Marxists have been discussing the class nature of authority since Marx and Engels themselves, see Marx’s Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy and Engels’ On Authority. On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice. The term “gulag” came from the GULAG administration, and doesn’t mean “torture/execution camp” or anything of the sort.
Defending the USSR from undue slander is the only correct path for a socialist to take. We defend the USSR because we defend the achievements of real, existing socialism, and we want to criticize the USSR’s shortcomings from an accurate point of view. Any comparisons equating communists to Nazis contributes to Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization. I’ll leave you with a quote:
To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism.
If you consider yourself a socialist, you owe it to our predecessors to wipe away the sludge cast onto their graves, and carry the mission for socialism forward.
Quibbling over the definition of “authoritarian” is kind of a red flag for a country that invented the term “gulag”
Defending the Soviet Union in this way has the same energy as someone claiming that the Nazis actually did some really good scientific research
“Pointing out that my epithet is categorically meaningless is a real red flag for a country that had -checks notes- prisons.”
Are you just doing spooky Slavic word association at this point?
You’re like a parody of an anarchist lmao
Marxists have been discussing the class nature of authority since Marx and Engels themselves, see Marx’s Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy and Engels’ On Authority. On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice. The term “gulag” came from the GULAG administration, and doesn’t mean “torture/execution camp” or anything of the sort.
Defending the USSR from undue slander is the only correct path for a socialist to take. We defend the USSR because we defend the achievements of real, existing socialism, and we want to criticize the USSR’s shortcomings from an accurate point of view. Any comparisons equating communists to Nazis contributes to Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization. I’ll leave you with a quote:
If you consider yourself a socialist, you owe it to our predecessors to wipe away the sludge cast onto their graves, and carry the mission for socialism forward.