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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22447069
The difference between Russian and American authoritarianism
Haha my dude you are comparing gulags to prison in the USA?
LMAO 🤣 i don't want to say Lemmy is disconnected from reality but this kind of posts and the ones blaming Latin Americans and minorities for the election lost just makes everyone here look unhinged
Really just outright playing 'bothsides' games with Putin's Russia already. Great.
Move to Russia then tell us how equal it is 🙄
Tankies 🤦♂️
Gulag's name means force labor camp, but there is a lot more context to it than that. A gulag is less about labor and conditions and more about it being a hole in the ground at an undisclosed location where people go in and never come out. People that the soviets put in Gulags were sometimes criminals, but they were prosecuted by secret courts after being arrested by secret police during the World War Era and until about 1961.
Of course the USA absolutely has its fair share of dirty laundry, around the same timeframe they were prosecuting crimes for "Black Laws" and sending them to mines.
I think that in this regard both countries have made a lot of progress but still have a long ways to go. Also Russia is worse.
Yet, one is clearly still a lot worse than the other. It's Russia and by a lot. Still glad not living in either country tho.
So, I believe the same thing, of course. But I think it's worth taking a moment to think about what we base those beliefs on. For me personally, it's based almost exclusively on what I read / see in the news, and maybe a stray meme here or there. Posts like OP make me wonder to what extent my beliefs are justified. Because the post is entirely correct, right? For the same exact thing, the news media will use one term when it's the bad guys doing it, and another term when the good guys are doing it. The war crimes that the US was committing in Iraq were called collateral damage at the time (and they were grievous, we're talking the act of disappearing people, torture of thousands, murdering hundreds of thousands with cluster bombs and napalm, bombing hospitals, cutting off water to entire cities, truly heinous and extensive). Collateral damage. There were headlines in mainstream media calling the invasion "Operation Iraqi freedom". In contrast, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was immediately (and rightly) called out as such, as well as their war crimes. I wonder to what extent my opinion of Russia is actually influenced by these differences in terminology and reporting. I don't think I'm immune to propaganda.
That is a lot of word salad to say the US portrays itself as the good guys and Russia is portrayed as the bad guys. Guess what, they are both bad. You know who isn't bad? The people of Iraq and Ukraine who get caught up in this bullshit.
Yes they are both bad, the fucking point of the post is the hypocrisy in how the media portrays them. What are you even trying to say? Also, I'm sorry that my comment was longer than you're able to grasp, that wasn't very inclusive of me.
It is called word salad. Try using spacing to break up your thoughts.
I was just summarizing your post to be helpful for others so they don't have to strain their brains trying to understand.
I do completely agree with you.
Reminds me of the two spies.
An old CIA agent and an old KGB agent, both retired, are having a drink together, talking about old times. The CIA agent says, "The Russian propaganda is fantastic, you can convince most of your people that whatever you do is the right thing using tv, radio and everything!" The KGB agent responds, "Thank you, but the American propaganda machine is the greatest ever, most of your people don't even know they're being brainwashed!"
The CIA man says, "But we don't use propaganda..."
Can I play?
Propaganda ———> National Media
Except anybody who shits sideways on the toilet can call themselves an "Entrepreneur", can't say the same thing about being an Oligarch.
Agreed except for the secret police part.
I feel like secret police are undercover cops who specifically enforce the laws or policy of secret courts.
A cop posing as a kid online to bait a sexual predator isn't "secret police" like the Stasi to me.
The Chicago blacksites seem like they would fit that description, they gave zero fucks about due process or civil rights, following their own law
Agreed. Undercover DEA agent busting up a drug ring (regardless of debate about what drugs should be legalized) is a bit different from a task force suppressing political opposition through imprisonment and "accidents ". Though I'm wondering if the gap with decrease over the next four years...
Count on it. I recall seeing videos of protestors around Trump's last year in office getting yanked into unmarked vans. I think it was around the same time he was using customs and border protection to do peacekeeping operations.
Well...
Portland protesters bering dragged into unindentified vans... under trump
remember that
I disagree with the meme but like with project 2025, it could very well be a thing.
How about agent provocateurs infiltrating protests and instigating crime as a pretense for police to crack down?
Would that qualify?
To me secret police are plain clothes officers who drive ordinary looking cars until the hidden lights come on. They're literally keeping it a secret from the public that they're enforcing the law.
That's not a definition of "secret police" I've ever heard of, but you're obviously more than welcome to think of it that way. Just know that's not what the rest of us are referring to.
*Invasion --------> liberate
We already have that one. It's true too. They'll liberate you back into the stone ages. They'll liberate you so hard, your great grandchildren will still feel the pain of it.
People's Liberation Army "liberating" Tibet...
"Are we the baddies?" Well, for a lot of people all over the world you're at least not the good ones.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_United_States
Ruled by oligarchs -----> ruled by oligarchs
Dont forget, it all starts with:
Greed/avarice = rational self-interest
Greed is a character deficit, a personal failing, and a destructive force. We've made it our primary practiced cultural value. We deify the greedy instead of condemning them for their greed. We've made greed a virtue, having largely abandoned the term in favor of self-masturbatory, complimentary terms for it.
You don't get to a place where empathy is a foreign concept, where your capital score is more important than the social contract, without demanding far more resources than most would need for a hundred lifetimes being tolerated by society.
The Gordon Geckos, Ebenezer Scrooges, and Mr. Potters were cautionary tales about bad people with bad values, villains. Yet Oliver Stone supposedly gets letters from fans who thank him for creating their fictional role model.
Kleptocracy ➡️ Kleptocracy
On the surface it seems like these comparisons are valid, but there’s truly a world of difference in how America deals with its people.
The fact still remains that skilled immigrants can come to America and make a life for themselves. It doesn’t matter who they are. Or that non-white or non-Christians can get elected to the U.S. congress.
America started out with an idealism it’s failing to live up to, and it’s the fault of those who indulge realpolitiks over that idealism. This isn’t an America problem, there’s a rot that’s taken over the soul of humanity. We’re casting aside intellectualism and enlightenment for realpolitiks.
Make no mistake though, people cannot be trusted so you always have to protect yourself. But there’s no civilization without ideals for humanity.
For sure. It's absolutely valid to criticize the US on all of these points, but when people equate it with what goes on in Russia, it mostly tells me that people don't fully realize how much worse the situation is in countries like Russia. As someone who was born in an Eastern Bloc country and whose grandparents actually went to jail for their political beliefs, I think it's good to sometimes remind yourself about how different a life we now thankfully get to enjoy.
America was founded by genocidal slavers who were angry about being unfairly taxed.
America has never been a moral nation. It is literally founded on stolen land, paved over the bodies of that land's natives, and built by the labor of the enslaved.
I would agree that America is not the only nation in the world with many of these problems. I'm an anarchist, so I fundamentally don't really believe that a completely moral state is ever possible. But even so America stands out particularly starkly even in comparison to other contemporary states.