HN about that), and exile of people whose opinions didn't jive with the current regime.

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Saying something very contrary to the establishment always had consequences (and still has, even in the US). Under Stalin, the consequences were lethal. At other times, plenty of people disagreed with the establishment and were just fine. My problem with your original statement was that it was very much a blanket statement. It applied to some parts of USSR's history and less to others.

In USSR, I recall propaganda that said that everyone in the US was racist and that blacks were uniformly mistreated. Of course, the reality is that there was slavery, there was the civil rights movement and that now things are different. Broad statements like that smack of propaganda.

"My problem with your original statement was that it was very much a blanket statement. It applied to some parts of USSR's history and less to others."

I am pretty sure the statement applied to the whole run of the USSR. Maybe more in parts and less in others, but they ignored the reality of their situation.

You seem to be trying to add things to what I said that have nothing to do with the statement and truly I am never happy with the "well your just as bad/worse" argument. It really doesn't have anything to do with what I said or prove me wrong. For example, the whole second paragraph of the above post has nothing to do with what I said.

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