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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Why do you say you could publish pro-soviet material in the USA during the cold war? My understanding is that this is not true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

> In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision in Adler v. Board of Education of New York, thus approving a law that allowed state loyalty review boards to fire teachers deemed "subversive".

It had certainly cooled down from outright McCarythism by 1960 but nobody wanted to be accused of Soviet sympathies back then...

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My stepgrandmother was part of the Communist Party USA and continued distributing their newspapers and trying to recruit people until she died. I don't want to softpedal the human-rights abuses that happened in the US, but in fact even the Smith Act prosecutions only imprisoned a dozen people — there was nothing like the gulags in the US (until the War on Drugs, anyway), and it was not difficult to find out the Soviets' side of the story.

You're actually comparing Soviet-era gulags to US prisons? Have you actually looked into them?

Yes. The overall numbers at present are broadly similar (2.2 million prisoners in the US at present, compared to 2.6 million at the peak of GULAG, though that was drawn from a smaller population), but US prisons have much lower death rates (especially compared to WWII-era GULAG — hopefully there will be no similar invasion of the US and so we will not have the opportunity to see if a wartime US massacres its prisoners in a similar fashion), and a smaller fraction of the prisoners are slave laborers (in GULAG it was nearly 100%).

Presumably if the US is beginning to institute Soviet-style censorship, it indicates a strong risk that prisoner numbers will go up and the treatment will get worse.

Have you? Find it very hard to believe that there's such a disproportionate number of criminals in the US.

China is locking up huge numbers of Muslims simply for having a religion and it still comes no where near the number of Americans incarcerated today without even having faced trial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

Three words: war. on. drugs.

Which would you rather be in? A US prison with basic rights, healthcare, etc, or a Chinese labor/reeducation camp, or Soviet era Gulag? The systems are incomparable, whether or not the numbers are the comparable, which is what I was talking about. Yes, I've read the Gulag Archipeligo and watched several Solzhenitsyn interviews, and had relatives suffer through that era. Not close to the same thing. At all.

This is just silly. I prefer to be in none, like a free human being treated with some basic rights.

You won't find that in the US or China. As much as it hurts some people's sensibilities think that's a fair thing to say. I'd be terrified to be a black person in many places in the United States. Hilariously think China is actually more free for the average human. Spent fair amount of time in both and as an outsider is my honest opinion. Where is best to be a political dissident is obviously a very different story.

If certain people want to repeat ad nauseum their respective propaganda media talking points fine. But the world is watching. History will judge you no matter how salty you get on the internet.

Survivorship bias is a very real phenomenon, does anyone disagree that the United States has both the most people incarcerated along with per-capita rates of prisoners?

The numbers are right there, are Americans just bad people in general and deserve to be locked up en masse? Don't think that's the case, would love to see anyone defend the status quo as it exists.

>Hilariously think China is actually more free for the average human

Until you're critical of the party leadership, or have forbidden religious beliefs, and then you get whisked away to a concentration camp (if you're lucky!) or get surgically parted out for organ transplants, often without anaesthetic.

The US has plenty of problems, but to say China is more free is a very distasteful and not particularly funny joke.

Is that not right there in my comment?

Y'all need to take a serious fucking step back and evaluate the words said here. I love America and everyone in it. People stateside are incredibly nice people on the whole and sometimes you need a rude foreigner to say some blunt stuff for the sake of honesty.

Get a grip on these criticisms mate. I stand by everything said above. It's fucking true and challenge you to prove otherwise.

I wouldn't care nor be commenting if I didn't like you guys, leave the nationalism at the door please.

China is far more free. 100% stand by that statement. Have you tried living there lately?

Its astounding how many people are willfully ignoring what's happening in the biggest country on Earth for the sake of some sort of nationalist pride matter. Do so at your peril. Honestly. The media is straight up lying to you about what's happening there and yet people lap it up.

I spent a bit of time living in one of the post-Soviet central asian states, and after a while there this was a conclusion I came to, too.

Living in a dictatorship, but feeling more personal freedom than I ever had in the US.

On a day-to-day basis, there's significantly more curtailment of personal freedom in the US than there was in one of the stans.

The one thing I wouldn't feel safe doing there? Openly speaking against the government. Here, however, if I were part of a movement that was gaining any strength or public good will against the political and capitalist powers that run the US, I'd still be afraid for my life.

Like how nearly every leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, MO, has been killed over the last few years. That's not a coincidence, not a random series of killings.

Wikipedia says that BLM founders are:

Alicia Garza - alive and well

Patrisse Cullors - alive and well

Opal Tometi - alive and well

Under "key people" - Shaun King, DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie, Tef Poe, Erica Garner. Of those, only Erica Garner is not alive - she died in 2017 of two heart attacks and the following brain damage.

BLM is a decentralized movement, so there are a lot of people that could be called "leaders", but clearly claim that "nearly every leader" has been killed is false. I suspect none were actually killed for any activities related to BLM (I did not check that but consider it plausible), though in large enough group of people there would always be people that die prematurely, either due to illness, or accidents, or crime (many BLM activists live in places where crime situation is not very good).

I think you'd better to put down the conspiracy Kool-Aid for a while.

> China is far more free. 100% stand by that statement. Have you tried living there lately?

I haven't but I heard from people that did that you can't even connect to the Internet there without government interference. That's some definition of freedom that you don't find in every dictionary.

The Americans sucking the straw of Fox news propaganda and genuinely believing that the USA is the freest bestest country in the world aren't on this forum man. We get it.

I gotta push back on this "China is more free" thing. China is definitely a very free place when you roll in as a white foreigner flush with a high value currency. I've been there, I remember thinking it's crazy what you can get away with there.

But this is like arguing you're more free there because you don't have to wear a seatbelt. Sure. Not having the government force you to wear a seatbelt means you are more free, by some definitions of free.

But it also means that when I'm driving around I'm not free to relax as much as I am on an American freeway because I have to watch out for shit falling off uninspected, falling to pieces construction vehicles. It means crossing the road is a game of frogger. It means I have to worry about whether my food will put me out for a week.

And if I'm native Chinese, I don't get nearly the freedoms in China that white dudes teaching English do. Putting aside the cultural restrictions (your family not letting you study art and shit like that) you actually DO have to worry about what you put on social media, because unlike a visiting white tourist, the PRC will have no problems with whisking you off to a reeducation camp.

> Where is best to be a political dissident is obviously a very different story

Did you know that Solzhenitsyn was successfully treated from cancer by evil communist doctors while being in Gulag that did not have any healthcare? Did you also know that while being in Gulag Solzhenitsyn was a "stukach" who reported of his fellow prisoners to the camp's authorities (he writes about it himself in one of his novels)?

Have you? [1]

"The emergent consensus among scholars who utilize official archival data is that of the 18 million who were sent to the Gulag from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million perished there or as a result of their detention."

yeah... prisons in the US are definitely worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

You seem to be saying that some 91% of GULAG prisoners survived their imprisonment, with some 67000 deaths per year on average; while GULAG population varied greatly during this time, if we assume an average of 1 million prisoners, we will not be far wrong. (The peak was officially 2.7 million, near the end of that period, slightly more than the current US incarcerated population.) This works out to a death rate of some 6700 deaths per 100'000 people per year, very roughly; this is clearly worse than the US prison system's mortality rate of 264 deaths per 100'000 people per year, by a factor of 20 or 30. (This figure does not include people who died as a result of their detention, but it seems safe to say that the number would be lower even if they were included.)

But many, perhaps most, of those deaths were during the German invasion, which killed about 25 million of the 169 million subjects of the USSR (most of them not in GULAG). It remains to be seen how well the US cares for the populations of its prisons and concentration camps if it suffers an invasion that kills an eighth of its population. Hopefully such an event will remain safely in the realm of speculation.

The government has more leeway when acting as an employer.

McCarthyism affect wide ranges of industry, including the entertainment industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist

You can be fired from many places for wrong kind of speech right now. That's not an issue of the USA, it's the issue of the employer. The government, as far as I know, did not mandate the firing, it only said that if somebody wanted to fire a teacher who is a fan of Joseph Stalin they don't have to let that person to indoctrinate their children but may let him go so he'd seek some other employment. And there was plenty of things supportive of USSR published in the US during the cold war.

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