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Notes -
Was Floyd picked as a figurehead because he was a criminal, rather than in spite of this?
I've been wondering about this from time to time over the last couple of years. I'd like to know if there's a term for this political strategy, if indeed it exists.
Surely there were some truly "innocent", non criminal black men - or black women, as the media would spin the 'racism crisis', but I gather it is pretty rare for women of any color to be murdered by cops - who were killed by cops in dubious circumstances, and could have been picked out by the BLM movement as their martyr? I'm not American and am not very familiar with the issue, but I do vaguely remember a few cases of egregious police brutality against black men without criminal records and without meth addictions, maybe even during the same time period in the year 2020. Rather than someone with a long criminal record and two types of hard drugs in his system.
If indeed this was done on purpose; why? May it be in order to make the pill harder to swallow for political opponents? And with the movement becoming unstoppable as they hoped for, it resulting in a bigger political win? If people went along with protesting for a criminal, they'll definitively be very likely to do it for actual decent people too...?
Even most of the people in the Soviet gulags were genuine criminals.
If you mean "criminals according to the arbitrary application of USSR laws", which included criminal punishment for things like criticizing The Party, having more property then the Party things you should have, or procuring any food when The Party decided you must starve to death, let alone being late to the job or making any mistake (which is clearly terrorist sabotage) - then yes. Otherwise I don't think they were.
The Soviet Union had no western style prisons, only the work camps. If you were a murderer, rapist, thief or gangster, you went to the same gulag complexes that the political prisoners went to. That’s where the scary tattooed Vor V’Zakone that later became the Russian mafia came from. That’s part of why being in a gulag was so hellish, the company wasn’t great.
Of course they had. Well, not "western-style" - much, much worse - but they existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prisons_in_the_Soviet_Union The problem was that building a physical prison - with walls, doors, grates, beds, plumbing, etc. - was too expensive and too slow for the number of inmates the NKVD machine needed to process. So most were directed to "camps" which were much cheaper to maintain (and way worse to be in, of course).
Err, no, Vory as a socio-cultural phenomenon existed way before the Glorious Socialist Revolution. But, since Soviet style mass imprisonment was not practiced in Russia before, at least not in the way USSR practiced it (look up how the revolutionaries sentenced to be deported to remote areas were handled by the Tsar - they were basically free to do whatever they liked there, including access to firearms for hunting, with the only requirement to periodically check in with the police. And yes, they were allowed to be accompanied by their wives, too) - the fertile ground for development of real comprehensive mafia-like structure only appeared with Gulag. Though given that many other mafias also started gaining power at the same time (e.g. Cosa Nostra, which existed way before, but started to become really powerful in the US by mid-century), I wonder if it's not part of some larger trend.
It didn't matter too much, it was hell regardless of who was around - it was designed and implemented that way. Of course, none of the above establishes that the majority of Gulag inmates are career criminals, as claimed, that point remains unproven.
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