I'm sure that you have excellent reasons for feeling the way that you do on this topic. Nevertheless it's not cool, on this site, to rush into ideological or political battle when strong feelings are activated. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you or anyone want more explanation, this set of past comments might be helpful for understanding what we're looking for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Still, I hate it with a passion that anytime someone dares to mention some good points of what happened in the "socialist" Eastern countries, and on a purely human level there is plenty even on the system level, comes up with this whataboutism normally thrown at others.
Yes those systems had to go. But there was plenty of good stuff there, and rebuking anyone who dares mention some is unhelpful. It's such a random uncontrolled reflex.
Slavery, colonialism, war mongering, etc. not exclusive to USSR. Well they lost the competition and the winning side likes to warp the reality.
I don’t want to take any side. It’s just that I really don’t believe in absolutes.
someone posted this[0] a few days ago.
[0]https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
Do you believe that absolutely?
On a more serious note, how can you lump the Soviets (and socialist regimes like the CCP) with everything else? It's like conversing with someone who, having been told that Bob murdered Alice, responds by saying that everyone makes mistakes and that, on a good day, Bob could be a nice guy. Communist regimes were at a whole different level of evil. The sheer number of people murdered, the social and cultural destruction and dysfunction it wrought, the deeply warped wordlview it imposed through the tyrannical apparatus of the almighty and pervasive state. The list goes on. I guess dissidents were just being ungrateful, eh? They didn't appreciate the good parts!
I will agree that Americans and others should engage in more self-criticism because American culture and its establishment are degenerate and share some eerie similarities with their Soviet counterparts. But this sort of whataboutism doesn't dismiss the glaring truth about the Soviet regime. For someone who says he doesn't believe in "absolutes", you basically demonstrated that you actually do. We're talking about different magnitudes and variety of evil here. People made lasting friendships in concentration camps and gulags, they even found their calling in those awful places[0] in a kind of metaphor for life in general, but no one would say "Eh, you know, it wasn't so bad. There were some good things in those gulags. And after all, American public schools are traumatic and soul-destroying, so..."
I mean, "good old" Soviet Union was a prison for all of it's population throughout it's existence, but it was also a prison within a prison for 37% of it's population till as late as 1974. Human existence there could hardly be called a modern life at any point of it.
Say what you want, there are countries that achieved way more than USSR, not to mention Mongolia, without mass killings, man made famines, slavery camps, serfs (1960s was the year when Soviet "collective farmers" were salaried for the first time and got a right to get a passport and leave their "farms").