“My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea”

>I don't think Noam Chomsky has ever been sympathetic to the USSR, he just said that the US was not much better than USSR.

Given what the USSR was, I think that qualifies as 'sympathetic'.

It is a complex system with many actors on different levels.

You can see it on several levels:

- People in power are interested to hold the power as long as they can, and that's why they suppress separatists movements

- Countries which allows such separations become weaker and don't survive, because separation is manipulatable process, and damage country's economy and power

- concept of ethics is very driven by government: they tell people that it is their land, and nobody can take it from them

US sanctions worsen the already bad economic situation but to claim the problem is caused by US sanctions is extremely misleading. We were already seeing severe shortages way before the 2014 sanctions (which were placed on individuals, anyway). The reasons are too complex to put in a short snippet.

Crimea and Venezuela are hard to compare. While there's the common point of having an authoritarian government, they're different in many other factors such as public support of the government, geography, pre-existing economy and timing and severity of the sanctions.

Though this is very true for both, I think:

> What these policies forget is a lot of general citizens don't have much choice over the regime that leads them. They are just often people doing their thing.

and from the POV of the authoritarian government on the sanctioned country it makes sense to double down upon receiving sanctions because the sanctioning country(ies) don't have a bigger stick than that (unless they resort to military aggression).

> It seems like the US has become what the USSR was

As somebody who actually lived in the USSR I call bullshit on this. There's a huge difference between arresting people for saying something the powers don't like and restricting business links to certain aggressive dictatorial regimes. True, many citizens of those regimes suffer twice - once because they live under a dictatorial regime and second time because of the effect of economic sanctions. And it is true that economic sanctions disrupt free flow of information and trade. They are a kind of warfare but one where people don't get killed - which is not good, all warfare is bad, but better than the other kind.

It is bad when there is a war between two countries. It is worse when the government wages war on its people, and that what happened in the USSR. It is nothing like what is happening in the US. Nowhere in the US you can be arrested or imprisoned for saying anything - including praising USSR, Russia, Putin, ayatollas, Hezbollah, whatever you like.

> The US doesn't yet have massive prison camp systems full of political dissidents

"Yet" is extremely disingenuous here - there's absolutely no indication US is anywhere close to have it, on the contrary, US has the strongest free speech laws among all developed countries, and the high courts consistently reject any attempt to change that. In fact, what I am hearing every day is how there's too much free speech and how it should be suppressed and restricted for my own good, lest I read something wrong and get offended.

> but then, for the first couple of decades, neither did the USSR.

Technically might be true, if you say reduce first couple of decades to first decade - Gulag started in 1929. But not because the bolsheviks were kind of heart - before, they just murdered whoever they considered the enemy of the people (or, in rare cases, kicked them out of the country). After Stalin came to power, he realized there's a lot of work to be done and he can't use the capitalist way of paying people for the work, and if he just keeps killing everybody there would be nobody left to do his grand projects. So he used the other way - put people in prison and force to work (of course, he still killed plenty but some were spared for prison camps). Even Soviet space program and nuclear program was done by people who were effectively prisoners (word to look for is "sharashka").

Not every issue where speech is limited is an issue of free speech. If you're told that you can not write on my house's wall, it's about speech, but not issue of free speech because it's my house and I decide who writes on it. If a mafia boss is imprisoned for ordering a contract murder, it's not issue of free speech, because even though the order was spoken, the murder is the crime that is punished, not speech. If you are not allowed to talk in the movie theater while movie is screening, it is not an issue of free speech - it's the issue of it being not the right place to speak. If there's a trade embargo that prohibits providing services to nationals of Elbonia and an Elbonian can't publish her speech - it's not the issue of free speech because the issue here is the embargo, not the speech. Having "speech" somewhere in the picture does not automatically makes it an issue of free speech. The same speech would be easily published if produced by anybody else. There's no issue with the content of the speech.