But the Cold War was the fault of the West, right? Because of all that capitalist aggression going on all up in Stalin’s grill from 1945 to 1949?
I do not know whose fault it was.
I stand corrected. I meant part of the Eastern block.
Yup, and that’s bad. Our prison system itself is bad in fact, and we incarcerate a huge number of citizens, one of the largest per capita on earth in fact. And there is definitely a racial component to that, as well as our stupid War on Drugs™ epic fail that’s put millions in prison over the years.
However, it’s really not comparable to the Soviet gulags which incarcerated 10’s of millions, many just ordinary citizens in truly horrific conditions and causing the deaths of literally millions, if not 10’s of millions, whether you want to accept that or not. Pointing out how bad the US is doesn’t detract from the fact that Soviet era Russia was a dysfunctional hell hole for many, many Russians, and that the Soviets killed 10’s of millions of their own citizens, let alone other peoples. It was a true blight on the planet and we are collectively well rid of them. Now, if only the CCP would fold as well, and perhaps Lil’ Kimmy and his merry men pose for gun fire against some nice wall…
The incarceration rate in Stalin’s USSR was very high – at peaks reaching the levels of incarceration in Louisiana, TX, Mississippi now. The peak was in 1950, when 2.7 million people were incarcerated.
Every incarceration without severe guilt is a tragedy.
Leaving aside the apples to bananas comparison between a small US state and a huge continent spanning superpower over decades compared to a small time window of ‘now’, where are the stats you are getting this from? Do you have, you know, a cite for this assertion?
I have read detailed history not by Communists but by those who oppose Communism – detailed studies of GULAG.
That’s nice. Can you cite what you read, give page numbers and quotations with supporting evidence? Or should we just accept that you read it and it says what you assert? Because so far, you haven’t given me, at least, a lot of confidence in your assertions, since many of them look to be Soviet apologist type stuff.
You don’t have to BE a Russian or even a communist to be an apologist btw.
The Gulag was horrible, but the mythical numbers are not reality.
I am definitely not Communist.
In Russia today, Communists can never get more then 20% of votes – Vladimir Putin gets >60%. Most of people in Russia do not want GULAG to return.
That’s the same Wiki cite you used before (well, it’s a graph linked on that same cite). It’s also disputed by several other sources and is hardly authoritative. Good grief, this should be an easy one as all you have to do is Google ‘more prisoners in the US than Soviet gulag’ to get a ton of links. You claim you have extensively read about this but when asked for cites you go to the same Wiki link you originally posted that doesn’t demonstrate what you are claiming! :smack:
Step forth with the true numbers.
Yeah, though the current rate has fallen to a touch more than .9 and still dropping. A lot of that is definitely the War on Drugs™, though there is zero doubt that we lock up a hell of a lot of our own citizens. I have my doubts we are number one, even wrt per capita, since I think there are a lot of countries that under-report their actual rates, but we are certainly in the top 5 if not the top 2 or 3. Something we, as Americans can all be proud of, no doubt. 
Of course, the rate per capita doesn’t tell the whole story wrt a comparison between the US rate and the old Soviet gulags.
No one really knows the ‘true numbers’. They range from the low end (which is what CCitizen is trying to pedal) to much higher…such as this from the Encyclopedia Britannia:
I could give you a Google link spew if you really want, but MY point was that CCitizen is making a hell of a lot of assertions with almost zero citations to back them up, simply repeating the same ones (without bothering to quote what s/he feels are the relevant parts, just drive by links).
Bonkers!
Meh. I think we could have had an interesting discussion here, because you are knowledgeable about the topic, but I’m not interested now. From now on, any time you respond to me, not only in this thread but any other thread, my only response will be “bonkers!”
But I have a lot of work coming in this week, so I might not peruse the thread anyway. So, you will probably have the last word if you really need to have it.
Why would India oppose a Soviet occupation of Pakistan? Other than its general distaste for offensive military action (which it conveniently forgot during the invasion of Goa), there was no reason.
It would neutralize Pakistan as a belligerent and allow India to redeploy its own forces to the Chinese border, and the Soviets would certainly have acceded to Indian demands to annex Pakistani-held areas of Kashmir.
At worst, India might have to worry about Pakistani irregular forces hiding in Kashmir while raiding Soviet military installations and so on, but that happens all the time in reverse anyway.
I was Indira, I would be cheering a Soviet invasion privately even if I was denouncing it publicly.
If you want all the reasons why India would have opposed an invasion, I can give them to you. But, keep in mind, that no country wants chaos on its borders (which and invasion of Pakistan would have certainly produced) and no country wants an influx of refugees (which it also would have produced). Plus, India and Pakistan were still operating under the framework of the Simla Agreement at this time. There’s no way they would have supported it.
After thinking about this some more, I think the problem Ravenman is that you and I are running different alternate history timelines here. I’m not sure how to resolve that, but I do think the info you have on de-targeting and the like is useful, so if you want to expand on that, I think it’s useful info.
The Russian invasion of Afghanistan was to prevent a puppet government from falling. The Russians were afraid that Muslim nationalism would spread from Afghanistan to the Central Asian (Muslim) republics. So, in a way, it was the logical response of a failing regime. As far as brutality went, the Russians were bad, but nothing like what Stalin would have done. Of course,as with all foreign incursions in the country, it was doomed to fail-it could only “work” if large segments of the population were killed or locked up in prison camps.
It should have been a lesson for the USA-of course, we don’t like to learn from history-we prefer to repeat the same mistakes, over and over.:smack:
I’m not quite clear what you mean by that. I’m looking at what actually happened between the early 1980s until today. I’m not speculating on anything, and it didn’t seem to me that you were either. Why did you have in mind?
This isn’t on detargeting, but the Nunn-Lugar program has provided huge benefits to de-escalation: