The comment you are replying to was rife with absolute inaccuracies. I can assure you you won't get anywhere trying to argue against that person.
Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned by Stalin because while on the front lines fighting against the Nazis he wrote a letter that was intercepted with statements in it critical of Stalin's poor execution in supplying the army.
The parent commenter doesn't even get this basic fact right and flips it on its head. Denial effects like this are the mark of a true ideologue, and as you pointed out the whataboutism is also a tale for cognitive dissonance. And the dismissive attitude towards gulags is also indicative of somebody shutting out information that would undermine a fragile ego clinging to ideology for purpose.
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/comments/3j2un8/is_so...
The biggest specialist in this subject, Viktor Zemskov, who worked in the Soviet archives in the period of 'Perestroika' gives the following facts1 "In 1937 there were 1,196,369 prisoners and 87% of them were ordinary non-political criminals like thieves, cons, etc. In 1938 in GULAG were 1,881,570 prisoners and 81% of them were ordinary criminals.
What do you say to a person who cites Soviet statistics in earnest?
What do you say to a person who, in one comment, rails against incarceration in the United States, only to say that in the Soviet Union the GULAG wasn't so bad because... "87% of them were ordinary non-political criminals like thieves, cons, etc."
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. The choice which often depended on availability of transportation.
Gulag terms were often only a few years because the lifespan of prisoners at many sites was short, particularly gold mines.
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.
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.
Your comment was a littany of attempts at character assassination largely unrelated to the work in question. The idea that Russian gulags were "just a prison" is a ridiculous characterization that no historian would agree with. They were prisons for political prisoners, who were there warehoused there to keep them from speaking out against the regime, and they were put there without due process of law. The idea that that is even remotely comparable to the American judicial system is just completely ahistorical Stalinist apologism.
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 poverty.
The US has a far larger prison population as a percentage of total population right now than the Soviet Union did even at the height of Stalin's purges. We have access to the Soviet archives now. We have actual numbers on these things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're setting up straw men and attributing lots of arguments to me that I'm not making. I spent a month in Kyiv last year, went to the Holodomor museum, and just finished a book about it not too long ago. The famine was very much a real thing. I've also been to Chernobyl, but I'm not sure why you're bringing any of this up.
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.
How is this whataboutism? I'm in no way apologizing for gulags, but the "Socialism and Marxism always leads to utter destruction" take is so tired and insulting to those who actually study history and political science.
Also, this "Ultimately that adherence to a singular ideology, with aggressive suppression of all others, leads to every subsequent horror." You do realize this holds true under every economic system, right. It was true under feudalism and it's absolutely true under Capitalism. That's kind of the nature of a system.
Edit: The point of bringing up the anti-semitism and Fascism was to show that his views, pretty much all around, were strongly forbidden in the Soviet Union at the time. Absolute free speech works fairly well in America, but you have to understand that at the time in that part of the world there were many different cultures with high-tensions sharing the same space. If hate speech was allowed it would result in non-stop war. The same thing was the case in Yugoslavia where hate speech was strongly punished and it served the purpose of keeping the peace, until Tito died. The history of the Balkans illustrates this point quite well. Yes, we all love free speech, but endless wars are good for nobody.
FWIW, I've traveled through all of these countries extensively and Russian is my second language. I also speak a bit of Serbo-Croatian. Traveling around and speaking with these people changed the lens with which I view these things. There is more nuance than words can describe and the history is complicated to say the least.
When and where did you do your travels? Living in the former USSR I can absolutely confirm the history is way more complicated, than it is commonly presented. Changes over time, changes depending on people you speak to. In my country we have had read army, Finnish army and Waffen SS veterans living out their lives quite peacefully together but they would no doubt give you a very different perspective on how the GULAG felt. And it’s not that you can tell from the outside.
As to the ideology, I agree with you about fundamentalism leading to death and destruction. Marxism, however, contains the premise, that one particular class must be liquidated. Also, it requires people to behave in a very particular and unnatural way leading easily to a conclusion that these should be eliminated too. So maybe it lends itself better as a tool for madmen raising to power, than some others. Maybe it’s not that people trying to implement Marxism have ended up in chaos but that people seeking absolute power have tended to use it as an ideological cover and to rally a support?
I was in St. Petersburg and Moscow last year and spent a month in Kyiv. I've been to Czech and Slovak republics the year before. Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia, North Macedonia, Serbia, Belarus. Next on the list is Georgia, Armenia, Romania, and Bulgaria. I've been wanting to go to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan too.
The percentage of the population that ended up spending time in a work camp was about 2.5% and the average sentence was 2-3 years. It's terrible what happened, there's no two ways about it, but the transition from feudalism to capitalism was pretty horrendous beyond words.
Honestly, the history of the region is so complex that it's incredibly challenging to know where to begin.
Memorization is largely vilified in American schooling, and for good reason. But I think if not abused, it is an excellent form of (self-) learning not at all devoid of near meditative qualities. There something special about committing things to memory, especially verses.
I had experience with both American schooling and European one where memorization was a big part of the learning. I was struggling to memorize things. The American way worked perfectly for me. I think that schools should not encourage memorization.
A learning process where you remember all the facts and recite them exactly, you get a good grade is bad. That doesn't mean you actually understand and can apply your knowledge. There was this article on HN a couple of days ago about the medical paper where the author had reinvented the integral. That's the result of too much memorization.
You have a very interesting insight here -- now that I think about it, I see it. But I'm not sure I agree that it is for a good reason.
Intuitive understanding of math is better than rote memorization. But that does not mean that rote memorization is bad, only lesser. I'm also not convinced that many people can grasp something intuitively, bypassing rote memorization.
It’s also been noted that basically all great mathematicians are excellent at basic maths (memorized timetables) and can remember many numbers and can calculate in head quickly —— even though technically shouldn’t be necessary for proofs
I read a big chunk of the Gulag Archipelago in Russian last year and it was, to my surprise, one of the most beautiful things I'd ever read. It reads like poetry, especially the beginning. Now I am thinking: maybe he recited and memorized all those passages to himself and used the verse-like structure to aid memorization.
In the Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn cites something that has really stuck with me:
> Martin Latsis, writing for the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918: “We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and essence of red terror.”
A haunting quote, you would think. The thing is, I'm not sure that our younger generation would learn much from reading Solzhenitsyn, or even the above quote. I think even Solzhenitsyn can't teach you that you cannot take things like "equality" at face value. That maybe there are deeper realities lurking beneath the surface?
I'll leave it to Dylan:
> A self-ordained professor's tongue / Too serious to fool/ Spouted out that liberty / Is just equality in school / "Equality," I spoke their word / As if a wedding vow / Ah, but I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now.
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 think you are misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not a racist. Far from it. I don't think race should come into anything. However it seems we're trying to make identity and race part of everything. That someone's opinion should count more or less because of their identity. This isn't a good idea.
That’s nice. Maybe in 500 years we can forget about race. Right now there are lots of people who are actively, intentionally racist, and as long as they are around, making race taboo just means you give cover to such people.
Referring to Jewish settlement in Palestine as "immigration" doesn't really paint the complete picture, generally.
Sure, some Jews immigrated to Palestine/Israel as we think of immigration. But many did not.
For example: I had a great-great uncle who was originally from Poland. Fearing the Germans, he escape Poland (on foot, alone, as a young teenager) shortly after the German invasion to live with his family in Ukraine (my direct ancestors). They survived together in Evacuation [1]. After the war, he decided to go back to Poland. What happened to him there, in 1946, was that he was forcefully removed from the country by his neighbors [2], who were pleased that Jews had been removed from their society and did not want them to return. He ended up in a DP camp, and with nowhere else to go, went to Palestine.
Did he displace the local population there? I guess. Did he have other options? No. What was he supposed to do, drown himself? In his story I see a plight not very different from Syrian refugees in Europe or Guatemalan refugees in the United States. I think his story is hardly unique, and explains largely why Israel exists in the first place. If you view the presence of Jews in Palestine as European Colonialism, I think your perspective has a very limited and selective in scope.
And half the population of Israel came from the mid-east. Either "Palestine" proper, or Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, etc. They were all displaced by 1948.
Today the issue is not the existence of Israel- right or wrong, it's the birthplace and homeland of millions. The issue is its recent and ongoing expansion in territories outside its legally recognized borders, and the violence and oppression that accompanies it. The situation in the occupied territories is one of actual apartheid, with Jews allowed to retain Israeli citizenship and subject to Israeli laws, and Palestinians basically stateless and subject to military laws.
Thanks for answer the question I asked elsewhere on the thread [1]. I think people misunderstood what you were saying.
I appreciate your perspective that the Jewish people who were born and live in Palestine now have a right to be there, but I am not sure that this is a commonly held perspective among Palestinians. To be honest, as much as I want there to be peace, I don't expect Palestinian Arabs to give up on Palestine, because why would they? In their perspective, it's their land, and 5-6 million foreign Jews are living on it. They've had several solid opportunities to accept this as reality and establish a state, but they did not. Had they done this, the military occupation of the West Bank would have ended 10-20 years ago. The military occupation of Gaza ended in 2006, and the territory is now under blockade by Egypt, The Palestinian Authority and Israel, due to the ruling party's perspective that with enough time and dedication they can liberate the rest of Palestine. Perhaps they will! I sincerely wish them the best in this endeavor, because you must admire tenacity, however self-destructive it may seem today.
> outside its legally recognized borders
It is also valuable to recognize that beyond its borders with Egypt and Jordan, Israel does not actually have legally recognized borders. Many entities (countries, international courts) have proclaimed Israel's borders to be this or that, but aside from settlements resulting from their formal peace treaties, Israel's "borders" today are actually war zones buffers established and governed by ceasefire agreements.
That is not true, they did not have any such opportunity. The best Israel has been prepared to offer was autonomy. That is, the Bantustan option favored, by, for example, Menachem Begin. The notion that the Palestinians "oppresses themselves" by not accepting "Israel's gracious offers" is completely absurd.
The Palestinians signed the Oslo accords in 1993. What has happened since? Israel has strengthened its grip on the West Bank and more than doubled the settler population. Despite the fact that everyone in the whole world recognizes that transferring your civilian population to occupied territory is a war crime. Why? Because Israel is run by supremacists and religious nuts who think that their holy book gives then an eternal and inviolable right to "Eretz Israel". In fact, they refer to the West Bank as "Judea and Samaria" to underscore their view that the territory belongs to the them.
> Israel does not actually have legally recognized borders
Let's start from this. Israel has a legally recognized border with Syria which doesn't include the Golan Heights. It also has a legally recognized border with the West Bank on the Green Line, and which doesn't include East Jerusalem. It's that simple. The reason these borders are called "disputed" or unclear, is that Israel refuses to give up illegally annexed territories or- in the case of the West Bank- because the lack of a border allows Israel to keep expanding without officially invading a different country. In other words, the lack of borders is not a bug: it's a feature.
What I expect from Israel as a necessary sign of good will, is to relinquish most of the annexed territories and to declare, once and for all, what are its borders. So that not a single Israeli soldier or citizen could cross them without authorization from the state on the other side of the border.
> They've had several solid opportunities to accept this as reality and establish a state
No they didn't, for the reasons I stated above. In fact, at the present, Israel's government is opposing by all means the possibility of an international recognition of a Palestinian State. Why? Because that would establish a border, and with it the end of Israel's expansion in the West Bank. Since Israel removed a few thousand settlers from Gaza, it has installed hundreds of thousands in the West Bank, creating a de-facto annexation that will be almost impossible to revert.
It also has a legally recognized border with the West Bank on the Green Line.
No, it doesn't. The GP is correct. The "Green Line" is not a legal border. It was a de facto border established along armistice lines between the armies of Israel on one side, and the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria on the other side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_(Israel)
There was also no country called "the West Bank" on the other side of the line. The other side of the western portion of the line in 1949 was Jordan, and it ruled there until 1967 when Israel captured the territory in the Six Day War. Jordan presently makes no claims on the West Bank and agrees its border with Israel runs along the Jordan river.
It has a legally recognized border with Syria.
Again, it doesn't. You are (perhaps unknowingly) once again referring to the Green Line, as per that same Wikipedia link. The border with Syria was a de facto border established by war. To quote Wikipedia:
The 1949 Armistice Agreements were clear (at Arab insistence) that they were not creating permanent borders. The Egyptian–Israeli agreement, for example, stated that "the Armistice Demarcation Line is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary, and is delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions of either Party to the Armistice as regards ultimate settlement of the Palestine question." Similar provisions are contained in the Armistice Agreements with Jordan and Syria.
Notably the border with Lebanon was the only border in 1949 that didn't include those terms, and was established as the official international borders of the State of Israel and Lebanon. Although Lebanon and Israel have gone to war since, Israel has not tried to annex territory from beyond the Lebanese/Israeli border line agreed to in 1949.
Why? Because that would establish a border
I think your present misconception as to why Israel and the Palestinians have yet to reach peace is due to your misconceptions about borders, since you believe Israel is anti-border in general and that it has repeatedly violated legal borders in the past. The GP is correct that the borders you've claimed Israel has violated were never legal borders, and were merely de facto borders established by war, which both sides agreed were not to be considered valid. When Israel has established treaties that create international borders, such as it did with Lebanon in 1949, Egypt in 1979 (in which Israel returned massive amounts of land, equivalent to larger than the entire remaining state of Israel, in exchange for a peace treaty), and Jordan in 1994, it has not sought to annex territory beyond those borders.
The root issue of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is... complicated, and a lot more complex than "Israel does not want any borders." One of the core issues that in part torpedoed the Oslo Peace Process is that both relatively-mainstream Israeli Jews and relative-mainstream Palestinian Muslims view an agreement that gives Jerusalem to the other side as a religious heresy that neither is willing to cross, and they both also have refused to share it. But it's not just as simple as that, either. The extreme religious right of Israel (e.g. the Shas political party) views any peace treaty that returns land from the original Jewish kingdom as religious heresy, and the extreme religious right on the Palestinian side (e.g. Hamas) views the entirety of Israel as an Islamic waqf [holy possession] that cannot be owned by any non-Muslim.
You got downvoted for some reason, but that's a totally legit thing to say in my opinion.
However, the problem of Jewish assimilation in Europe was much more complicated than you might imagine. Prior to the United States, not many places in history really let Jews assimilate. A notable example is China, where Jews moved over the last few thousand years only to always vanish due to assimilation. Non-religious Jews (ie. those willing to assimilate) are vanishing in the United States, too, because the local population is not particularly intolerant of assimilation.
In Europe, however, assimilation was largely not an option, even for Jews willing to assimilate, and even after WWII. This very topic is what spurred Theodore Herzl to become a Zionist, after initially rejecting it for many years. There's a whole book about it: Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism [1], but if you search the web you can find plenty of information about it.
I like your response, and I will take a look at that book since you're probably the first Jew who's tried to argue with me in good faith on this matter.
But to respond to what I can, yeah, exactly. Your great-great uncle could try to assimilate in a non-Jewish country and hope they trust him, which they may or may not given the history of organized Judaism, or he could colonize Palestine and screw them over. He chose the latter, now some people (not me, I'm not Palestinian) hate him for it. Given human history he certainly knew there would be attempts at further expansion in the future, so they hate him for that, too. Why is any of this surprising? I feel like if you believe your great-great uncle deserves a pass you must believe that Palestinians were either uneducated or grossly immoral and bigoted for wanting to keep their land because that would have meant possible death for Jews. And if you do believe that then that could be a really interesting discussion.
Overall though it just seems easier to me to accept that he screwed someone over to get something good. My ancestors have done that plenty of times.
>Did he displace the local population there? I guess. Did he have other options? No. What was he supposed to do, drown himself?
Those were not the only two options. You mentioned the Syrian refugees. They did come here where I live but unlike in Palestine they don't displace anyone but became part of the populace. No-one is or were forcing anyone to displace Palestinians. You are turning a sad story into a propaganda piece which helps no-one. Just like my Syrian friend, who now owns a restaurant he started with local help, one could become part of israel without being part of the forced displacement programs.
> You mentioned the Syrian refugees. They did come here where I live but unlike in Palestine they don't displace anyone but became part of the populace. No-one is or were forcing anyone to displace Palestinians.
The displacement of Palestinian Arabs occurred as the result of a civil war that took place between them an Palestinian Jews in 1948. Prior to that, there was no displacement, at least nothing like what happened in 1948. Yes, the dynamic with Syrians in Europe is different, because they can't possibly engage in a civil war with the local population. But the Civil War between Jews and Arabs in Palestine occurred, and the result was mass displacement of Arabs as the Jews won. Had the Civil War not occurred, Arabs would have been part of the Jewish state as partitioned by the United Nations in 1947. Many Arabs are, in fact, Israeli Citizens (with a Covid vaccination rate roughly as high as Ultra Orthodox Jews).*
What I am saying is: Yes, there were aggressive Zionists who came to Palestine to fight fight fight**. But the majority of refugees who came to Palestine just wanted to be left alone, and were forced into a fight by their ethnic alignment that was decided for them at birth, the same ethnic alignment that forced them to Palestine in the first place.
[*] And why are these Arabs citizens of Israel? More often than not, because their ancestors who were alive in 1948 had a history of peaceful enough co-existence with Jews, or their village was location geographically such that they did not pose a perceived threat during the civil war. As bad as population displacement is, the Jews by and large did not arbitrarily displace people in 1948. The perspective was at the time that either a strategic foothold is established, or the opposing Arab armies will finish Hitler's job, which would have certainly been the case.
Why do you say that the Arabs would have finished Hitlers job? Jews had been living for centuries in the Middle East alongside Arabs. Even today Morrocan Jews in Israel talk warmly of their past lives as Morrocans.
I once met a Lebanese whose friend growing up was Jewish. Later he grew up and moved to Israel only to come back to Lebanon as a military commander. He saw him at a military checkpoint in the city they grew up in.
If only. Never thought I would see gulag apologism, but I am not surprised.
I guess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varlam_Shalamov was a facist anti-semite, too.
PS. Nice touch with the whattaboutism.
PSS. As a Jew I just love when antisemitism is invoked in character assassinations. Makes me feel loved, valued and most all: protected! ;)