poweronselftest
poweronselftest on Hacker News
- the belief in Soviet statistics and
- a belief in the comparability of imprisonment in the United States and the Soviet Union.
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.
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.
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."
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! ;)
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.
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.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Theodor-Herzl-Assimilation-Zionism-Li...
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.
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.
[**] For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze'ev_Jabotinsky
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_in_the_Soviet_Union