You ignored the fact that overall the population of the Soviet Union under Stalin was less-than half what the US Population is now.
Sure, but the fact that there are more people in US prisons than in Stalin’s gulags should tell you something about America.
Now let me clarify something. The Russian Federation didn’t exist before the USSR fell, so we can only really talk about the period from 1991. That’s the “selective time range” I’m using. When I say America is the worst on Earth, I’m saying it’s currently the worst on Earth.
I’m not talking about countries that don’t exist anymore. You’re the one that brought gulags up, I just wanted to mention a disturbing fact about America’s carceral system. This doesn’t even get into the history of chattel slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans, this is just about the fact that modern America has the worst prisoner-per-capita ratio on Earth and also the largest prisoner population on Earth. Worse than Russia, worse than China, the worst.
You ignored the fact that the charges and conditions of Russian gulags are ostensibly more trumped up and far worse conditions, overall.
US prisons are torture centers where people get raped and murdered all the time, are used for extremely cheap slave-like labor, and have mass graves like the 215 people have been buried behind a Mississippi jail since 2016. US prisons are comparable to gulags and in some cases worse.
Now globally I imagine there might be worse prisons today, so I won’t say that US has the worst prisons on Earth. They’re pretty fucking bad, though, and when combined with having the highest prisoner-per-capita ratio and highest number of prisoners its a monument to human suffering that is unparalleled in the modern world.
You ignored that rather than imprison political prisoners, he just blatantly murdered them… In the millions. You want to talk about legitimate genocide and you side-step this? If it wasn’t so absurd and sad it would be laughable!
That’s just wrong. The Great Purges may have seen 750,000 executions. That was certainly excessive, not something I’m defending, and that’s literally not genocide. He didn’t target an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. He killed perceived enemies of his state and he did so along class and political lines.
War on terror, Condor, Dirty Wars, etc. - None come remotely close to Russia, both foreign and domestic.
Now, maybe it was unfair of me to bring up Operation Condor & the Dirty Wars (60,000–80,000 deaths in Central and South America) and Jakarta (between 100,000 and 1,000,000 deaths in Indonesia) because those were before the Russian Federation even existed. I just finished reading The Jakarta Method and it was on my mind, I shouldn’t have let that distract me from my point. Apologies.
Or the blatant assassination and silencing of dissidents within Russia from Nemtsov to Nevalny and tightening of laws where one cannot even speak publicly about the war without 15 years imprisonment lol.
And that’s not good!
Its not like protesters haven’t been assaulted and arrested by cops in the US since before our parents were born, and I can point out that the US is trying to extradite Julian Assange for doing journalism and prosecuting the Cop City protesters on RICO charges, but you’re right that Russia is still definitely worse on this front. I think the mass incarceration and global imperialism are worse problems.
You lose on the numbers and severity. This is just a fact.
Pretty sure you lose on the numbers. Severity is arguable, but I think quantity is a quality all on its own.