Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

nevalalee.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 77 posts

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#61

Post by poweronselftest »

darawk wrote: post #42
mushbino wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A relatively small percentage were political prisoners, but when you compare the number of people who have received very lengthy sentences for minor drug possession, in some cases life, how is that any better? Not to mention Jim Crow in the US at the time. We have the largest prison population in the world by a considerable margin. Most of the people in our jails and prisons are there for drug offenses and crimes of…

Of course they were a small percentage. That just means they imprisoned a lot of people, though. The absolute number of political prisoners was extremely large, in the millions.

There was no rule of law in the USSR. Sentencing was arbitrary. Your typical "thief" was quite often a person who inhabited the apartment someone else wanted, or a person who's position someone wanted at work. Write to the authorities that you saw them stealing: done! There were prison quotes to fill, most seriously. The United States has absolutely nothing on the Soviet Union.

Only a person who has no experience outside the realm of Western existence could believe such a thing as Soviet (or today, Chinese) statistics. People were disappeared, summarily shot in basements, all the time. The whole system worked like that, from prisoners in prisons to the production of basic commodities: https://soviet_intelligence.enacademic.com/381/Uzbek_Cotton_.... Everything was lies and murder.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#62

Post by poweronselftest »

ncmncm wrote: post #51
mushbino wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part is inaccurate and where did I say anything contradicting what you're saying? I've studied Russian history for many years. We know much more about the gulags since Glasnost and the opening of the archives. We can now compare actual numbers against Solzhenitsyn's. I've studied this quite a bit and could go on forever, but here's a link to one post on AskHistorians: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comme…

During WWII, German prisoners, and anybody else drafted into service for Germany and captured, were killed or sent to the Gulags. During and after the war, anyone who had been taken prisoner and returned to Soviet custody were considered deserters, and shot or sent to the Gulags. Civilians in places first overrun by German and then Soviet forces were considered collaborators and commonly killed or sent to the Gulags.…

> particularly gold mines.

The commenters who compared prisons in the United States with Gulags, where you were sent to dig for gold basically by hand, poorly dressed at -30C for 12 hours.

> So, not just prisons or labor camps. It is hard to imagine how 81% or 87% could be identified as ordinary criminals in the absence of any semblance of due process. A tortured confession is not a verdict.

It takes a special kind of ignorance to believe statistics like this, and then to believe that being a "thief" makes being sent to prison okay, while complaining about incarceration in the United States, where people are incarcerated for petty crimes. It is mind bending.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#63

Post by poweronselftest »

mushbino wrote: post #45
darawk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they were a small percentage. That just means they imprisoned a lot of people, though. The absolute number of political prisoners was extremely large, in the millions.

The height of the US prison population was in 2008 when about 1,000 in 100,000 U.S. adults were behind bars. In the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalin purges is was about 714 to 892 imprisoned per 100,000 USSR residents. From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...

This is a Whataboutism predicated on:

- the belief in Soviet statistics and

- a belief in the comparability of imprisonment in the United States and the Soviet Union.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#64

Post by poweronselftest »

obscoth wrote: post #52
bennysonething wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole woke my movement is this type of thinking all over again. What you are, where you are from, what group you identify with gives your argument weight. Not your actual thoughts. The scary thing is I'm experiencing this being accepted as normal in the work place. To challenge this type of thinking is to become a heretic. Or worse a racist. I keep my views to myself.

I don’t see the problem here. Do we want bigots to feel free to spew their hatred unopposed?

I think the question is whether these people are actually bigots.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#65

Post by mushbino »

poweronselftest wrote: post #62
ncmncm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During WWII, German prisoners, and anybody else drafted into service for Germany and captured, were killed or sent to the Gulags. During and after the war, anyone who had been taken prisoner and returned to Soviet custody were considered deserters, and shot or sent to the Gulags. Civilians in places first overrun by German and then Soviet forces were considered collaborators and commonly killed or sent to the Gulags.…

> particularly gold mines. The commenters who compared prisons in the United States with Gulags, where you were sent to dig for gold basically by hand, poorly dressed at -30C for 12 hours. > So, not just prisons or labor camps. It is hard to imagine how 81% or 87% could be identified as ordinary criminals in the absence of any semblance of due process. A tortured confession is not a verdict. It takes a special kind o…

I'm open to being wrong if you have evidence to the contrary, but you've only been offering anecdotes and ad-hominems.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#66

Post by mushbino »

poweronselftest wrote: post #63
mushbino wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The height of the US prison population was in 2008 when about 1,000 in 100,000 U.S. adults were behind bars. In the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalin purges is was about 714 to 892 imprisoned per 100,000 USSR residents. From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...

This is a Whataboutism predicated on: - the belief in Soviet statistics and - a belief in the comparability of imprisonment in the United States and the Soviet Union.

Honest question: where do you get the information that you're operating on? It sounds like you're just presenting opinion and you don't know a whole lot about Soviet history, gulags, or the US prison system.

You do know that we have forced labor in the US and slavery is allowed under the 13th amendment if you are convicted of a crime. Prisoners are frequently lent out as cheap labor to private companies.

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

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#67

Post by TimTheTinker »

WaxProlix wrote: post #48
TimTheTinker wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reads like propaganda, trying to hand-wave away one of the greatest works of journalism in the 20th century. Of course it reads like a novel and not an exposé - he had to memorize a huge portion of it. But it's an accurate indictment nonetheless.

I think that you seeing this work of fiction as one of the greatest works of journalism of the 20th century is exactly why I posted. I agree that the gulag system sucks? So don't think I'm in favor of the USSR or something, because I'm not. But the book's content isn't real, it's largely fabrication, and you can say something like "I think he speaks to the truth of the situation despite not accurately representing fa…

Solzhenitsyn is required reading today for Russion schoolchildren. That alone ought to speak to its importance and accuracy -- not of figures per se (unbeknownst to him, some of his sources were not accurate), but the reality of the horrors committed by the Soviets, which he experienced first-hand.

Have you read at least the first few chapters of The Gulag Archipelago?

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#68

Post by JPKab »

poweronselftest wrote: post #61
darawk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they were a small percentage. That just means they imprisoned a lot of people, though. The absolute number of political prisoners was extremely large, in the millions.

There was no rule of law in the USSR. Sentencing was arbitrary. Your typical "thief" was quite often a person who inhabited the apartment someone else wanted, or a person who's position someone wanted at work. Write to the authorities that you saw them stealing: done! There were prison quotes to fill, most seriously. The United States has absolutely nothing on the Soviet Union. Only a person who has no experience out…

Western intellectuals spent decades defending and minimizing Soviet atrocities, because like many intellectuals, they really believed Utopia is possible, if only everyone thought like them.

They still do. The admiration for the Chinese Communist Party's response to COVID has been very telling. Note that praise of Taiwan, who handled it phenomenally without welding people into apartment buildings, has been limited in comparison.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#69

Post by JPKab »

mushbino wrote: post #66
poweronselftest wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a Whataboutism predicated on: - the belief in Soviet statistics and - a belief in the comparability of imprisonment in the United States and the Soviet Union.

Honest question: where do you get the information that you're operating on? It sounds like you're just presenting opinion and you don't know a whole lot about Soviet history, gulags, or the US prison system. You do know that we have forced labor in the US and slavery is allowed under the 13th amendment if you are convicted of a crime. Prisoners are frequently lent out as cheap labor to private companies. https://en.w…

I would encourage you to look at the Soviet statistics on the Ukrainian famine, and ask yourself if any of them can be trusted, and why you have trusted them in the past.

We're talking about a government that suppressed its own scientists to a point where a critical design flaw in a nuclear reactor was ignored until the world's worst nuclear accident occurred.

And like a good little ideologue, you proceed with whataboutism, assuming that people like me haven't called legislators to demand an end to private prisons and prison labor. I have.

Re: Solzhenitsyn’s Rosary (2016)

#70

Post by burntoutfire »

mushbino wrote: post #45
darawk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they were a small percentage. That just means they imprisoned a lot of people, though. The absolute number of political prisoners was extremely large, in the millions.

The height of the US prison population was in 2008 when about 1,000 in 100,000 U.S. adults were behind bars. In the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalin purges is was about 714 to 892 imprisoned per 100,000 USSR residents. From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...

The stats talk about number of people imprisoned in a particular moment of time. It doesn't say if a part of them for example died over the next couple of months due to cold and starvation and were topped up with new inmates That would make the number look unchanged during the next count.
Post reply on HN