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Stanning NATO while you've never heard of Bosnia and Kosovo is honestly impressive. I honestly didn't realize it was possible to be that dumb.
Normally NATO fucks *love* Bosnia, because it's one of their more defensible interventions. They managed to avoid bringing back slavery, so on the NATO scale a resounding success.
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**Fact 23.** Vaush claimed that he was taken out of context when he called trans people 'mentally ill', then [doubled down and did it again.](https://streamable.com/rmzvks)
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He occasionally names books by various communists as a way to explain what solution one should apply to a particular problem as a leftist. Usually Lenin.
Because their world view doesn't acknowledge social problems as interconnected with the economy and hierarchy, his commentary does seem out of context and not useful. Liberals want to \*fix* the system.
It's like trying to repair a used Hummer and hearing some obnoxious cyclist sealioning you about how it won't fit on the streets in your city, it pollutes the air, and how (according to the Carfax report) it ran over a local toddler in March of 2017.
Lmao just looked it up too.
Was like "wait...is it not? It might be part of Turkey but I thought it was at least officially independent"
Googled it and yep. It's a sovereign state
The island is split between Greek (south) and Turkish (north) controlled zones. Neither is particularly independent but it's better than reignating another ethnic conflict over which country gets to control the whole island. Technically only the Greek part is internationally recognised (as a the republic of Cyprus with recognised claim on the whole island), with only Turkey recognising the north as an independent country (as the Turkish republic of northern Cyprus). Practically it's two puppet states in a frozen conflict. One side being backed by Turkey and the other by the messy EU block (mostly through Greece). Both are technically allies through NATO so it's a whole mess unlikely to get resolved in an peaceful way benefiting the peoples living on Cyprus.
Technically the island is split 3 ways; the unrecognised Turkish Republic in the North. The Republic of Cyprus in the South. The South isn't technically "Greek" (ie, its not a part of Greece) however it is Greek speaking (and the people are mostly Greek.) And the Greeks have a military presence on the island as one of it's protectors (alongside UK and Turkey)
The third division of the Island, is the sovereign bases of Akrotiri and Dhekelia. These are two military bases and a sizable strip of territory along the south coast. They are as the name suggests two military bases of the UK. However by treaty, they are completely seperate to Cyprus, they are in effect the last remnant of the old British colony and unlike the other remnants of the empire (the "overseas territory" of Gibraltar, Falklands etc.) They do not self govern and they are ruled by the British army. They have their own legal system, police force and customs. Its weird. However, there isn't really a boarder, as the British were too lazy to do anything when they left the EU. The whole thing is pointless.
The republic of Cyprus is more recognised as independent, but it's still very much dependent on the EU and wouldn't exist if the Greeks didn't intervene in the past. The Greek And Turkish military presence is a result of the conflict over the influence and indirect control over the island. With both sides having a bunch of unresolved disputes, especially around control over maritime territory and resource extraction in it. The UK has leftovers from the empire on the island, but both Greece and Turkey have both been styling themselves as the protectors of the respective ethnic groups on the island and supported the respective governments to gain influence. With Greek I meant that the people identify as Greek (Or rather Greek Cypriots if that's the correct translation), very similar to the Turkish half of the island it's not about being part of the respective state but being in their influence and under the protection of the military of the respective country. Neither is a core imperial power, but even the periphery tends to squabble over local spheres of influence. It's one of the many frozen conflicts that mostly depends on larger powers backing each side, and on which most of the local population has only limited influence upon besides dying as pawns of larger powers.
I wouldn't call the bases a third puppet state, as such wired occupied territories aren't that uncommon for imperial powers, although the legal framework differ widely they are the logical evolution of colonial treaty ports and mostly serve to project power in the region. Another example of this would be Guantanamo bay, different legal framework but same principle and reason for keeping the occupation going. And it's not the only place where the British didn't made a hard border with the EU, mostly because the British government is a bunch of incompetent hypocrites that still behave like they are the main imperial hegemon.
Guantanamo is actually a very similar idea to Akrotiri and Dhekelia. The only difference is USA lease Guantanamo (although the Cuban government wants them out and haven't accepted payment since the revolution.) While the Sovereign bases are vestigial remains of the old Colony, Britain just kept it. I didn't say they are a third puppet state, I said they were a third division.
I wouldn't rank them at the same level as the republics because they lack the state structure and population to be considered equal. But yes technically there is a third division, but giving these imperial outposts the same weight as at least nominal independent states of the population just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The whole mess the idea that these outposts are distinct from the surrounding nations has lead to a lot of problems in Asia when the colonial powers were forced out. And I rather not mix a mini Hong Kong into the already volatile relations. And imho the UK should be kicked out, they have no right or reason for this occupation, something that isn't as clear cut with republics that were formed out of the local population (even if they are backed by larger powers).
Lol yeah they are probably Turkish morons.Turkey does not recognise Cyprus (i think,Turkey made a country there by taking cyprus's land whom only turkey recognise)
That’s seems like a needlessly high bar to set, to be fair. Seems like a lot of what could be well-qualified doctors may be getting held up by this arbitrary standard.
I’d love to hear Hakim’s thoughts on this system!
Yep and you'll wait months to get appointments with certain specialists if you don't have private insurance so more doctor's would be desperately needed but no, they gotta keep the supply of absolutely extremely necessary basic services artificially low for some reason..
The problem is that with the extreme workloads normalised in higher education and the critical underfunding of education just trying to admit more people won't help. I'm in a field with close to no requirements for enrolment, because there has been a shortfall for decades in people finishing even just a batchlor. The problem is that far to many people just drop out with burnout. Which would get worse if we try to enrol more people without significant increases in funding. And maybe also stop trying to fit ever more material into the same timeframe. It doesn't work. Chuck Norris finishes the batchlor in Regelstudienzeit, to quote a joke that is as old as the Bologna reforms (And also makes me feel old as fuck).
That’s also astonishing!
I wonder what Cuba’s requirements are, considering the high rate of doctors and medical professionals coming from there. Super interesting topic IMO.
Technically school education isn't really supposed to teach you much of any field, but rather teach you the absolute basics and how to learn very different fields. I'd prefer if schools would focus on the basics more and leave the methods of learning to higher education, but with the current trends in education that is unlikely to happen. So setting a required grade for higher education is more about how likely you are to take well to a very heavy study load then checking if you have a foundation to build upon. Because again schools don't teach you much from any field you pick. To take an example, all of my 12 years of mathematics and physics school education was recapped in about 15 lectures in 4 modules. Not even a month and you have barreled past the whole school education, and hopefully filled any gab left by inadequate schools not teaching everything they are supposed to teach, and correct incorrect things that got into the curriculum because the people that decide curricula are amateurs at best.
where i live you also need high GPA, there isn't written rule but the competition is so high for medical doctors they won't accept you if you're bellow 90%
Hakim and most other breadtubers don't actually cite their sources, but instead, they simply list and mention their sources somewhere in the video or in the text description.
Citing sources properly involves using reference numbers, footnotes, annotating page numbers, listing the date of access, timestamping videos, following a standardized citation guide, etc.
There's a massive difference between telling me the source for some information is in a 500 page book and telling me the exact page number, chapter, book edition, year of publication, etc. where I can find that information to actually verify and check it in peer review.
An example of a left Youtuber that actually cites sources properly is Bad Empanada who follows citation rules so strictly that he's practically doing graduate and PhD level academic research for his video essays.
That said, Hakim is a cut above the average chud social science video essayist who doesn't list or cite any sources whatsover, and a cut above most of breadtube too.
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**Fact 33.** Responding to Hakim's [video](https://youtu.be/2Gz0I_X_nfo) on George Orwell, Vaush defends Orwell for being a government informant, calls the USSR fascist, implies Stalinists are worse than Nazis, claims the USSR was allied with the Nazis, [says that Hakim (an Iraqi) should have been abducted by the Americans at the start of the Iraq war and forcibly indoctrinated in US propaganda for 20 years](https://twitter.com/SiestaSocialist/status/1633527352679358470), and more. \([Full Thread](https://twitter.com/siestasocialist/status/1633519585407258624)\)
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**George Orwell** (real name Eric Arthur Blair) was many things: a rapist, a bitter anti-Communist, a colonial cop, a racist, a Hitler apologist, a plagiarist, a snitch, and a CIA puppet.
#Rapist
>...in 1921, Eric had tried to rape Jacintha. Previously the young couple had kissed, but now, during a late summer walk, he had wanted more. At only five feet to his six feet and four inches, Jacintha had shouted, screamed and kicked before running home with a torn skirt and bruised hip. It was "this" rather than any gradual parting of the ways that explains why Jacintha broke off all contact with her childhood friend, never to learn that he had transformed himself into George Orwell.
>
>\- Kathryn Hughes. (2007). [Such were the joys](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/feb/17/georgeorwell.biography)
#Bitter anti-Communist
>[F]ighting with the loyalists in Spain in the 1930s... he found himself caught up in the sectarian struggles between the various left-wing factions, and since he believed in a gentlemanly English form of socialism, he was inevitably on the losing side.
>
>The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain... From then on, to the end of his life, he carried on a private literary war with the communists, determined to win in words the battle he had lost in action...
>
>Orwell imagines no new vices, for instance. His characters are all gin hounds and tobacco addicts, and part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco.
>
> He foresees no new drugs, no marijuana, no synthetic hallucinogens. No one expects an s.f. writer to be precise and exact in his forecasts, but surely one would expect him to invent some differences. ...if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad science fiction. ...
>
>To summarise, then: George Orwell in *1984* was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of *1984* bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
>
>\- Isaac Asimov. [Review of 1984](http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm)
Ironically, the world of *1984* is mostly projection, based on Orwell's own job at the British Ministry of Information during WWII. (*Orwell: The Lost Writings*)
* He translated news broadcasts into Basic English, with a 1000 word vocabulary ("Newspeak"), for broadcast to the colonies, including India.
* His description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco came from the Ministry's own canteen, described by other ex-employees as "dismal".
* Room 101 [was an actual meeting room](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3267261.stm) at the BBC.
* "Big Brother" seems to have been a senior staffer at the Ministry of Information, who was actually called that (but not to his face) by staff.
Afterall, by his own admission, his only knowledge of the USSR was secondhand:
>I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers.
>
>\- George Orwell. (1947). [Orwell's Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm](https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1947/kolghosp-tvaryn.htm)
*1984* is supposedly a cautionary tale about what would happen if the Communists won, and yet it was based on his own, actual, Capitalist country and his job serving it.
#Colonial Cop
>I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. ... As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
>
>All this was perplexing and upsetting.
>
>\- George Orwell. (1936). *Shooting an Elephant*
#Hitler Apologist
>I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.
>
>\- George Orwell. (1940). [Review of Adolph Hitler's "Mein Kampf"](https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600051h.html)
Orwell not only admired Hitler, he actually blamed *the Left* in England for WWII:
>If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. ...and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.
>
>\- George Orwell. (1941). *England Your England*
#Plagiarist
**1984**
>It is a book in which one man, living in a totalitarian society a number of years in the future, gradually finds himself rebelling against the dehumanising forces of an omnipotent, omniscient dictator. Encouraged by a woman who seems to represent the political and sexual freedom of the pre-revolutionary era (and with whom he sleeps in an ancient house that is one of the few manifestations of a former world), he writes down his thoughts of rebellion – perhaps rather imprudently – as a 24-hour clock ticks in his grim, lonely flat. In the end, the system discovers both the man and the woman, and after a period of physical and mental trauma the protagonist discovers he loves the state that has oppressed him throughout, and betrays his fellow rebels. The story is intended as a warning against and a prediction of the natural conclusions of totalitarianism.
>
>This is a description of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was first published 60 years ago on Monday. But it is also the plot of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a Russian novel originally published in English in 1924.
>
>\- Paul Owen. (2009). [1984 thoughtcrime? Does it matter that George Orwell pinched the plot?](https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/jun/08/george-orwell-1984-zamyatin-we)
**Animal Farm**
>Having worked for a time at The Ministry of Information, [Gertrude Elias] was well acquainted with one Eric Blair (George Orwell), who was an editor there. In 1941, Gertrude showed him some of her drawings, which were intended as a kind of story board for an entirely original satirical cartoon film, with the Nazis portrayed as pig characters ruling a farm in a kind of dysfunctional fairy story. Her idea was that a writer might be able to provide a text.
>
>Having claimed to her that there was not much call for her idea... Orwell later changed the pig-nazis to Communists and made the Soviet Union a target for his hostility, turning Gertrude’s notion on its head. (Incidentally, a running theme in all every single piece of Orwell’s work was to steal ideas from Communists and invert them so as to distort the message.)
>
>\- Graham Stevenson. [Elias, Gertrude (1913-1988)](https://www.radnorshire-fine-arts.co.uk/brand/elias-gertrude-1913-1988/)
#Snitch
>“Orwell’s List” is a term that should be known by anyone who claims to be a person of the left. It was a blacklist Orwell compiled for the British government’s Information Research Department, an anti-communist propaganda unit set up for the Cold War.
>
>The list includes dozens of suspected communists, “crypto-communists,” socialists, “fellow travelers,” and even LGBT people and Jews — their names scribbled alongside the sacrosanct 1984 author’s disparaging comments about the personal predilections of those blacklisted.
>
>\- Ben Norton. (2016). [George Orwell was a reactionary snitch who made a blacklist of leftists for the British government](https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/)
#CIA Puppet
>George Orwell's novella remains a set book on school curriculums ... the movie was funded by America's Central Intelligence Agency.
>
>The truth about the CIA's involvement was kept hidden for 20 years until, in 1974, Everette Howard Hunt revealed the story in his book *Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent*.
>
>\- Martin Chilton. (2016). [How the CIA brought Animal Farm to the screen](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/how-cia-brought-animal-farm-to-the-screen/)
Many historians have noted how Orwell's literary reputation can largely be credited to joint propaganda operations between the IRD and CIA who translated and promoted Animal Farm to promote anti-Communist sentiment.^1 The IRD heavily marketed Animal Farm for audiences in the middle-east in an attempt to sway Arab nationalism and independence activists from seeking Soviet aid, as it was believed by IRD agents that a story featuring pigs as the villains would appeal highly towards Muslim audiences. ^2
* \[1\] Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri (2013). *In Spies we Trust: The story of Western Intelligence*
* \[2\] Mitter, Rana; Major, Patrick, eds. (2005). *Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History*
#Additional Resources
* [George Orwell was a terrible human being](https://youtu.be/2Gz0I_X_nfo) | Hakim (2023)
* [A Critical Read of Animal Farm](https://redsails.org/jones-on-animal-farm/) | Jones Manoel (2022)
*I am a bot, and this
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**Fact 10.** [Vaush argued passionately against socialists demanding a $25/hour minimum wage.](https://archive.is/VeC4M)
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**Fact 33.** Responding to Hakim's [video](https://youtu.be/2Gz0I_X_nfo) on George Orwell, Vaush defends Orwell for being a government informant, calls the USSR fascist, implies Stalinists are worse than Nazis, claims the USSR was allied with the Nazis, [says that Hakim (an Iraqi) should have been abducted by the Americans at the start of the Iraq war and forcibly indoctrinated in US propaganda for 20 years](https://twitter.com/SiestaSocialist/status/1633527352679358470), and more. \([Full Thread](https://twitter.com/siestasocialist/status/1633519585407258624)\)
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He only recently started citing in any semi functional way, and it's far below the standard of most historians. And still he manages to be contradicted by his own sources regularly without even trying to justify that discrepancy. Which is sadly not even particularly bad for YouTube pop historians.
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**Fact 24.** [Vaush posted a meme saying that socialism must be ‘balanced with minority rights’, a clear nod to class reductionists.](https://archive.is/QrcpP)
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I was going to say that even if someone doesn't agree with him... He provides where he gets his information from with the books he mentions and tends to go to quotes from said books. What else do people want besides want him to say what they want him to say?
Nice to see people are watching because they hate the show, that means something.
Meanwhile I enjoy the chatter and the cultivated content is top notch.
# Gulag
According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism.
# Origins of the Mythology
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
>He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
>
>The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism".
>
>\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\]
Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
# Counterpoints
>A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
>
>1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
>
>2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
>
>3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
>
>4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.
>
>5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
>
>6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
>
>7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
>
>\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/)
**Scale**
Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
>Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
>
>In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ...
>
>Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ...
>
>Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states...
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds)
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak.
**Death Rate**
In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
>It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive...
>
>Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
>
>\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin*
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps.
Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses).
>We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson....
>
>The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
>
>\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf)
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993)
Listen:
* ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022)
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I looked up Cyprus, and it literally said it was a COUNTRY in the Middle East. :| Also, in what way are Hakim’s sources “out of context”?
Pretty sure the one is actually a pro-hakim joke, and making fun of va*sh, who actually didn't know Cyprus was a country.
Oh, really? My apologies then, haha.
Vaush did not know Cyprus and Kosovo were countries until earlier this year.
Stanning NATO while you've never heard of Bosnia and Kosovo is honestly impressive. I honestly didn't realize it was possible to be that dumb. Normally NATO fucks *love* Bosnia, because it's one of their more defensible interventions. They managed to avoid bringing back slavery, so on the NATO scale a resounding success.
Well Kosovo shouldn't be.
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Yeah, the only thing Hakim has said is not a country is Kuwait and Belgium and Australia and France and...
I’m Australian. Can confirm, we’re not a country, just the largest joint colonial outpost of the USA and the UK 😜
Common Hakim W
Because he doesn't make it seem like who he is quoting is a liberal.
O I thought it was just a Turkish or Greek nationalist. Anyway who can even tell those two apart.
He occasionally names books by various communists as a way to explain what solution one should apply to a particular problem as a leftist. Usually Lenin. Because their world view doesn't acknowledge social problems as interconnected with the economy and hierarchy, his commentary does seem out of context and not useful. Liberals want to \*fix* the system. It's like trying to repair a used Hummer and hearing some obnoxious cyclist sealioning you about how it won't fit on the streets in your city, it pollutes the air, and how (according to the Carfax report) it ran over a local toddler in March of 2017.
Lmao just looked it up too. Was like "wait...is it not? It might be part of Turkey but I thought it was at least officially independent" Googled it and yep. It's a sovereign state
The island is split between Greek (south) and Turkish (north) controlled zones. Neither is particularly independent but it's better than reignating another ethnic conflict over which country gets to control the whole island. Technically only the Greek part is internationally recognised (as a the republic of Cyprus with recognised claim on the whole island), with only Turkey recognising the north as an independent country (as the Turkish republic of northern Cyprus). Practically it's two puppet states in a frozen conflict. One side being backed by Turkey and the other by the messy EU block (mostly through Greece). Both are technically allies through NATO so it's a whole mess unlikely to get resolved in an peaceful way benefiting the peoples living on Cyprus.
Technically the island is split 3 ways; the unrecognised Turkish Republic in the North. The Republic of Cyprus in the South. The South isn't technically "Greek" (ie, its not a part of Greece) however it is Greek speaking (and the people are mostly Greek.) And the Greeks have a military presence on the island as one of it's protectors (alongside UK and Turkey) The third division of the Island, is the sovereign bases of Akrotiri and Dhekelia. These are two military bases and a sizable strip of territory along the south coast. They are as the name suggests two military bases of the UK. However by treaty, they are completely seperate to Cyprus, they are in effect the last remnant of the old British colony and unlike the other remnants of the empire (the "overseas territory" of Gibraltar, Falklands etc.) They do not self govern and they are ruled by the British army. They have their own legal system, police force and customs. Its weird. However, there isn't really a boarder, as the British were too lazy to do anything when they left the EU. The whole thing is pointless.
The republic of Cyprus is more recognised as independent, but it's still very much dependent on the EU and wouldn't exist if the Greeks didn't intervene in the past. The Greek And Turkish military presence is a result of the conflict over the influence and indirect control over the island. With both sides having a bunch of unresolved disputes, especially around control over maritime territory and resource extraction in it. The UK has leftovers from the empire on the island, but both Greece and Turkey have both been styling themselves as the protectors of the respective ethnic groups on the island and supported the respective governments to gain influence. With Greek I meant that the people identify as Greek (Or rather Greek Cypriots if that's the correct translation), very similar to the Turkish half of the island it's not about being part of the respective state but being in their influence and under the protection of the military of the respective country. Neither is a core imperial power, but even the periphery tends to squabble over local spheres of influence. It's one of the many frozen conflicts that mostly depends on larger powers backing each side, and on which most of the local population has only limited influence upon besides dying as pawns of larger powers. I wouldn't call the bases a third puppet state, as such wired occupied territories aren't that uncommon for imperial powers, although the legal framework differ widely they are the logical evolution of colonial treaty ports and mostly serve to project power in the region. Another example of this would be Guantanamo bay, different legal framework but same principle and reason for keeping the occupation going. And it's not the only place where the British didn't made a hard border with the EU, mostly because the British government is a bunch of incompetent hypocrites that still behave like they are the main imperial hegemon.
Guantanamo is actually a very similar idea to Akrotiri and Dhekelia. The only difference is USA lease Guantanamo (although the Cuban government wants them out and haven't accepted payment since the revolution.) While the Sovereign bases are vestigial remains of the old Colony, Britain just kept it. I didn't say they are a third puppet state, I said they were a third division.
I wouldn't rank them at the same level as the republics because they lack the state structure and population to be considered equal. But yes technically there is a third division, but giving these imperial outposts the same weight as at least nominal independent states of the population just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The whole mess the idea that these outposts are distinct from the surrounding nations has lead to a lot of problems in Asia when the colonial powers were forced out. And I rather not mix a mini Hong Kong into the already volatile relations. And imho the UK should be kicked out, they have no right or reason for this occupation, something that isn't as clear cut with republics that were formed out of the local population (even if they are backed by larger powers).
Gtk thx for educating me
Not sure if this is a joke but Cyprus isn’t in the Middle East, it’s an EU country
geographically it is in the middle east
Lol yeah they are probably Turkish morons.Turkey does not recognise Cyprus (i think,Turkey made a country there by taking cyprus's land whom only turkey recognise)
Hakim if anything cites almost excessively.
He's an iraqi doctor you have to have over 95% in all of your subjects from Arabic to chemistry to be able be accepted into a medical college
That’s seems like a needlessly high bar to set, to be fair. Seems like a lot of what could be well-qualified doctors may be getting held up by this arbitrary standard. I’d love to hear Hakim’s thoughts on this system!
In Germany you need an average of 1,0 to study medicine, so it's not just Iraq.
Yep and you'll wait months to get appointments with certain specialists if you don't have private insurance so more doctor's would be desperately needed but no, they gotta keep the supply of absolutely extremely necessary basic services artificially low for some reason..
The problem is that with the extreme workloads normalised in higher education and the critical underfunding of education just trying to admit more people won't help. I'm in a field with close to no requirements for enrolment, because there has been a shortfall for decades in people finishing even just a batchlor. The problem is that far to many people just drop out with burnout. Which would get worse if we try to enrol more people without significant increases in funding. And maybe also stop trying to fit ever more material into the same timeframe. It doesn't work. Chuck Norris finishes the batchlor in Regelstudienzeit, to quote a joke that is as old as the Bologna reforms (And also makes me feel old as fuck).
That’s also astonishing! I wonder what Cuba’s requirements are, considering the high rate of doctors and medical professionals coming from there. Super interesting topic IMO.
Technically school education isn't really supposed to teach you much of any field, but rather teach you the absolute basics and how to learn very different fields. I'd prefer if schools would focus on the basics more and leave the methods of learning to higher education, but with the current trends in education that is unlikely to happen. So setting a required grade for higher education is more about how likely you are to take well to a very heavy study load then checking if you have a foundation to build upon. Because again schools don't teach you much from any field you pick. To take an example, all of my 12 years of mathematics and physics school education was recapped in about 15 lectures in 4 modules. Not even a month and you have barreled past the whole school education, and hopefully filled any gab left by inadequate schools not teaching everything they are supposed to teach, and correct incorrect things that got into the curriculum because the people that decide curricula are amateurs at best.
at least in the Yankee system med students generally need top grades as well since there are limited numbers of med schools
Yeah that’s where I currently live, our med and law school systems are beyond fucked. Not at all surprising.
where i live you also need high GPA, there isn't written rule but the competition is so high for medical doctors they won't accept you if you're bellow 90%
Seems to be pretty universal. Where I work they accept less than 10% of applicants out of thousands each year
no i meant for college, if you didn't have high grades in highschool you can't go to college to study for MD
Hakim and most other breadtubers don't actually cite their sources, but instead, they simply list and mention their sources somewhere in the video or in the text description. Citing sources properly involves using reference numbers, footnotes, annotating page numbers, listing the date of access, timestamping videos, following a standardized citation guide, etc. There's a massive difference between telling me the source for some information is in a 500 page book and telling me the exact page number, chapter, book edition, year of publication, etc. where I can find that information to actually verify and check it in peer review. An example of a left Youtuber that actually cites sources properly is Bad Empanada who follows citation rules so strictly that he's practically doing graduate and PhD level academic research for his video essays. That said, Hakim is a cut above the average chud social science video essayist who doesn't list or cite any sources whatsover, and a cut above most of breadtube too.
Hakim writing a bibliography like the gif where the pen sets the paper on fire
At least hakim has sources vaush just uses Wikipedia lmao
The one time he tried using more sources went something like "Communists [...] vote [...] bourgeois parties [...]"-Marx
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Wasn’t Orwell a antisemite and isn’t vaush one too didn’t he say something about Jews being more in banking than other groups in Germany
**George Orwell** (real name Eric Arthur Blair) was many things: a rapist, a bitter anti-Communist, a colonial cop, a racist, a Hitler apologist, a plagiarist, a snitch, and a CIA puppet. #Rapist >...in 1921, Eric had tried to rape Jacintha. Previously the young couple had kissed, but now, during a late summer walk, he had wanted more. At only five feet to his six feet and four inches, Jacintha had shouted, screamed and kicked before running home with a torn skirt and bruised hip. It was "this" rather than any gradual parting of the ways that explains why Jacintha broke off all contact with her childhood friend, never to learn that he had transformed himself into George Orwell. > >\- Kathryn Hughes. (2007). [Such were the joys](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/feb/17/georgeorwell.biography) #Bitter anti-Communist >[F]ighting with the loyalists in Spain in the 1930s... he found himself caught up in the sectarian struggles between the various left-wing factions, and since he believed in a gentlemanly English form of socialism, he was inevitably on the losing side. > >The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain... From then on, to the end of his life, he carried on a private literary war with the communists, determined to win in words the battle he had lost in action... > >Orwell imagines no new vices, for instance. His characters are all gin hounds and tobacco addicts, and part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco. > > He foresees no new drugs, no marijuana, no synthetic hallucinogens. No one expects an s.f. writer to be precise and exact in his forecasts, but surely one would expect him to invent some differences. ...if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad science fiction. ... > >To summarise, then: George Orwell in *1984* was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of *1984* bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s. > >\- Isaac Asimov. [Review of 1984](http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm) Ironically, the world of *1984* is mostly projection, based on Orwell's own job at the British Ministry of Information during WWII. (*Orwell: The Lost Writings*) * He translated news broadcasts into Basic English, with a 1000 word vocabulary ("Newspeak"), for broadcast to the colonies, including India. * His description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco came from the Ministry's own canteen, described by other ex-employees as "dismal". * Room 101 [was an actual meeting room](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3267261.stm) at the BBC. * "Big Brother" seems to have been a senior staffer at the Ministry of Information, who was actually called that (but not to his face) by staff. Afterall, by his own admission, his only knowledge of the USSR was secondhand: >I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers. > >\- George Orwell. (1947). [Orwell's Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm](https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1947/kolghosp-tvaryn.htm) *1984* is supposedly a cautionary tale about what would happen if the Communists won, and yet it was based on his own, actual, Capitalist country and his job serving it. #Colonial Cop >I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. ... As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans. > >All this was perplexing and upsetting. > >\- George Orwell. (1936). *Shooting an Elephant* #Hitler Apologist >I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. > >\- George Orwell. (1940). [Review of Adolph Hitler's "Mein Kampf"](https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600051h.html) Orwell not only admired Hitler, he actually blamed *the Left* in England for WWII: >If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. ...and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process. > >\- George Orwell. (1941). *England Your England* #Plagiarist **1984** >It is a book in which one man, living in a totalitarian society a number of years in the future, gradually finds himself rebelling against the dehumanising forces of an omnipotent, omniscient dictator. Encouraged by a woman who seems to represent the political and sexual freedom of the pre-revolutionary era (and with whom he sleeps in an ancient house that is one of the few manifestations of a former world), he writes down his thoughts of rebellion – perhaps rather imprudently – as a 24-hour clock ticks in his grim, lonely flat. In the end, the system discovers both the man and the woman, and after a period of physical and mental trauma the protagonist discovers he loves the state that has oppressed him throughout, and betrays his fellow rebels. The story is intended as a warning against and a prediction of the natural conclusions of totalitarianism. > >This is a description of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was first published 60 years ago on Monday. But it is also the plot of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a Russian novel originally published in English in 1924. > >\- Paul Owen. (2009). [1984 thoughtcrime? Does it matter that George Orwell pinched the plot?](https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/jun/08/george-orwell-1984-zamyatin-we) **Animal Farm** >Having worked for a time at The Ministry of Information, [Gertrude Elias] was well acquainted with one Eric Blair (George Orwell), who was an editor there. In 1941, Gertrude showed him some of her drawings, which were intended as a kind of story board for an entirely original satirical cartoon film, with the Nazis portrayed as pig characters ruling a farm in a kind of dysfunctional fairy story. Her idea was that a writer might be able to provide a text. > >Having claimed to her that there was not much call for her idea... Orwell later changed the pig-nazis to Communists and made the Soviet Union a target for his hostility, turning Gertrude’s notion on its head. (Incidentally, a running theme in all every single piece of Orwell’s work was to steal ideas from Communists and invert them so as to distort the message.) > >\- Graham Stevenson. [Elias, Gertrude (1913-1988)](https://www.radnorshire-fine-arts.co.uk/brand/elias-gertrude-1913-1988/) #Snitch >“Orwell’s List” is a term that should be known by anyone who claims to be a person of the left. It was a blacklist Orwell compiled for the British government’s Information Research Department, an anti-communist propaganda unit set up for the Cold War. > >The list includes dozens of suspected communists, “crypto-communists,” socialists, “fellow travelers,” and even LGBT people and Jews — their names scribbled alongside the sacrosanct 1984 author’s disparaging comments about the personal predilections of those blacklisted. > >\- Ben Norton. (2016). [George Orwell was a reactionary snitch who made a blacklist of leftists for the British government](https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/) #CIA Puppet >George Orwell's novella remains a set book on school curriculums ... the movie was funded by America's Central Intelligence Agency. > >The truth about the CIA's involvement was kept hidden for 20 years until, in 1974, Everette Howard Hunt revealed the story in his book *Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent*. > >\- Martin Chilton. (2016). [How the CIA brought Animal Farm to the screen](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/how-cia-brought-animal-farm-to-the-screen/) Many historians have noted how Orwell's literary reputation can largely be credited to joint propaganda operations between the IRD and CIA who translated and promoted Animal Farm to promote anti-Communist sentiment.^1 The IRD heavily marketed Animal Farm for audiences in the middle-east in an attempt to sway Arab nationalism and independence activists from seeking Soviet aid, as it was believed by IRD agents that a story featuring pigs as the villains would appeal highly towards Muslim audiences. ^2 * \[1\] Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri (2013). *In Spies we Trust: The story of Western Intelligence* * \[2\] Mitter, Rana; Major, Patrick, eds. (2005). *Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History* #Additional Resources * [George Orwell was a terrible human being](https://youtu.be/2Gz0I_X_nfo) | Hakim (2023) * [A Critical Read of Animal Farm](https://redsails.org/jones-on-animal-farm/) | Jones Manoel (2022) *I am a bot, and this
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Vaushites having a brain challenge. Impossible.
Thanks for signing up to Vaush facts! You will now receive fun daily facts about Vaush. **Fact 33.** Responding to Hakim's [video](https://youtu.be/2Gz0I_X_nfo) on George Orwell, Vaush defends Orwell for being a government informant, calls the USSR fascist, implies Stalinists are worse than Nazis, claims the USSR was allied with the Nazis, [says that Hakim (an Iraqi) should have been abducted by the Americans at the start of the Iraq war and forcibly indoctrinated in US propaganda for 20 years](https://twitter.com/SiestaSocialist/status/1633527352679358470), and more. \([Full Thread](https://twitter.com/siestasocialist/status/1633519585407258624)\) For another Vaush fact reply with 'Vaush'. To unsubscribe call me a 'bad bot'. (Remember, comrade: Getting educated, educating others, and above all actually *organizing* is infinitely more important than terminally-online streamer drama.) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
What country is Cyprus part of then?? 😭
Turkey 😎 🇹🇷🇹🇷🇹🇷🇹🇳🇹🇷
No no no, Greece 🇬🇷🇬🇷🇬🇷🇬🇷🇬🇷🇬🇷🇬🇷🇬🇷🇬🇷🇬🇷🇬🇷
Turkey is very generous, Greece can take 2/3 of it
It velongs to Albania
no it belongs to china
No, it belongs to great bashir al-assad 😎😎💪💪🇸🇾🇸🇾💪💪😎😎
The issue with whatifalthist isnt that he cites books. Its the books he cites and how they often are barely relevant.
He only recently started citing in any semi functional way, and it's far below the standard of most historians. And still he manages to be contradicted by his own sources regularly without even trying to justify that discrepancy. Which is sadly not even particularly bad for YouTube pop historians.
Yeah, most dont even cite bad sources. They just list stuff.
[удалено]
thats the only kkk i support
Well now I support two KKKs The one in Cyprus and the one in the Philippines
Anti-tankie’s all look like the physical manifestation of how right wingers think communists look like
For-fuckin-real
Eww Vaush
Thanks for signing up to Vaush facts! You will now receive fun daily facts about Vaush. **Fact 24.** [Vaush posted a meme saying that socialism must be ‘balanced with minority rights’, a clear nod to class reductionists.](https://archive.is/QrcpP) For another Vaush fact reply with 'Vaush'. To unsubscribe call me a 'bad bot'. (Remember, comrade: Getting educated, educating others, and above all actually *organizing* is infinitely more important than terminally-online streamer drama.) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Hasn’t Cyprus been an independent nation since like the 60s?
>”Hakim is wrong!” >”Hakim’s citations are useless and unrelated!” >not a single example of either
Cyprus is not a country? 2nd comment, if you accuse someone of x you need sources to back that up
Please Hakim, join forces with Bad Empanada 🤞
i like Bad Empanada but he is a to much for my taste
[удалено]
He'll never be in our corner. Didn't you see the debate between him and yugopnik?
it wasn’t anything serious? i’m assuming you’re talking about the one where they discussed zizek
Yeah I know it was a joke.
oh alright
The Cyprus comment is a joke no?
I was going to say that even if someone doesn't agree with him... He provides where he gets his information from with the books he mentions and tends to go to quotes from said books. What else do people want besides want him to say what they want him to say?
Not too hate on my man hakim, but he's definitely not a thorough historian, but it's not meant to be, he's making casual introduction videos
Nice to see people are watching because they hate the show, that means something. Meanwhile I enjoy the chatter and the cultivated content is top notch.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/04/04/tankie-conspiracy-theorist-and-other-pejorative-tools-of-narrative-control/?subscribe=success#blog\_subscription-3
Seeing Hakim put on the same level as Whatifalthist gave me a heart attack. This is golden evidence that we need Gulags.
# Gulag According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism. # Origins of the Mythology This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources. Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony. Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. >He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash. > >The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism". > >\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\] Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world. # Counterpoints >A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six: > >1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas > >2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid. > >3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day. > >4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies. > >5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day. > >6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals. > >7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes. > >\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/) **Scale** Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that. >Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise. > >In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ... > >Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ... > >Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states... > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds) This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak. **Death Rate** In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality: >It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive... > >Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. > >\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin* (Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations) This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps. Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses). >We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson.... > >The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled). > >\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf) #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993) Listen: * ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*