4 ms·

I had never expected a tankie on HN, truth be told. And I guess Katyń never happened too, or we deserved it? Mass deportations were also a myth, right?

RedCondor 4y ago
The pro-Soviet view is that Katyn was done by the Nazis and blamed on the Soviets after the fact. I've never cared to investigate it in depth. Mass deportations were a sad but not uncommon operation at the time, as seen for example by this Churchill speech from 1937: >I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ Or this one from 1944: >Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/7069/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70... The absurdity comes when they're used to try to conjure up a boogeyman.
- scp_not_gpt 4y ago
  > Holodomor was invented to make a boogeyman of USSR > Katyn was done by Nazis > Gulags were not that bad > Deportations were unfortunate, but look, someone did it too, therefore it's ok > Molotov-Ribbentrop was a fake, whatabout [insert some unrelated nonsense] > The rape of Berlin never happened Nothing like the whiff of braindead and morally bankrupt ideology in the morning
  - RedCondor 4y ago
    This is just bargain-bin "spraying shit and seeing what sticks." Some falsehoods, some distorsions, most of which are handled superbly by this book chapter on the Khrushchev Report: https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ Beevor is particularly vile with his rape-storytelling, and his stuff does not check out. See, "Hordes of Rapists: The Instrumentalization of Sexual Violence in German Cold War Anti-Communist Discourses": https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 Seek truth from facts, brother.
    - dang 4y ago
      Please edit out swipes and avoid flamewar as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We have to ban accounts that keep breaking the rules.
  - dang 4y ago
    You've broken the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
lp0_on_fire 4y ago
Thankfully, tankies are easy to spot. "Solzhenitsyn was just a fiction writer and totally made it all up" "The purges in the Red Army and of political dissidents were just western propaganda" "Trotsky shot himself in the back of the head" etc.
- RedCondor 4y ago
  Solzhenitsin's own wife said his book was "folklore," a set of horror stories for Westerners compiled out of the worst hearsay he ever heard about a poor country's prison system: >Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today. Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information: She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced. She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.” https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.html https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-ex... There were about as many people in Gulags at peak, war-with-Nazis paranoia than in America today. >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%). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 (Notice the second post is informed by the first--100% slave, etc. Ample evidence contradicts that.)
  - scp_not_gpt 4y ago
    The second source is a blue-ribbon journal grade, truly.
dang 4y ago
Please don't post ideological flamewar to HN, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. We've had to ask you this before. Two acceptable options are (1) engage by posting substantively and thoughtfully; or (2) just walk away and remember the internet is already wrong about nearly everything. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

RedCondor 4y ago

The pro-Soviet view is that Katyn was done by the Nazis and blamed on the Soviets after the fact. I've never cared to investigate it in depth. Mass deportations were a sad but not uncommon operation at the time, as seen for example by this Churchill speech from 1937: >I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ Or this one from 1944: >Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/7069/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70... The absurdity comes when they're used to try to conjure up a boogeyman.

scp_not_gpt 4y ago
> Holodomor was invented to make a boogeyman of USSR > Katyn was done by Nazis > Gulags were not that bad > Deportations were unfortunate, but look, someone did it too, therefore it's ok > Molotov-Ribbentrop was a fake, whatabout [insert some unrelated nonsense] > The rape of Berlin never happened Nothing like the whiff of braindead and morally bankrupt ideology in the morning
- RedCondor 4y ago
  This is just bargain-bin "spraying shit and seeing what sticks." Some falsehoods, some distorsions, most of which are handled superbly by this book chapter on the Khrushchev Report: https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ Beevor is particularly vile with his rape-storytelling, and his stuff does not check out. See, "Hordes of Rapists: The Instrumentalization of Sexual Violence in German Cold War Anti-Communist Discourses": https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 Seek truth from facts, brother.
  - dang 4y ago
    Please edit out swipes and avoid flamewar as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We have to ban accounts that keep breaking the rules.
- dang 4y ago
  You've broken the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

lp0_on_fire 4y ago

Thankfully, tankies are easy to spot. "Solzhenitsyn was just a fiction writer and totally made it all up" "The purges in the Red Army and of political dissidents were just western propaganda" "Trotsky shot himself in the back of the head" etc.

RedCondor 4y ago
Solzhenitsin's own wife said his book was "folklore," a set of horror stories for Westerners compiled out of the worst hearsay he ever heard about a poor country's prison system: >Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today. Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information: She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced. She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.” https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.html https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-ex... There were about as many people in Gulags at peak, war-with-Nazis paranoia than in America today. >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%). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 (Notice the second post is informed by the first--100% slave, etc. Ample evidence contradicts that.)
- scp_not_gpt 4y ago
  The second source is a blue-ribbon journal grade, truly.

dang 4y ago

Please don't post ideological flamewar to HN, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. We've had to ask you this before. Two acceptable options are (1) engage by posting substantively and thoughtfully; or (2) just walk away and remember the internet is already wrong about nearly everything. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html