The Role of Government

[The Romulan Republic]

Promoting the general welfare of the population should include order and security.

The way I see it it goes even further then that, to me Egalitarian leads to order and security.
Liberal Democracies are far more stable and healthy then tyrannical dictatorships and monarchs.

Order doesn't need to be a priority, focus on freedom, justice, fairness, and equality, and order simply follows.

Yes, this myth that it is a choice between freedom and security, like the accompanying myth that authoritarian=orderly, needs to be destroyed. Tyranical societies are not secure. They maintain control by terror, and those who live in such societies live in constant fear and uncertainty, knowing that even the wrong words could see them arrested, tortured, even murdered. Until finally the people have had enough, and the whole thing ends in a revolution that may end up putting another dictator in power.

[United Dependencies]

Sources:
Animal Farm
Ayn Rand
Trotsky
Lmao.

Thankfully I don't have to quote Ayn Rand to show that markets=prosperity or that USSR was an authoritarian hellhole.

Pictures will do, instead.

http://www.realussr.com/ussr/21-depress ... -shaikhet/

...



I'm no fan of the USSR myself, but what is my reaction to these pictures supposed to be?

[Washington Resistance Army]

Between the USSR and PR China dozens of millions of people died, that is not what is best for anyone.

Population graphs says otherwise. It would be impossible with the population of the time for "millions to die" unless there was a fertility rates that put rabbits to shame. If Russia and China did not become communist, they would be like India, low literacy rates, high infant mortality rates, even poorer people. Russia and China were 3rd world shitholes before the revolutions and the revolutions improved them, remember that. Capitalists would just exploit the poor workers without caring for their health.

Are you actually denying that several tens of millions of people died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution?

Holy shit, you might have just won the 'Most willfully ignorant poster' award.

[Socialist Tera]

Thankfully I don't have to quote Ayn Rand to show that markets=prosperity or that USSR was an authoritarian hellhole.

Pictures will do, instead.

http://www.realussr.com/ussr/21-depress ... -shaikhet/

...



I'm no fan of the USSR myself, but what is my reaction to these pictures supposed to be?

The pictures do not really mean much sense to me at all really.
The videos make more sense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpTI6_JvUA
Seriously, the pictures are put there to make stupid conclusions.

[Ardoki]

Thankfully I don't have to quote Ayn Rand to show that markets=prosperity or that USSR was an authoritarian hellhole.

Pictures will do, instead.

http://www.realussr.com/ussr/21-depress ... -shaikhet/

...



I'm no fan of the USSR myself, but what is my reaction to these pictures supposed to be?

A lot of those pictures painted a good picture of the USSR. I didn't see a single negative one.

[Ardoki]

Population graphs says otherwise. It would be impossible with the population of the time for "millions to die" unless there was a fertility rates that put rabbits to shame. If Russia and China did not become communist, they would be like India, low literacy rates, high infant mortality rates, even poorer people. Russia and China were 3rd world shitholes before the revolutions and the revolutions improved them, remember that. Capitalists would just exploit the poor workers without caring for their health.

Are you actually denying that several tens of millions of people died during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution?

Holy shit, you might have just won the 'Most willfully ignorant poster' award.

I don't think that Stalin killed 100 million people out of a population less than 150 million. But that is just my opinion, and what the facts say.

[United Dependencies]

...



I'm no fan of the USSR myself, but what is my reaction to these pictures supposed to be?

A lot of those pictures painted a good picture of the USSR. I didn't see a single negative one.

I'm seeing the introduction of new farm equipment, electrification, and education for women in engineering. For a nation that was as backwards and agrarian as Tsarist Russia, I can't really say that those are bad things.

[The Liberated Territories]

Thankfully I don't have to quote Ayn Rand to show that markets=prosperity or that USSR was an authoritarian hellhole.

Pictures will do, instead.

http://www.realussr.com/ussr/21-depress ... -shaikhet/

...



I'm no fan of the USSR myself, but what is my reaction to these pictures supposed to be?

Uh, depression?

I can show you shots of Russian prostitutes begging for money if that works.

[United Dependencies]

Uh, depression?

I can show you shots of Russian prostitutes begging for money if that works.

As I just noted, I don't think that gallery has the intended effect.

[Socialist Tera]

...



I'm no fan of the USSR myself, but what is my reaction to these pictures supposed to be?

Uh, depression?

I can show you shots of Russian prostitutes begging for money if that works.

Prostitution was banned in the USSR but nice try.

A lot of those pictures painted a good picture of the USSR. I didn't see a single negative one.

I'm seeing the introduction of new farm equipment, electrification, and education for women in engineering. For a nation that was as backwards and agrarian as Tsarist Russia, I can't really say that those are bad things.

Women is tsarist times were often forced into prostitution because it was weirdly legal, Lenin banned it and both Stalin/Lenin encouraged women to become educated and to get jobs that are similar to the ones men did. Women even served as soldiers.

[Ardoki]

A lot of those pictures painted a good picture of the USSR. I didn't see a single negative one.

I'm seeing the introduction of new farm equipment, electrification, and education for women in engineering. For a nation that was as backwards and agrarian as Tsarist Russia, I can't really say that those are bad things.

That's exactly what I thought. There was also education for the indigenous minorities, caring for the homeless child, leisure activities, sport, etc.

[Ardoki]

...



I'm no fan of the USSR myself, but what is my reaction to these pictures supposed to be?

Uh, depression?

I can show you shots of Russian prostitutes begging for money if that works.

What is wrong with prostitution?

If that is what they want to do, no one has a right to stop them.

[Russels Orbiting Teapot]

I don't think that Stalin killed 100 million people out of a population less than 150 million. But that is just my opinion, and what the facts say.

You're right, that number would be a stupid exaggeration, which is why no one is using it. Current, conservative estimates put the number of people that Stalin had killed at roughly 20 million. And that's not counting anyone who died in combat.

[The Liberated Territories]

Uh, depression?

I can show you shots of Russian prostitutes begging for money if that works.

Prostitution was banned in the USSR but nice try.

I'm seeing the introduction of new farm equipment, electrification, and education for women in engineering. For a nation that was as backwards and agrarian as Tsarist Russia, I can't really say that those are bad things.

Women is tsarist times were often forced into prostitution because it was weirdly legal, Lenin banned it and both Stalin/Lenin encouraged women to become educated and to get jobs that are similar to the ones men did. Women even served as soldiers.

Because if you ban something, it magically goes away!

Or it goes underground...

Uh, depression?

I can show you shots of Russian prostitutes begging for money if that works.

What is wrong with prostitution?

If that is what they want to do, no one has a right to stop them.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with it, just that it is perhaps more undesirable than most jobs a woman could get relative to say, engineering. Yet there certainly was a black market for it.

[Ardoki]

I don't think that Stalin killed 100 million people out of a population less than 150 million. But that is just my opinion, and what the facts say.

You're right, that number would be a stupid exaggeration, which is why no one is using it. Current, conservative estimates put the number of people that Stalin had killed at roughly 20 million. And that's not counting anyone who died in combat.

According to population statistics of the USSR and its population growth rate. That number is far too high.

He was responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people, I don't deny that. However the Ukrainian famine was not a planned campaign of extermination, it was an accident. Anyway, Gulags were not designed to kill, most people survived and when released they settled colonies in the far east.

[Russels Orbiting Teapot]

Stalin had nearly a million of his own citizens executed, beginning in the 1930s. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen.

"In some cases, a quota was established for the number to be executed, the number to be arrested," said Naimark. "Some officials overfulfilled as a way of showing their exuberance."

The term "genocide" was defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention's work was shaped by the Holocaust – "that was considered the genocide," said Naimark.

"A catastrophe had just happened, and everyone was still thinking about the war that had just ended. This always occurs with international law – they outlaw what happened in the immediate past, not what's going to happen in the future."

[Ardoki]

Prostitution was banned in the USSR but nice try.

Women is tsarist times were often forced into prostitution because it was weirdly legal, Lenin banned it and both Stalin/Lenin encouraged women to become educated and to get jobs that are similar to the ones men did. Women even served as soldiers.

Because if you ban something, it magically goes away!

Or it goes underground...

What is wrong with prostitution?

If that is what they want to do, no one has a right to stop them.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with it, just that it is perhaps more undesirable than most jobs a woman could get relative to say, engineering. Yet there certainly was a black market for it.

I don't understand your point though. There is prostitution in every country in the world, and it has been around as long as civilisation (or almost as long). So I don't see how it is suppose to be a point against the USSR, when it can be universally applied to just about every known civilisation.

[Ardoki]

Stalin had nearly a million of his own citizens executed, beginning in the 1930s. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen.

"In some cases, a quota was established for the number to be executed, the number to be arrested," said Naimark. "Some officials overfulfilled as a way of showing their exuberance."

The term "genocide" was defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention's work was shaped by the Holocaust – "that was considered the genocide," said Naimark.

"A catastrophe had just happened, and everyone was still thinking about the war that had just ended. This always occurs with international law – they outlaw what happened in the immediate past, not what's going to happen in the future."

Stalin definitely was responsible for at least 600 000 deaths, this number can reach a million. However most of the people deported and used as labour in the GULAG did not die due to their treatment but were instead forcibly settled on colonies there after their release.

[Russels Orbiting Teapot]

According to population statistics of the USSR and its population growth rate. That number is far too high.

He was responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people, I don't deny that. However the Ukrainian famine was not a planned campaign of extermination, it was an accident. Anyway, Gulags were not designed to kill, most people survived and when released they settled colonies in the far east.

That number is probably low. You are trying to revise history and erase a genocide. Stop it.

http://www.distributedrepublic.net/arch ... ly-murder/

The figure comes from the book by Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (Macmillan 1968). In his appendix on casualty figures, he reviews a number of estimates of those that were killed under Stalin, and calculates that the number of executions 1936 to 1938 was probably about 1,000,000; that from 1936 to 1950 about 12,000,000 died in the camps; and 3,500,000 died in the 1930-1936 collectivization. Overall, he concludes:


Thus we get a figure of 20 million dead, which is almost certainly too low and might require an increase of 50 percent or so, as the debit balance of the Stalin regime for twenty-three years.

In all the times I've seen Conquest’s 20,000,000 reported, not once do I recall seeing his qualification attached to it.

Considering that Stalin died in 1953, note what Conquest did not include -- camp deaths after 1950, and before 1936; executions 1939-53; the vast deportation of the people of captive nations into the camps, and their deaths 1939-1953; the massive deportation within the Soviet Union of minorities 1941-1944; and their deaths; and those the Soviet Red Army and secret police executed throughout Eastern Europe after their conquest during 1944-1945 is omitted. Moreover, omitted is the deadly Ukrainian famine Stalin purposely imposed on the region and that killed 5 million in 1932-1934. So, Conquest’s estimates are spotty and incomplete.

http://www.ukemonde.com/news/rferl.html

A famine deliberately engineered by the regime of Josef Stalin 70 years ago claimed millions of lives, mostly in Ukraine but also in some other parts of the Soviet Union. It is today considered one of the worst atrocities of the Soviet regime and a terrifying act of genocide. Even so, the famine of 1933 is relatively unknown. RFE/RL correspondent Askold Krushelnycky examines the reasons behind this and reports on a campaign to draw attention to the atrocity.

Prague, 8 April 2003 (RFE/RL) -- Estimates of how many people died in Stalin's engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale -- between seven and 11 million people.

But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told their stories about concentration camps and massacres. The experience was also captured unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial.

Lyubomyr Luciuk is the director of research at the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association. He explained why there was no such opportunity to investigate the famine in the Soviet Union.

British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, "Harvest of Sorrow," brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.

Conquest said that while most historians now accept that a devastating famine took place, some skeptics remain that try to find a justification for Stalin's behavior.

But Conquest said more evidence has emerged since the disintegration of the USSR allowed greater access to Soviet archives. He says he himself has uncovered documented evidence that shows Stalin knew that hundreds of thousands of peasants were trying to enter Russia in search of food.

If you keep trying to defend a monster you will become a monster.

[Socialist Tera]

Prostitution was banned in the USSR but nice try.

Women is tsarist times were often forced into prostitution because it was weirdly legal, Lenin banned it and both Stalin/Lenin encouraged women to become educated and to get jobs that are similar to the ones men did. Women even served as soldiers.

Because if you ban something, it magically goes away!

Or it goes underground...

What is wrong with prostitution?

If that is what they want to do, no one has a right to stop them.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with it, just that it is perhaps more undesirable than most jobs a woman could get relative to say, engineering. Yet there certainly was a black market for it.

That's what gulags are for. Here's a fun question, what would The Liberated Territorist Russia do to stop mass illiteracy and mass poverty? I doubt your policies would of been able to lift millions out of illiteracy and poverty.

[Ardoki]

According to population statistics of the USSR and its population growth rate. That number is far too high.

He was responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people, I don't deny that. However the Ukrainian famine was not a planned campaign of extermination, it was an accident. Anyway, Gulags were not designed to kill, most people survived and when released they settled colonies in the far east.

That number is probably low. You are trying to revise history and erase a genocide. Stop it.

http://www.distributedrepublic.net/arch ... ly-murder/

The figure comes from the book by Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (Macmillan 1968). In his appendix on casualty figures, he reviews a number of estimates of those that were killed under Stalin, and calculates that the number of executions 1936 to 1938 was probably about 1,000,000; that from 1936 to 1950 about 12,000,000 died in the camps; and 3,500,000 died in the 1930-1936 collectivization. Overall, he concludes:


Thus we get a figure of 20 million dead, which is almost certainly too low and might require an increase of 50 percent or so, as the debit balance of the Stalin regime for twenty-three years.

In all the times I've seen Conquest’s 20,000,000 reported, not once do I recall seeing his qualification attached to it.

Considering that Stalin died in 1953, note what Conquest did not include -- camp deaths after 1950, and before 1936; executions 1939-53; the vast deportation of the people of captive nations into the camps, and their deaths 1939-1953; the massive deportation within the Soviet Union of minorities 1941-1944; and their deaths; and those the Soviet Red Army and secret police executed throughout Eastern Europe after their conquest during 1944-1945 is omitted. Moreover, omitted is the deadly Ukrainian famine Stalin purposely imposed on the region and that killed 5 million in 1932-1934. So, Conquest’s estimates are spotty and incomplete.

http://www.ukemonde.com/news/rferl.html

A famine deliberately engineered by the regime of Josef Stalin 70 years ago claimed millions of lives, mostly in Ukraine but also in some other parts of the Soviet Union. It is today considered one of the worst atrocities of the Soviet regime and a terrifying act of genocide. Even so, the famine of 1933 is relatively unknown. RFE/RL correspondent Askold Krushelnycky examines the reasons behind this and reports on a campaign to draw attention to the atrocity.

Prague, 8 April 2003 (RFE/RL) -- Estimates of how many people died in Stalin's engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale -- between seven and 11 million people.

But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told their stories about concentration camps and massacres. The experience was also captured unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial.

Lyubomyr Luciuk is the director of research at the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association. He explained why there was no such opportunity to investigate the famine in the Soviet Union.

British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, "Harvest of Sorrow," brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.

Conquest said that while most historians now accept that a devastating famine took place, some skeptics remain that try to find a justification for Stalin's behavior.

But Conquest said more evidence has emerged since the disintegration of the USSR allowed greater access to Soviet archives. He says he himself has uncovered documented evidence that shows Stalin knew that hundreds of thousands of peasants were trying to enter Russia in search of food.

If you keep trying to defend a monster you will become a monster.

Robert Conquest is not a reliable source, considering his vocal political leanings and affiliations.

[Genivaria]

The way I see it it goes even further then that, to me Egalitarian leads to order and security.
Liberal Democracies are far more stable and healthy then tyrannical dictatorships and monarchs.

Order doesn't need to be a priority, focus on freedom, justice, fairness, and equality, and order simply follows.

Yes, this myth that it is a choice between freedom and security, like the accompanying myth that authoritarian=orderly, needs to be destroyed. Tyranical societies are not secure. They maintain control by terror, and those who live in such societies live in constant fear and uncertainty, knowing that even the wrong words could see them arrested, tortured, even murdered. Until finally the people have had enough, and the whole thing ends in a revolution that may end up putting another dictator in power.

Couldn't have put it better myself friend.

[Russels Orbiting Teapot]

Robert Conquest is not a reliable source, considering his vocal political leanings and affiliations.

Have you read the works of Roy Medvedev, the soviet author who comes to the same figures?

I don't suppose you have a source for population figures across all the USSR that somehow make this genocide impossible?

Your like a holocaust denier here, and you're just going to shame yourself.

[Ardoki]

Robert Conquest is not a reliable source, considering his vocal political leanings and affiliations.

Have you read the works of Roy Medvedev, the soviet author who comes to the same figures?

I don't suppose you have a source for population figures across all the USSR that somehow make this genocide impossible?

Your like a holocaust denier here, and you're just going to shame yourself.

I am not a holocaust denier.

[Washington Resistance Army]

Have you read the works of Roy Medvedev, the soviet author who comes to the same figures?

I don't suppose you have a source for population figures across all the USSR that somehow make this genocide impossible?

Your like a holocaust denier here, and you're just going to shame yourself.

I am not a holocaust denier.

You're close enough.