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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.
Can I ask why you routinely resort to such snark? What he very obviously meant to say was that the majority of GULAG prisoners were common criminals as opposed to political prisoners i.e. thiefs, murderers, bandits, rapists, average thugs and bums etc., which was indeed the case if you look at the data.
There's no snark there. By USSR laws, a lot of minor acts were criminalized - like being late to work, or any unauthorized usage of kolkhoz property (which was just forcibly taken from the farmers) - e.g. the infamous Law of Three Spikelets so a lot of people that were convicted under supposedly "criminal" articles weren't actually bandits, rapists or bums - they were average citizens trying to survive in the hellscape of total terror. "The data" (which btw you neglected to support with any evidence) can't tell you that, you need a little knowledge about what actually was going on.
There is, in fact, a rather mundane legislative reason for the phenomenon you’re describing, included at the beginning of the Wikipedia article you linked to:
The Russian version of the same article goes into more detail on this:
A similarly mundane and succinct reasoning was actually provided by Stalin himself in private correspondence, quoted in the same article:
Capitalism could not have smashed feudalism, it would not have developed and grown stronger, if it had not declared the principle of private property the basis of capitalist society, if it had not made private property sacred property, the violation of the interests of which is most severely punished and for the protection of which it created its own state. Socialism will not be able to finish off and bury the capitalist elements and the individual-grabbing habits, skills, traditions (which serve as the basis for theft), shaking the foundations of the new society, if it does not declare public property (cooperative, collective farm, state) sacred and inviolable.
Who knows, maybe if the so-called Law of Spikelets had been enforced with as much longevity, relentlessness and rigor as the Bloody Code in Britain, the peoples of the USSR would have gradually come to respect the concept of public property. Then again, I’m not a sociologist by profession. It should be noted for the sake of context that, according to the same article, a rough total of 182,000 people were sentenced according to this law in a span of 7 years in a country of almost 170 million, which was a scarce contribution to the spectacle of mass imprisonment, total terror, hellscape and whatnot, to the extent that it existed in reality (and nor in the realm of sensationalist literature and yellow journalism).
With respect to the criminalization of being late for work, that is explained by the even more mundane fact that Russian peasants usually had zero concept of measuring time in hours and minutes; I imagine they’d have gradually acquired this trait in the span of decades after being turned into factory workers even without such harsh penalties, as it probably happened in Britain (although I imagine the difference in harshness was only limited in that respect); however, industrialization in the USSR was to be completed in a much more swift manner. This phenomenon is actually described in a rather succinct fashion in the novel Darkness at Noon.
I find it rather curious that you but ‘the data’ in quotes when in fact yes, it’s factual truth that to the extent that any examination of the Gulag’s history discusses this subject (which I imagine is a touchy one for many), it mentions that the majority of inmates were not political prisoners but common criminals. See here and here, for example.
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