this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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@Aatube @yogthos @NoiseColor
1/3 [most western states (and, in fact, most states) don't suppress discourse as much as the USSR often did.]
I have to partially disagree. While it is likely true that the USSR was more outward with its suppression methods than most western states today, countries, like America for example, do suppress dissent on a regular scale (Campus protest, George Floyd protest are just two notable examples, but there are plenty of more).
@Aatube @yogthos @NoiseColor
2/3 Also, speaking of America again, one of America's suppression methods is suppression through delusion, tricking people into thinking that they're actually free with constant propaganda in media and schools when the reality is that America is just as much (and maybe even more, since it's hard to compare the exact numbers to the Soviet Union) police presence and civilian surveillance as the Soviet Union did (but probably more surveillance given the advancements..
@Aatube @yogthos @NoiseColor
3/3 ...in technology) and all while having the largest prison population in the entire world, possibly being larger than the amount of prisoners in labor camps under Stalin (again, it's hard to compare since records from that era from the Soviet Union are lacking).
There's currently less than 1.4 million prisoners in the US, while official Soviet records show 0.79 million in executions alone under Stalin. Average that by year, and you still have 0.02 million per year.
According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, which averages to 0.58 million per year.
Edit: That's a little bit more than two times the current US prison influx amount, and I didn't account for per capita-ing (modern US has more population in total than USSR ever did).
actual sources seem to disagree with you
https://web.archive.org/web/20121104001152/https://time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2109777,00.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/the-caging-of-america
I only counted those incarcerated. You're counting community service, probation, parole, etc. And my sources are The Guardian and this academic journal.
That's just splitting hairs, but even going with your numbers, it's clearly comparable to the time of peak incarcerations in USSR. So, if we look at how the systems evolve over time, USSR incarceration rate dropped, while US incarceration rate continues to climb.
USSR having double of course isn’t comparable, and the US prison rate has been going down (well, at least until 2019, after which we got COVID and prison rates saw a gigantic dip that has been climbing bit by bit since, but still lower than 2019).
And no, it’s not just splitting hairs. There’s a difference between being constantly surveiled and watched by the state, temporarily (at least nominally); and getting locked up in a festering environment where they neglect your good feeding and, in the USSR’s case, your well-being and being forced to labor, with a much stronger KGB.
The only way you get double is by massively undercounting the actual rate of incarceration in US.
It's amazing how you managed to write this without a hint of irony as if Snowden leaks haven't happened. The level of surveillance that's currently happening in US is far beyond anything KGB could've ever dreamed of.
If you think I'm undercounting, show me a rate of incarceration per the same amount of heads for both the United States and Soviet Union. According to https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-009-9430-2, page 465, "At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, the institutionalized population was over 2.5 million, or 1,558 prisoners per 100,000 population (Table 1). This incarceration rate was ten times that of the United States for the same year." I can email you a PDF of this paper if you want. Even in modern times, the population has been decreasing since 2013 until 2022, and according to Vox, the highest per 100,00 adults never passed 700.
It's "amazing" how all you focus on is the intelligence part while completely ditching the difference between probation and incarceration. Of course there's a difference between being held in a cell and having what's basically a search warrant on you for every step of your life by court order. And on intelligence, even if you completely disregard the judicial vulnerability, the US surveillance agencies still hold far less domestic power than the KGB's domestic cell.
Again, we're comparing to the incarceration rate today.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html
https://nicic.gov/resources/nic-library/all-library-items/growth-incarceration-united-states-exploring-causes-and
I refuse to believe that anybody could be stupid enough to genuinely think this.
Where is the incarceration rate? People getting held pre-trial is a problem, yes, but even then, the gulag held 2.5 million at their height in the 1950s, and that's not even counting anyone pre-trial or adjusting for the population difference between 1950s Soviet Union and modern day USA.
I am comparing to the incarceration rate today. In 2022, the incarceration rate was 700 per 100,000. Unless you have evidence that that rate more than doubled in two years, I don't see how the US has a higher incarceration rate.
Call me stupid all you want, do you still think incarceration vs. correctional supervision is splitting hairs?
These numbers have been challenged by many scholars, Parenti does a great job dissecting these claims in Blackshirts and Reds. You basically cherry pick the numbers you want for USSR while downplaying the numbers in US to make your argument.
I think that you're intentionally playing with the numbers to make your argument work.
Fine, we are both picking figures. If you think the numbers I gave are wrong, give me sourced numbers about the same thing that are right.
Chapter 5 here, references at the end of the book, can also read chapter 6 showing how incarceration rate jumped up dramatically after transition to capitalism https://welshundergroundnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf
I don't think labor camps and prison are comparable to probation and parole. Do you still want to include probation and parole? If not, I think we can safely conclude that the Soviet Union was much more authoritarian. (If you adjust it by capita, you'd have a US prison population of 1.03 million Soviet heads, which is only a few ten thousands more than half the Soviet population.) If yes, why?
As I've already stated repeatedly, I see exclusion of parole completely arbitrary. You could argue that it's not equivalent certainly, but you can't just dismiss it. And again, we're comparing peak incarceration rate in USS right after the revolution with incarceration in US when its functioning regularly. The fact that USSR numbers drop significantly over time while US numbers do not, is what's really key here.
All you've said about it before was that you thought it was "splitting hairs" once. What do you suppose we do with probation then? Is there a Soviet purge-era equivalent with a measure we can compare?
Well, that's what we sought to compare. Both you and EgoCom claimed stuff like "US incarceration rate is higher than what USSR had during Stalin's purges".
It's hard to have numbers drop a frick ton when you've had no arbitrary purging of ideas that led to gulag-levels of arrests.
We're just going in circles here, and it's pretty clear that we're not going to convince each other of anything. So, I'm going to leave it at that. Have a good day.
Having poorly made police officers is way worse than have state policies of persecuting ideas and even forms of art. Unlike what would happen in the USSR, Snowden's leaks were not blocked and promoters of the leak weren't hunted down (except for Snowden himself, which would happen in most countries), and you are free to discuss here without being banned.
Oops, yeah, I forgot about that. But you actually see livestreamed debate about whether suppressing these protests was good (oftentimes it's highly criticized), and you don't just get prosecuted if you just express opinions online. Also, the campus protests were suppressed because the owners of the private property being protested on didn't like it. They get substantial funding from the state, but there's still a difference from the state itself doing it. Like socialists and flat-earthers don't get straight-up stamped out by police, whereas Stalin actively prosecuted people who didn't support pseudobiology.
@Aatube @yogthos @NoiseColor
I'm not at all trying to suggest that Stalinist Russia was more free than modern-day America, just that many people think of America as a free country when it's actually closer to Stalinist Russia than they'd care to recognize.
My point is that the United States is indeed much less authoritarian. Saying that there's no such thing as a state that's more authoritarian or less authoritarian is denying reality.
US incarceration rate is higher than what USSR had during Stalin's purges. It's hard to think of a better measure of how authoritarian a state is than the percentage of the population it keeps behind bars.
https://lemmy.ml/post/17103219/11784747
@Aatube @yogthos @NoiseColor
[Saying that there's no such thing as a state that's more authoritarian or less authoritarian is denying reality.]
To clarify, that's not what I said. I said that there is no such thing as a non-authoritarian state because states are authoritarian by nature, not that there aren't varying degrees of the level of authoritarianism among different states. America is in many ways less authoritarian than the USSR, but it's still authoritarian nonetheless.
Hmm, I understand what you meant to say now. However, by all common discourse and even the term's very original definition, the United States isn't "authoritarian" enough to be considered authoritarian.