Who else dreads this year?

[Comrade Clod]

A failure to pay lots of money to research a disease which had a relatively low number of deaths in absolute terms and was confined to a small sector of the population is morally equivalent to mass executions and concentration camps?

That would be the Nazi's.

Also perhaps to their credit the soviets never outright launched an anti-lgbt campaign after banning them (except, perhaps naturally, Stalin). Plenty of references to "bourgeois immorality" but less of the LGBT panic you see elsewhere.

Or, y'know the actual concentration camps run by the Nazis.

 

[Deleted member]

That would be the Nazi's.

Also perhaps to their credit the soviets never outright launched an anti-lgbt campaign after banning them (except, perhaps naturally, Stalin). Plenty of references to "bourgeois immorality" but less of the LGBT panic you see elsewhere.

Or, y'know the actual concentration camps run by the Nazis.

No, actually. Castro "cured" AIDS in Cuba by imprisoning everyone with it in concentration camps to die. You appear to have the typical problem of being unable to tell Death Camps and Concentration Camps apart. The Soviets and their puppet states had plenty of the later, and it wasn't just the Cubans:

Article 154 quickly became a tool of reprisal against political dissent. In January 1934, homosexuals were arrested en masse in the Soviet Union's main cities. Among those imprisoned were many actors, musicians and artists. Historians have noted numerous suicides in the Red Army and a growing mood of panic among Soviet gays at that time.

In 1936 the Commissar for Justice, Nikolai Krylenko, declared homosexuality a political crime against the Soviet state and the proletariat. It became an object of NKVD (later transformed into KGB) investigations, possibly with a view to recruiting new informers from among known homosexuals.

In the mid-1930s gays flooded into Soviet camps in their thousands, and the influx apparently remained steady throughout the years article 121 was in force.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

I suppose Gulags aren't TECHNICALLY concentration camps OR death camps... never mind that the survival rate for gulags tended toward the "95% fatality" end of the spectrum...

Please tell me you don't think it's a good thing most prisoners didn't serve their full sentence.

 

[Realm]

never mind that the survival rate for gulags tended toward the "95% fatality" end of the spectrum...

Bruh where you gettin your numbers from, Prager U?

 

[The Name of Love]

Bruh where you gettin your numbers from, Prager U?

No, PragerU actually cites some of the BS it talks about.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

Bruh where you gettin your numbers from, Prager U?

"tended toward"

ballpark, off the cuff, throw a random high number estimate. If I was going to do an actual statistical analysis I'd be looking into things like "The Gulag Archipelago".

They were certainly closer to "95%" than say, "20%".

 

[Realm]

"tended toward"

ballpark, off the cuff, throw a random high number estimate. If I was going to do an actual statistical analysis I'd be looking into things like "The Gulag Archipelago".

They were certainly closer to "95%" than say, "20%".

They...

They really weren't

The highest numbers I've seen, even by anti-soviet scholars have been about 25% during the years of WW2, 10% overall in the decades surrounding that and finally hitting about 1% by the end.

 

[FriedCFour]

They...

They really weren't

The highest numbers I've seen, even by anti-soviet scholars have been about 25% during the years of WW2, 10% overall in the decades surrounding that and finally hitting about 1% by the end.

The Gulag’s Veiled Mortality by Golfo Alexopoulos

www.hoover.org

Those were the soviet Camp officials numbers, not Anti-Soviets. When you have a policy of "release the terminally ill to go home so they die a mile away on the road in Siberia." Yes, that will give you a lower death rate.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

there's a reason I said that if I wanted to make a serious effort at a precise-ish number I'd be looking at works like "The Gulag Archipelago"

 

[auraofcalm]

That article was horrifically depressing.

 

[Realm]

Those were the soviet Camp officials numbers, not Anti-Soviets. When you have a policy of "release the terminally ill to go home so they die a mile away on the road in Siberia." Yes, that will give you a lower death rate.

Lowered death rate doesn't mean a masked 95% death rate which looking more into the sources of that article is still entirely not the case.

 

[The Name of Love]

Lowered death rate doesn't mean a masked 95% death rate which looking more into the sources of that article is still entirely not the case.

Indeed. I say this as someone who despises the Soviet Union and what it stood for, but if you are going to make a point about socialism, you shouldn't just spout a statistic without knowing whether it's true or not.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

s still entirely not the case.

I mean, if the article ever actually gave "so we think the numbers are probably more like X" then maybe you'd have a point... since instead the article is just "the Official Soviet Numbers are purposely lying to you quite hard" I dunno how you can magic up specific numbers.

might as well put this here I suppose

The Frigid Story of a Girl in the Soviet Gulag

www.theepochtimes.com

"Estimates of death range from one to around 10 million, with the low estimate coming from a 1993 study of Soviet data between 1934 and 1953. There was no archival data from 1919 to 1934. The 10 million figure comes from “The Great Terror: A Reassessment: 40th Anniversary Edition,” authored by British historian Robert Conquest. "

Isn't a percentage point buuuuut.

EDIT: Also, I feel inclined to repeat my prior statement "tended toward 95%", I pick my words fairly carefully even if I don't do the same with numbers. I'd need some very compelling evidence to accept that it was significantly closer to 20% than 95%, and don't bother trying to use the official Soviet Numbers.

 

[The Name of Love]

EDIT: Also, I feel inclined to repeat my prior statement "tended toward 95%", I pick my words fairly carefully even if I don't do the same with numbers. I'd need some very compelling evidence to accept that it was significantly closer to 20% than 95%, and don't bother trying to use the official Soviet Numbers.

That's a very slippery language game. I think, for the sake of clarity, you ought to avoid making such statements in the future.

 

[Lanmandragon]

I'd be inclined to not take Soviet numbers at face value. Are there sources that dont actively benefit from lying?

 

[DarthOne]

*points to the religious right and Reagans handling of the aids crisis*

There’s a difference between ‘a handful of murders and a

The Gulag’s Veiled Mortality by Golfo Alexopoulos

www.hoover.org

Those were the soviet Camp officials numbers, not Anti-Soviets. When you have a policy of "release the terminally ill to go home so they die a mile away on the road in Siberia." Yes, that will give you a lower death rate.

...that’s deviously evil of them.

 

[Deleted member]

That article was horrifically depressing.

Welcome to the savage reality of Bolshevik Atheist Communism. I've been working on a post on the massacres that attended the suppression of the Orthodox Church in Russia, which is completely forgotten about, during the Civil War.

 

[FriedCFour]

You know its interesting to me that should you even seem to question the stated death toll of the Holocaust you are instantly treading into territory that will see you permanently shunned and ostracized, lose you your job if you attach it to your public name, and generally have you demonized, but you can basically freely question or even justify the deaths in gulags and dekulakization and write the Ukrainian genocide off as just a famine, no engineering whatsoever, and even be an academic with tenure while doing so. Funny how that is.

 

[Arch Dornan]

You know its interesting to me that should you even seem to question the stated death toll of the Holocaust you are instantly treading into territory that will see you permanently shunned and ostracized, lose you your job if you attach it to your public name, and generally have you demonized, but you can basically freely question or even justify the deaths in gulags and dekulakization and write the Ukrainian genocide off as just a famine, no engineering whatsoever, and even be an academic with tenure while doing so. Funny how that is.

The communists survived and the Nazis didn't?

 

[Lanmandragon]

The communists survived and the Nazis didn't?

There's other things to but this is the truth.