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A comment on East German Doping Victims Die 10 to 12 Years Earlier – psychologist. Parent comment

Re:East German Doping Victims Die 10 to 12 Years Earlier – p... by golergka on Saturday July 14, 2018 @11:23AM (#17530663)
That's a good point, but there's a crucial difference you're not considering. In US, programs like MK Ultra were actually trying to be secret and had a severe public outlash as they were published. Now, these programs are widespread knowledge and you won't find a reasonable US person who would defend them.

In USSR, on the other hand, state-backed violence was only "save face" secret that everybody was more or less aware of. Solzhenitsyn's revelations made a much bigger splash outside of the USSR than within exactly because he didn't reveal anything most of the population wasn't already aware of - but the people themselves didn't mind that much. Even today, most Russians would say that state-sponsored violence of USSR, which affected tens of millions of people, was a good thing, and leaders who perpetrated it are still viewed favorably.

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Re:East German Doping Victims Die 10 to 12 Years Earlier – p... by watwut on Saturday July 14, 2018 @12:30PM (#17530960)
> he didn't reveal anything most of the population wasn't already aware of - but the people themselves didn't mind that much

The scope of purges was such that it was impossible not to know. When the book went out, Soviet union was much safer place to live in, simply because main purge already ended. After communism fell, he was also not only one to write about these things or talk about them, bookstores were full of memoirs.

Current support for those things has a lot to do with both contemporary politics and propaganda and with the way young democracy was mishandled.

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Re:East German Doping Victims Die 10 to 12 Years Earlier – p... by ItsMe000001 on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @06:35AM (#17548647)
Are you out of your f...ing mind??? What distortions of mind are necessary - on a Trump-like level - to try to twist it until the US looks good no matter what shit you guys do? You will surely come up with some good justifications for anything as long as it's done by "your" country. From all its many many wars and killings to internal things like asset forfeiture or biased sentencing of the poor to for-profit prisons.

Yes, if you got the money and don't belong to the wrong group you can live quite nicely in the US of A.

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