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Why do you say you could publish pro-soviet material in the USA during the cold war? My understanding is that this is not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M

Why do you say you could publish pro-soviet material in the USA during the cold war? My understanding is that this is not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism > In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision in Adler v. Board of Education of New York, thus approving a law that allowed state loyalty review boards to fire teachers deemed "subversive". It had certainly cooled down from outright McCarythism by 1960 but nobody wanted to be accused of Soviet sympathies back then...

kragen 7y ago
My stepgrandmother was part of the Communist Party USA and continued distributing their newspapers and trying to recruit people until she died. I don't want to softpedal the human-rights abuses that happened in the US, but in fact even the Smith Act prosecutions only imprisoned a dozen people — there was nothing like the gulags in the US (until the War on Drugs, anyway), and it was not difficult to find out the Soviets' side of the story.
- cronix 7y ago
  You're actually comparing Soviet-era gulags to US prisons? Have you actually looked into them?
  - kragen 7y ago
    Yes. The overall numbers at present are broadly similar (2.2 million prisoners in the US at present, compared to 2.6 million at the peak of GULAG, though that was drawn from a smaller population), but US prisons have much lower death rates (especially compared to WWII-era GULAG — hopefully there will be no similar invasion of the US and so we will not have the opportunity to see if a wartime US massacres its prisoners in a similar fashion), and a smaller fraction of the prisoners are slave laborers (in GULAG it was nearly 100%). Presumably if the US is beginning to institute Soviet-style censorship, it indicates a strong risk that prisoner numbers will go up and the treatment will get worse.
  - A2017U1 7y ago
    Have you? Find it very hard to believe that there's such a disproportionate number of criminals in the US. China is locking up huge numbers of Muslims simply for having a religion and it still comes no where near the number of Americans incarcerated today without even having faced trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
    - smsm42 7y ago
      Three words: war. on. drugs.
    - cronix 7y ago
      Which would you rather be in? A US prison with basic rights, healthcare, etc, or a Chinese labor/reeducation camp, or Soviet era Gulag? The systems are incomparable, whether or not the numbers are the comparable, which is what I was talking about. Yes, I've read the Gulag Archipeligo and watched several Solzhenitsyn interviews, and had relatives suffer through that era. Not close to the same thing. At all.
      - A2017U1 7y ago
        This is just silly. I prefer to be in none, like a free human being treated with some basic rights. You won't find that in the US or China. As much as it hurts some people's sensibilities think that's a fair thing to say. I'd be terrified to be a black person in many places in the United States. Hilariously think China is actually more free for the average human. Spent fair amount of time in both and as an outsider is my honest opinion. Where is best to be a political dissident is obviously a very different story. If certain people want to repeat ad nauseum their respective propaganda media talking points fine. But the world is watching. History will judge you no matter how salty you get on the internet. Survivorship bias is a very real phenomenon, does anyone disagree that the United States has both the most people incarcerated along with per-capita rates of prisoners? The numbers are right there, are Americans just bad people in general and deserve to be locked up en masse? Don't think that's the case, would love to see anyone defend the status quo as it exists.
smsm42 7y ago
You can be fired from many places for wrong kind of speech right now. That's not an issue of the USA, it's the issue of the employer. The government, as far as I know, did not mandate the firing, it only said that if somebody wanted to fire a teacher who is a fan of Joseph Stalin they don't have to let that person to indoctrinate their children but may let him go so he'd seek some other employment. And there was plenty of things supportive of USSR published in the US during the cold war.
wahern 7y ago
The government has more leeway when acting as an employer.
- DanBC 7y ago
  McCarthyism affect wide ranges of industry, including the entertainment industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist

kragen 7y ago

My stepgrandmother was part of the Communist Party USA and continued distributing their newspapers and trying to recruit people until she died. I don't want to softpedal the human-rights abuses that happened in the US, but in fact even the Smith Act prosecutions only imprisoned a dozen people — there was nothing like the gulags in the US (until the War on Drugs, anyway), and it was not difficult to find out the Soviets' side of the story.

cronix 7y ago
You're actually comparing Soviet-era gulags to US prisons? Have you actually looked into them?
- kragen 7y ago
  Yes. The overall numbers at present are broadly similar (2.2 million prisoners in the US at present, compared to 2.6 million at the peak of GULAG, though that was drawn from a smaller population), but US prisons have much lower death rates (especially compared to WWII-era GULAG — hopefully there will be no similar invasion of the US and so we will not have the opportunity to see if a wartime US massacres its prisoners in a similar fashion), and a smaller fraction of the prisoners are slave laborers (in GULAG it was nearly 100%). Presumably if the US is beginning to institute Soviet-style censorship, it indicates a strong risk that prisoner numbers will go up and the treatment will get worse.
- A2017U1 7y ago
  Have you? Find it very hard to believe that there's such a disproportionate number of criminals in the US. China is locking up huge numbers of Muslims simply for having a religion and it still comes no where near the number of Americans incarcerated today without even having faced trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
  - smsm42 7y ago
    Three words: war. on. drugs.
  - cronix 7y ago
    Which would you rather be in? A US prison with basic rights, healthcare, etc, or a Chinese labor/reeducation camp, or Soviet era Gulag? The systems are incomparable, whether or not the numbers are the comparable, which is what I was talking about. Yes, I've read the Gulag Archipeligo and watched several Solzhenitsyn interviews, and had relatives suffer through that era. Not close to the same thing. At all.
    - A2017U1 7y ago
      This is just silly. I prefer to be in none, like a free human being treated with some basic rights. You won't find that in the US or China. As much as it hurts some people's sensibilities think that's a fair thing to say. I'd be terrified to be a black person in many places in the United States. Hilariously think China is actually more free for the average human. Spent fair amount of time in both and as an outsider is my honest opinion. Where is best to be a political dissident is obviously a very different story. If certain people want to repeat ad nauseum their respective propaganda media talking points fine. But the world is watching. History will judge you no matter how salty you get on the internet. Survivorship bias is a very real phenomenon, does anyone disagree that the United States has both the most people incarcerated along with per-capita rates of prisoners? The numbers are right there, are Americans just bad people in general and deserve to be locked up en masse? Don't think that's the case, would love to see anyone defend the status quo as it exists.

smsm42 7y ago

You can be fired from many places for wrong kind of speech right now. That's not an issue of the USA, it's the issue of the employer. The government, as far as I know, did not mandate the firing, it only said that if somebody wanted to fire a teacher who is a fan of Joseph Stalin they don't have to let that person to indoctrinate their children but may let him go so he'd seek some other employment. And there was plenty of things supportive of USSR published in the US during the cold war.

wahern 7y ago

The government has more leeway when acting as an employer.

DanBC 7y ago
McCarthyism affect wide ranges of industry, including the entertainment industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist