• Kevin@c.im
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    6 months ago

    @hitmyspot @GoodEye8 @solarpunk
    And another thing 😀
    How can you call the USSR a totalitarian state because of the Gulags and Stalin Purges but not say the same thing about the US? We lock up an almost identical share of our population as Russia did at the height of the gulags.
    USA=2.4% at its last peak in 2008
    Russia=2.5% at its peak in 1950

    How about the killings done for economic or state building purposes by those uniquely evil “communists”? I won’t even bother gathering the statistics of Stalin’s Purges vs US genocide of native peoples. At least, Stalin stopped the purges, the US continues to immiserate the native populations and won’t live up to legally binding treaty obligations, see Arizona et al. vs Navajo Nation et al.

    At the end of the day, the US and the USSR were/are colonial empires run by oligarchies. The results are going to be substantially similar. Yet the USSR was within spitting distance of US life expectancy on half the GDP per capita for most of the 20th century, until capitalism was introduced. A small amount of egalitarianism goes a long way.