Just prisons… That used the prisoners as forced labor until they died. Just prison labor camps with the elderly and children and ethnic groups deemed enemies of the state. You know, a typical, normal, average prison. Yep. 🙄
Your comment isn’t consistent with historical evidence, though. At the peak of WW2, the GULAG death rate was about 17-20%, during a famine and a war that killed about 10% of the country. Death rate for the war was 10%, so a 20% death rate in prison during the war doesn’t seem that crazy to me, and the fact that it was much lower before and after kinda indicates that it wasn’t the intention. Additionally, out of the millions that went thorugh the GULAG system, about 700k seem to be the consensus for political prisoners, which makes up only a fraction of the total. It’s not great, but it’s not death camps for the enemies of the state, it’s a prison system in an underdeveloped country undergoing the greatest war of human history.
Gulag does not mean prison, that is tyur’ma. GULAG was an acronym for the for the branch of government over the prison camps, Glavnoye Upravleniye ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGere, or Main Administrative of Corrective Labor Camps.
Still an affront to human rights, and the gulags still played a role in perpetuating genocide and cultural erasure
Never said it wasn’t.
I actually came across this post the other day and it really made me feel crazy for a moment because it’s not immediately obvious that it’s propaganda or some dumb asshole. Then I learned what tankie meant and I stopped feeling crazy.
It kinda drives me nuts, as I really enjoy cowbee’s style of posting. He seems to put a ton of effort into his posts, presents things in a well composed, rational way, and often provides sources. Even in rebuttals, I haven’t noticed him get angry, just tries to further contextualize his point. He’ll come into threads of people asking for advice on political things and just calmly provide a huge list of texts and books on forming political movements and developing ideology. It’s all stuff that I’d normally love.
I just personally don’t agree with a lot of the stuff that he says. I mean, he obviously devotes more time to politics than I do, but I just don’t recall ever anyone defending Russia, China, etc that wasn’t one of their allies, invested in the same or similar narrative. I’d have loved if the world had avoided the Cold War and Red Scare, and if the US, Soviets, China, and the rest of the world could have spent that time as allies working on the space race, nuclear power, etc instead of spy craft and star wars, I think this world would be a much different place. But that isn’t the history we got.
I’m certainly not going to defend the Western powers any, then or now. They’ve all got dirty hands too, but that’s why I don’t sing the virtues of any state. He seems like a very intelligent person, but I just feel there’s a lot of confirmation bias of the sources he uses. It’s not enough to make me actually dislike him, I think I would really enjoy him as a person overall, but I don’t know if we’d agree on much. I don’t feel he’s actively being bad intentioned, quite the opposite, but I just don’t buy what he’s selling. I would probably love an anarchist cowbee, even though I wouldn’t call myself an anarchist, but I think we’d mesh much better.
But again, that isn’t how things actually are, so I just do my thing somewhere else.
You should check out Cowbee’s hexbear account. It’s much different than his “normie” one
I come here to try to get away from drama. 😄
Occasionally I wonder if I should have an alt for my opinions vs my educational content, but I think just having one account keeps me acting decent and not adding fuel to any fires when I get angry at things.
all very fair
💯 agree. The West is very often a hypocritical terrorist organization. But that doesn’t make the Soviet Union or China the good guys.
Cowbee, and many others, seem to not be able to understand that people can be well versed on a subject, and come to a different conclusion on the subject, on their own, without it being due to government brainwashing. This is what bothers me the most about these people. They do not seem to understand that people can genuinely disagree with them, they have to be brainwashed, and they take it so far it become blatantly racist. Like they will attribute things a culture has done for centuries, that they don’t like, to american imperialism, and completely erase the the culture of the people they are talking about. They can’t have thoughts, or cultures, of their own, it all must be a construct of the american occupation.
They don’t even have to take it this far, the amount of interference in the US does is already more than enough to damn it. Yet they seem to feel like everyone who isn’t in lock-step with them are thoughtless robots, completely controlled by US influence. It really demonstrates how little they think of human life.
I think it was something about the Uyghurs the last time I came across a post of his that was like that. All about how the West is uninformed and making the Chinese gov look bad like they’re genociding instead of helping them out or something like that.
I don’t think the average American know who the Uyghurs are to make it worth some propaganda campaign revolving around them worth it. I barely know who they are and I try to be aware of world events. But I do know there’s reports from a lot of different places talking about how bad stuff is happening to them.
It could probably be argued that’s the same justification that it’s all from Western media like I just complained about for cowbee, but I don’t think the West is aligned as tightly like that as the “Communist” countries are. I could be wrong, but I’m at least willing to acknowledge my information may be wrong or incomplete.
This is why I try to stay out of political threads anymore though. I don’t feel like people are looking so much for discussion or debate. I’d like to talk about some of this the way I talk about animal stuff here, but I don’t feel social media as a whole is very conducive to it since everyone can just ignore or talk over each other too readily and it’s easy to misread people’s emotions.
Yeah, I agree on the part that the vast majority of americans have no idea who the Uyghurs are. I do not fully consider what is happening genocide, more like cultural erasure, which some academics say is a form of genocide, and I can see why. The thing that gets me is when the same people who are like “it’s not a genocide they are just making them conform to chinese society” also view things like the native american residential schools as a form of genocide. Though I think a lot of the US has some vague idea china is wiping out sub-ethnic groups in china.
Fun fact about people in Stalin’s Gulags: they used to write him letters begging for release, believing they had been imprisoned in error, and not realizing he was the one who sent them there.
Supposedly he loved reading those letters and shared them with his rapist pals to laugh at
How did you find a 9 months old comment?
All one has to do is look. When it comes to cowbee, they are very consistent. Consistently hypocritical. They’ve made many similar comments in the past, and will make many similar comments in the future. Whether they call the boot out or lick the boot. Much like most liberals, it all comes down to the flavor of boot.
As long as this doesn’t become the main sort of content, I really don’t see a problem with documenting well-known hypocrites like them.
I was just surprised to see such an old comment show up.
Cowbee is featured here once a week, but usually it’s for more recent content.
Perhaps I’ve been a bit too busy in real life. I haven’t seen any regarding them recently. I suppose perhaps it’s an extremely slow week.
hey they’re not perfect guys. poor widdle stalin and the ussr made mistakes okay? they tried, okay?! THEY TRIED. THEY HAD TO REMOVE THE JEWISH DOCTORS. THEY HAD TO KILL THE GAYS, OKAY?
It’s amazing what conclusions humans can reach when willing to pick the desired conclusion ahead of time and stomp on the data until it fits.
Did you also know that the rivers of the USSR swelled with warm milk and honey and that its roads were all paved in gold? No? Well, that’s because the superior glorious Soviet Empire had to keep those facts carefully secret, less they stoke the murderous avarice of the filthy capitalistic swine of the West. Obviously.
