domain:npr.org
NelsonRushton
17m ago
I think Russians will probably be more fine with that than ex-Soviet non-Russians would be.
Fair enough, I removed the word "Russian".
NelsonRushton
20m ago
Thanks for the clarification.
I think that you should try to clearly define what you mean by Soviet communism having killed somebody.
If I were writing a paper on the subject of how many people were killed by the Soviet Regime (instead of a single sentence about it) I think you would clearly be right, but I don't think so in this case. In my reading, the morbidly humorous phrase "plus or minus 15 million" makes it clear that I'm not shooting for anything in that sentence that is justifiable by a rigorous standard, and at the same time leaves enough slack that you can take or leave #3 and still stay in range. The bottom of my range is 10 million and that is a safe bet IMO by any reasonable way of counting.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22m ago
I don’t know about that.
The American right has plenty of history with speech restrictions, especially around sexual content. DeSantis is not breaking new ground. He’s approaching from a more secular angle, but it’s the same old song and dance of a Moral Majority. Same for Texas jurisprudence.
Nor is the situation uniquely dire for the right! Keep in mind previous acts of defying the Feds have ended with the 101st Airborne deployed to high school. Or at least a good old FBI shootout. Compared to that the cultural and legal battles are tame.
I think what you’re observing is better explained by the libertarian wing receding from its high-water mark during Obama’s presidency. Trump’s branding has polarized the Republican base and it dominates any media coverage.
RobertLiguori
23m ago
Huh. So you can make a husky act like a basset hound in terms of general laid-backness and temperament with a single gene tweak?
Respectfully, I doubt this. Can you link any sources to this effect?
gattsuru
27m ago
I'm not convinced that they were tools that are broken rather than blunted, but even if they are splintered beyond repair, how and when and what happened is worth knowing. Regardless of what matters in the long run, these tools are almost certainly not the only tools vulnerable to the same things.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
37m ago
I largely agree, but he is currently facing a wrongful death lawsuit by Anthony Huber's father. I imagine he's going to be hounded by very well-funded civil suits for a long time as revenge for getting off. Still, this is a far shot from state prosecution or murder.
Yep, so I want to be clear, my interest in this matter is not to try to defend Soviet communism. It was a very brutal system, at least in its first few decades. I am just interested in historical accuracy.
I think that you should try to clearly define what you mean by Soviet communism having killed somebody.
For me, it makes sense to count #1 and #2, but not #3. Partly this is because it is extremely hard to accurately count #3.
And do you count military deaths in wars, or just civilian deaths as a result of political persecution?
When you say that mainstream scholarly estimates are about 25 million, how does that break down between the three categories above? 25 million doesn't make much sense to me just because: Russian civil war deaths were about 10 million and I think at most you could probably only ascribe about third of those to direct or indirect killing of civilians by communists. Estimates of the Holodomor death range from about 3-7 million. The Great Purge killed fewer than a million, and if you add all the other purges on top it probably adds another few hundred thousand as far as I know. Various ethnic resettlements killed maybe another million.
If you count every civilian killed as a result of Soviet military actions, that would add another 5 million or so, but that would not help a critique of communism much because the US and its allies also killed millions of civilians during WW2 and the Cold War, so killing large numbers of civilians in war time seems to be more a feature of large scale war, rather than of a country's political system.
I think Russians will probably be more fine with that than ex-Soviet non-Russians would be. Only a minority of Lithuanians or Ukrainians would be ok with being called Russians, on the other hand there are probably plenty of Russians who, while not considering Lithuanians or Ukrainians to be ethnically Russian, would still be more or less ok with them being called Russian in a certain sense of the word Russian if they were re-incorporated into the Moscow-based empire.
But I didn't bring it up in order to nit-pick, it's actually important because I wasn't sure if you actually meant ethnic Russians, or you meant Soviets in general. I understand now that you meant Soviets in general, but I had no way of knowing that when I first read your post.
The Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic empire and even modern Russia is also still a multi-ethnic empire despite not having as much territory as the Soviet Union had.
A lot of the bad blood from the Soviet times comes down to people arguing about whether:
Theory A: The Soviet Union was pro-Russian and oppressed other ethnicities. Ethnic non-Russian nationalists tend to agree with this, and there is good reason to believe it given for example the Holodomor. On the other hand, many of the Holodomor's architects were not ethnic Russians.
Theory B: The Soviet Union was anti-Russian and actually helped non-Russian ethnicities to form their own nationalist movements. Ethnic Russian nationalists tend to agree with this. The idea that the Soviet Union was anti-Russian might seem strange, but the Russian ethnonationalists who argue for this point of view point out that the Soviet Union's leadership in its important years was not particularly ethnically Russian (Lenin was probably part Kalmyk, part Jewish... Trotsky was Jewish... Stalin was Georgian...) and that the Soviets had a policy of (Korenizatsiia)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia]. On the other hand, given that the Soviet Union was about 50% ethnic Russian (in practice, you could probably say even more because back then, many people who in modern terms are non-ethnic Russians were maybe more likely to view themselves and be viewed as ethnic Russian than they are now), it's also clear that Russians were the dominant ethnicity by population size at least - no other single ethnicity had nearly such a fraction of the population.
More options
Context Copy link