3 ms·
With all due respect to your father who survived through very difficult times, I doubt that he agrees with the statement "Stalinism and the gulags are alive and
by osipov 17y ago
With all due respect to your father who survived through very difficult times, I doubt that he agrees with the statement "Stalinism and the gulags are alive and well in Russia today"
- rms 17y agoThis is an argument about a difference of orders of magnitude. I think it is possible for Stalinism and the gulags to be alive while impacting much less than the millions of people killed during Stalin's reign of terror, though I understand why you disagree.
- osipov 17y agoMorality of killing human lives should not be counted in orders of magnitude -- there is a qualitative difference between killing a man, a family, an ethnicity or a race. Saying that "Stalinism and the gulags are alive today" establishes a false moral equivalence.
- joeyo 17y agoA genocide begins with the killing of one man..." -- Kofi Annan
- osipov 17y ago...not for what he has done, but because of who he is" -- you should have posted the entire quote otherwise the meaning is out of context. Are you using Kofi Annan's point to claim that Russia government has a policy of genocide against lawyers?
- andrewvc 17y agoI think you're right in a certain strict sense, however I think most people understand that statement to be hyperbole. The sentence perhaps should have ended with 'in some respects', but I think that kind of goes without saying. Secondly, in America everyone knows about the Holocaust, and the right wing's been using it for months now to bash healthcare reform and their own twisted definition of socialism. People will mangle history because it suits their purposes, not because of some little article in Foreign Affairs.
- osipov 17y agoWhen people try to rewrite history to suit their purposes we should hold those people accountable through debate. Those who chose to use hyperbole (e.g. this article) or misrepresentations (e.g. healthcare reform) have their right to free speech but they should be ready to face facts and to respect rights of others to have a different opinion.
- andrewvc 17y agoHey, I agree with those principles, I just think this guy was using a tiny bit of artistic license, and he had a reasonable expectation that his readership would understand that he did not mean that Russia was now exactly like the USSR under Stalin.
- osipov 17y agoGood, so we do agree on something :) However there is a problem once we take the artistic license to its logical conclusion: Bill Browder, the author of the article, has an artistic license to voice his biased opinions. Given that he welds a certain amount of influence needed to publish in Foreign Policy, he is given an artistic license to persuade less influential readers. Thus we are faced with a situation where strong (i.e. influential) weld more powerful opinions than the weak (i.e. those who can't influence opinion by publishing in Foreign Policy). We can call this state of affairs a "rule of force". How is the rule of force with respect to opinion different from the rule of force with respect to money?