Memorization is largely vilified in American schooling, and for good reason. But I think if not abused, it is an excellent form of (self-) learning not at all devoid of near meditative qualities. There something special about committing things to memory, especially verses.
I had experience with both American schooling and European one where memorization was a big part of the learning. I was struggling to memorize things. The American way worked perfectly for me. I think that schools should not encourage memorization.
A learning process where you remember all the facts and recite them exactly, you get a good grade is bad. That doesn't mean you actually understand and can apply your knowledge. There was this article on HN a couple of days ago about the medical paper where the author had reinvented the integral. That's the result of too much memorization.
You have a very interesting insight here -- now that I think about it, I see it. But I'm not sure I agree that it is for a good reason.
Intuitive understanding of math is better than rote memorization. But that does not mean that rote memorization is bad, only lesser. I'm also not convinced that many people can grasp something intuitively, bypassing rote memorization.
It’s also been noted that basically all great mathematicians are excellent at basic maths (memorized timetables) and can remember many numbers and can calculate in head quickly —— even though technically shouldn’t be necessary for proofs
In ancient Greece papyrus was roughly worth its weight in silver. For a long time writing was so onerous that people just didn't do it.
The shared civilization behind ancient Greece and ancient Northern India and ancient Britain had a system of oral-formulaic poetry, wherein descriptions are full of stock phrases like "wine-dark sea" or "rosy-fingered Dawn", like in today's "My name is X and I'm here to say" in more recent oral poetic forms.
I’ve heard speculation that such poetic formulas act as a sort of data integrity system. It’s a form of error correction because what comes next in the poem has to fit certain rules. It’s not just useful for memorization, it actively helps structure the information so it gets passed with fewer errors.
The data integrity operates on the level of story line and major themes. Formulae are at the word and phrase level. If the written is subordinate to the orally extemporaneous, like jazz, maybe you memorize a few star solos, but memorization isn't how you play a solo as a jazz musician. It's like asking "Did Hansel and Gretel see Rapunzel along the way?", and the answer depends on whether a book or a culture creates the stories their use.
If you have no writing, all of your community's texts are fan fiction with limit on headcanon. People brought tape recorders to Bosnia in the 1930s, to try to see how oral folk music worked, and to see how much it changed day to day and year to year, and they found that they couldn't glue the same story together from day to day.
The Gulag Archipelago is one of those pieces I wish everyone would read. These days the lessons of socialism and communism are lost on a younger generation that seems blind to what Marxism led to, and how much suffering and death it caused.
The ideologies behind these government systems require authoritarianism, from the state and the mob. It requires a single ideology to win with everything else stamped out, and this is explicitly mentioned in foundational Marxist works. Ultimately that adherence to a singular ideology, with aggressive suppression of all others, leads to every subsequent horror.
I read a big chunk of the Gulag Archipelago in Russian last year and it was, to my surprise, one of the most beautiful things I'd ever read. It reads like poetry, especially the beginning. Now I am thinking: maybe he recited and memorized all those passages to himself and used the verse-like structure to aid memorization.
In the Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn cites something that has really stuck with me:
> Martin Latsis, writing for the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918: “We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and essence of red terror.”
A haunting quote, you would think. The thing is, I'm not sure that our younger generation would learn much from reading Solzhenitsyn, or even the above quote. I think even Solzhenitsyn can't teach you that you cannot take things like "equality" at face value. That maybe there are deeper realities lurking beneath the surface?
I'll leave it to Dylan:
> A self-ordained professor's tongue / Too serious to fool/ Spouted out that liberty / Is just equality in school / "Equality," I spoke their word / As if a wedding vow / Ah, but I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now.
The whole woke my movement is this type of thinking all over again. What you are, where you are from, what group you identify with gives your argument weight. Not your actual thoughts. The scary thing is I'm experiencing this being accepted as normal in the work place. To challenge this type of thinking is to become a heretic. Or worse a racist. I keep my views to myself.
I think you are misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not a racist. Far from it. I don't think race should come into anything. However it seems we're trying to make identity and race part of everything. That someone's opinion should count more or less because of their identity. This isn't a good idea.
That’s nice. Maybe in 500 years we can forget about race. Right now there are lots of people who are actively, intentionally racist, and as long as they are around, making race taboo just means you give cover to such people.
Solzhenitsyn's name has come up several times in various things I've read this month. I don't think it's a coincidence.
I purchased his book off Amazon a few weeks ago, thinking it wouldn't be long until they started delisting books. Now all this nonsense with Dr. Seuss.
One quote, loosely paraphrased from another book I'm struggling to finish -- an interview with survivors of post WW2 totalitarianism. One of them was incredibly disillusioned, and told the author not to bother with the interview, as no one would be ready to believe it was happening until it was too late.
Edit: I am speaking very loosely here. Yes, I know the government isn't censoring Dr. Seuss. Yes, I know the estate has the right to cease publishing for any reason. Yes, I know Amazon did not delist Dr. Seuss, it was eBay. But I was not referring to any of these things, and I did not intend to.
My statement was intended to be this: I expect Amazon to delist books, and am purchasing physical copies. What is happening now with Dr. Seuss is in the category of things that drove my worried purchases.
Rarely will I say this, as I value being precise with what I'm saying. If your response is, "But @bjt2n3904, the government isn't censoring this" you are both technically correct, and missing the forest for the trees.
> I purchased his book off Amazon a few weeks ago, thinking it wouldn't be long until they started delisting books. Now all this nonsense with Dr. Seuss.
Except it was the copyright holder of the Dr. Seuss books that decided to withdraw these books. Not the government or sellers like Amazon. It's more of an argument for reducing the length of copyright in the US rather than some sort of ominous supression of free speech.
The copyright holder didn't delist the books, eBay did.
From wsj:
> Online marketplace eBay Inc. said it is working to prevent the resale of six Dr. Seuss books that were pulled earlier this week by the company in charge of the late author’s works because they contain offensive imagery.
Personally I don't think the fact that it was a copyright holder makes this outcome much better. These publishers are also subject to the mob pressure that comes from the long march through the institutions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_ins...). A few activist employees can force internal decision making, because everyone else might be afraid to speak against due to the threat of cancel culture - that is, they don't want to get fired because for speaking against the excesses of progressive left ideology.
Just like with tech companies' internal political culture or newsroom revolts sweeping all the major journalism houses, publishers have themselves experienced both internal employee activism and external pressures. Consider for example, that employees in Penguin House were in literal tears (https://reason.com/2020/11/25/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-l...) because they decided to publish Jordan Peterson's new book. Or observe how activists associated with Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon tried to stop a local landmark book store (Powell's) from selling Andy Ngo's book "Unmasked", which details the criminal activity of local antifa cells (https://pen.org/press-release/pen-america-supports-powells-d...).
Book burning was once a far-fetched joke but it really is very much upon us. And it doesn't have to come in the literal form of a book burning. It's enough for the threat of "cancellation" to force the hand of authors, publishers, or retailers.
There is no such thing as an antifa cell. An antifa cell would imply an antifa organization.
But antifa is an activity, not an organization. Anyone can do antifa simply by opposing local fascist activity. It may be as simple as covering up fascist graffiti, or punching Richard Spencer. Some people do it with their friends, others alone. Every little bit helps, but more helps more. Try not to endanger yourself or non-fascists.
Antifa is most definitely an organization. The claim that it is an activity and not an organization is just low-tier gaslighting. Here's hard evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_City_Antifa
As noted, people may join together for anti-fascist activity, and any organization may participate in such activity. That does not imply an "Antifa" organization any more than the activity of fascists implies a Fascist organization.
There are many fascist and fascist-leaning groups and individuals, and many opposing them. Anyone may oppose them, without need for permission. Organizing with local others can produce greater effect. That also does not require permission.
Any existing organization may choose to engage in anti-fascist activity, possibly in coördination with other groups. That also does not imply an "Antifa" organization.
Opposition to fascism is everyone's responsibility. How that opposition may best be effected varies with circumstance. Rooting out fascism in police departments is an obviously important part of anti-fascist activity.
It's also only 33TB on bittorrent. Humanity's literary heritage fits on $900 worth of hard drives. If Sci-Hub is the World Library's nonfiction section then LibGen is the fiction aisles.
Solzhenitsyn’s In The First Circle is also important for people in the tech industry to read. The book takes place in a Sharashka, a prison-within-the-prison-system for talented engineers who get (marginally) better food and conditions in exchange for doing the State's bidding.
The sad part is that they end up rather excitedly reinforcing the very regime that put them there and, towards the end, are instrumental in thwarting one of their country's best hopes at throwing off the yoke of Stalinism.
If you do read it, make sure you get the uncensored version. The chapter making fun of Stalin's working habits is hilarious.
And if anyone decides to read this, please make sure you read In The First Circle, not The First Circle. The latter is the "first" publication, which Solzhenitsyn abridged and modified, because he did not think that the true work would make it past the Soviet minders. In The First Circle is the true work, as Solzhenitsyn intended.
You're commenting as if Capitalism and Imperialism are squeaky clean, which is incredibly far from the truth. Just to give a little more context, Solzhenitsyn was a Fascist who supported the Germans during WWII and openly supported Franco in Spain. He was also a notorious anti-semite even at a time when anti-semitism was punishable by death in Soviet Russia. I've read Gulag Archipelago and he's a pretty good writer, but it should not be considered a work of non-fiction.
A quote from an interview with his wife:
"Natalya Reshetovskaya, a Russian chemist who twice married the dissident writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, and questioned the famous account he gave of Stalin's prison camps in ''The Gulag Archipelago,'' died in Moscow on May 28. She was 84.
In her 1974 memoir, ''Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'' (Bobbs-Merrill), she wrote that she was ''perplexed'' that the West had accepted ''The Gulag Archipelago'' as ''the solemn, ultimate truth,'' saying its significance had been ''overestimated and wrongly appraised.''
Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.
He began a series of love affairs with younger women and when Miss Reshetovskaya protested, she wrote that he replied: ''I have to describe lots of women in my novels. You don't expect me to find my heroines at the dinner table, do you ?''
He eventually left her for Natalya Svetlova, a young mathematician.
What is a gulag? It's a penal colony or a labor camp or a prison.
The US today houses more prisoners for slave labor as a percentage of it's population than the Soviet Union at the height of the gulag period, modern day Russia, Iran or China.
The comment you are replying to was rife with absolute inaccuracies. I can assure you you won't get anywhere trying to argue against that person.
Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned by Stalin because while on the front lines fighting against the Nazis he wrote a letter that was intercepted with statements in it critical of Stalin's poor execution in supplying the army.
The parent commenter doesn't even get this basic fact right and flips it on its head. Denial effects like this are the mark of a true ideologue, and as you pointed out the whataboutism is also a tale for cognitive dissonance. And the dismissive attitude towards gulags is also indicative of somebody shutting out information that would undermine a fragile ego clinging to ideology for purpose.
What part is inaccurate and where did I say anything contradicting what you're saying? I've studied Russian history for many years. We know much more about the gulags since Glasnost and the opening of the archives. We can now compare actual numbers against Solzhenitsyn's. I've studied this quite a bit and could go on forever, but here's a link to one post on AskHistorians: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3j2un8/is_so...
The biggest specialist in this subject, Viktor Zemskov, who worked in the Soviet archives in the period of 'Perestroika' gives the following facts1 "In 1937 there were 1,196,369 prisoners and 87% of them were ordinary non-political criminals like thieves, cons, etc. In 1938 in GULAG were 1,881,570 prisoners and 81% of them were ordinary criminals.
What do you say to a person who cites Soviet statistics in earnest?
What do you say to a person who, in one comment, rails against incarceration in the United States, only to say that in the Soviet Union the GULAG wasn't so bad because... "87% of them were ordinary non-political criminals like thieves, cons, etc."
During WWII, German prisoners, and anybody else drafted into service for Germany and captured, were killed or sent to the Gulags. During and after the war, anyone who had been taken prisoner and returned to Soviet custody were considered deserters, and shot or sent to the Gulags. Civilians in places first overrun by German and then Soviet forces were considered collaborators and commonly killed or sent to the Gulags. The choice which often depended on availability of transportation.
Gulag terms were often only a few years because the lifespan of prisoners at many sites was short, particularly gold mines.
So, not just prisons or labor camps. It is hard to imagine how 81% or 87% could be identified as ordinary criminals in the absence of any semblance of due process. A tortured confession is not a verdict.
The commenters who compared prisons in the United States with Gulags, where you were sent to dig for gold basically by hand, poorly dressed at -30C for 12 hours.
> So, not just prisons or labor camps. It is hard to imagine how 81% or 87% could be identified as ordinary criminals in the absence of any semblance of due process. A tortured confession is not a verdict.
It takes a special kind of ignorance to believe statistics like this, and then to believe that being a "thief" makes being sent to prison okay, while complaining about incarceration in the United States, where people are incarcerated for petty crimes. It is mind bending.
Your comment was a littany of attempts at character assassination largely unrelated to the work in question. The idea that Russian gulags were "just a prison" is a ridiculous characterization that no historian would agree with. They were prisons for political prisoners, who were there warehoused there to keep them from speaking out against the regime, and they were put there without due process of law. The idea that that is even remotely comparable to the American judicial system is just completely ahistorical Stalinist apologism.
A relatively small percentage were political prisoners, but when you compare the number of people who have received very lengthy sentences for minor drug possession, in some cases life, how is that any better? Not to mention Jim Crow in the US at the time. We have the largest prison population in the world by a considerable margin. Most of the people in our jails and prisons are there for drug offenses and crimes of poverty.
The US has a far larger prison population as a percentage of total population right now than the Soviet Union did even at the height of Stalin's purges. We have access to the Soviet archives now. We have actual numbers on these things.
Of course they were a small percentage. That just means they imprisoned a lot of people, though. The absolute number of political prisoners was extremely large, in the millions.
There was no rule of law in the USSR. Sentencing was arbitrary. Your typical "thief" was quite often a person who inhabited the apartment someone else wanted, or a person who's position someone wanted at work. Write to the authorities that you saw them stealing: done! There were prison quotes to fill, most seriously. The United States has absolutely nothing on the Soviet Union.
Only a person who has no experience outside the realm of Western existence could believe such a thing as Soviet (or today, Chinese) statistics. People were disappeared, summarily shot in basements, all the time. The whole system worked like that, from prisoners in prisons to the production of basic commodities: https://soviet_intelligence.enacademic.com/381/Uzbek_Cotton_.... Everything was lies and murder.
Western intellectuals spent decades defending and minimizing Soviet atrocities, because like many intellectuals, they really believed Utopia is possible, if only everyone thought like them.
They still do. The admiration for the Chinese Communist Party's response to COVID has been very telling. Note that praise of Taiwan, who handled it phenomenally without welding people into apartment buildings, has been limited in comparison.
Honest question: where do you get the information that you're operating on? It sounds like you're just presenting opinion and you don't know a whole lot about Soviet history, gulags, or the US prison system.
You do know that we have forced labor in the US and slavery is allowed under the 13th amendment if you are convicted of a crime. Prisoners are frequently lent out as cheap labor to private companies.
I would encourage you to look at the Soviet statistics on the Ukrainian famine, and ask yourself if any of them can be trusted, and why you have trusted them in the past.
We're talking about a government that suppressed its own scientists to a point where a critical design flaw in a nuclear reactor was ignored until the world's worst nuclear accident occurred.
And like a good little ideologue, you proceed with whataboutism, assuming that people like me haven't called legislators to demand an end to private prisons and prison labor. I have.
You're setting up straw men and attributing lots of arguments to me that I'm not making. I spent a month in Kyiv last year, went to the Holodomor museum, and just finished a book about it not too long ago. The famine was very much a real thing. I've also been to Chernobyl, but I'm not sure why you're bringing any of this up.
The stats talk about number of people imprisoned in a particular moment of time. It doesn't say if a part of them for example died over the next couple of months due to cold and starvation and were topped up with new inmates That would make the number look unchanged during the next count.
How is this whataboutism? I'm in no way apologizing for gulags, but the "Socialism and Marxism always leads to utter destruction" take is so tired and insulting to those who actually study history and political science.
Also, this "Ultimately that adherence to a singular ideology, with aggressive suppression of all others, leads to every subsequent horror." You do realize this holds true under every economic system, right. It was true under feudalism and it's absolutely true under Capitalism. That's kind of the nature of a system.
Edit: The point of bringing up the anti-semitism and Fascism was to show that his views, pretty much all around, were strongly forbidden in the Soviet Union at the time. Absolute free speech works fairly well in America, but you have to understand that at the time in that part of the world there were many different cultures with high-tensions sharing the same space. If hate speech was allowed it would result in non-stop war. The same thing was the case in Yugoslavia where hate speech was strongly punished and it served the purpose of keeping the peace, until Tito died. The history of the Balkans illustrates this point quite well. Yes, we all love free speech, but endless wars are good for nobody.
FWIW, I've traveled through all of these countries extensively and Russian is my second language. I also speak a bit of Serbo-Croatian. Traveling around and speaking with these people changed the lens with which I view these things. There is more nuance than words can describe and the history is complicated to say the least.
When and where did you do your travels? Living in the former USSR I can absolutely confirm the history is way more complicated, than it is commonly presented. Changes over time, changes depending on people you speak to. In my country we have had read army, Finnish army and Waffen SS veterans living out their lives quite peacefully together but they would no doubt give you a very different perspective on how the GULAG felt. And it’s not that you can tell from the outside.
As to the ideology, I agree with you about fundamentalism leading to death and destruction. Marxism, however, contains the premise, that one particular class must be liquidated. Also, it requires people to behave in a very particular and unnatural way leading easily to a conclusion that these should be eliminated too. So maybe it lends itself better as a tool for madmen raising to power, than some others. Maybe it’s not that people trying to implement Marxism have ended up in chaos but that people seeking absolute power have tended to use it as an ideological cover and to rally a support?
I was in St. Petersburg and Moscow last year and spent a month in Kyiv. I've been to Czech and Slovak republics the year before. Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia, North Macedonia, Serbia, Belarus. Next on the list is Georgia, Armenia, Romania, and Bulgaria. I've been wanting to go to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan too.
The percentage of the population that ended up spending time in a work camp was about 2.5% and the average sentence was 2-3 years. It's terrible what happened, there's no two ways about it, but the transition from feudalism to capitalism was pretty horrendous beyond words.
Honestly, the history of the region is so complex that it's incredibly challenging to know where to begin.
He was fighting in Red Army during the WWII and got wounded doing so. How that constitutes supporting fascism, I do not know. In his later years his views did indeed drift to russian nationalism bordering on russian supremacy. This led him to fall out with, among others, Estonians who sheltered him while he was writing the Archipelago. This is a pity, but does not negate the significance of his early work. Neither does his work imply anybody else to be squeaky clean. It explores evil, it’s working on people and documents the outcome of that work in a particular case.
He was fighting for his country. If someone invaded the US during the Trump, Bush, or Obama depending on who you dislike, we would all be fighting to defend our country regardless of who was in charge. Defending your was of life, family, countrymen doesn't take a huge amount of imagination to wrap your head around.
He ended up leaving the US and going back to Russia because he said the US had no culture. Not saying I agree with that, but that's how he felt. It's pretty common for people to become more nationalistic after they leave their home country.
The facist tendencies come from a meeting he had with Thatcher where he said "The German army could have liberated the Soviet Union from Communism but Hitler was stupid and did not use this weapon." It seems extraordinary that Solzhenitsyn saw the failure of Nazi Germany to annex the Soviet Union as some kind of missed opportunity.
He also visited Franco in Spain on a number of occasions and did a TV interview where he praised Franco.
When I first read Gulag Archipelago I accepted it as fact and projected his feelings onto the rest of Russian society. It was only through later studies that I found this to not be the case.
Ragarding the Holocaust - if anyone has a reference to someone debunking the common arguments for denying its size I’d appreciate a link. Arguments such as all death camps being in the soviet controlled part of Germany (after the war), the wooden doors in gas chambers idea, that holes for putting gas in gas chambers were made after the war, and that gas and collection of shoes (I remember the mountain of them when visiting) were used for delousing. It’s easy to find claims online that these things point to the event being a communist propaganda fabrication, but surely the well read HN community can help me debunk such claims.
There are different kinds of socialism, like there are different kinds of capitalism.
The author lived in the most extreme one and his writings show that.
I can tell you that from my personal experience that the time after the fall of communism and before the agents of capitalism gained power in society was the most free time in my life.
So, the only way this could possibly be true, as someone who has lived through the fall of communism, is if you are an oligarch or in an oligarch family who had first access to the resources of the state and got rich by getting ownership rights to it.
Oh, sorry, the other alternative is that you were part of the mafia that took over control of a lot of where the police couldn't.
It's an interesting book and (I think) well written, but we should take care not to take it as factual. Gulags were real and very awful places, but Solzhenitsyn wasn't writing a history or a scientifically investigated piece. He was writing material for future novels, and much of the book is fabrication. His wife's autobiography (and other places) confirm what's a fairly widespread view outside of the OECD world. She called western responses to it "overestimated and wrongly appraised", and mentions that Solzhenitsyn himself never viewed the book as "historical research, or scientific research, but [rather more] a 'camp folklore' collection".
Solzhenitsyn wrote a lot and TGA seems like a melting pot of his own anticommunist beliefs, his experiences under Soviet rule, and an interest in his craft as a writer. But it's not 100% a historically accurate book.
Obviously (shouldn't have to say it but who knows these days) gulags were bad and I wouldn't want to be placed into one etc. I do however think we do ourselves a disservice when taking untrue accounts as factual, as is the case in a lot of western treatment of Soviet leaders (esp. Stalin; Lenin seems to get more of a pass).
Are all the books written about Auschwitz also "more novels than scientific fact then"?
How does your post truth attitude account for the fact that the stories that have come out of the gulags and auschwitz by many many people seem to tell the same stories? Are these just fictional novels popping up in everyone's heads?
Shameful, I'm so angry after reading this, as someone from one of these countries who's family was affected. You should be ashamed for trying to normalise this type of society.
Your comment reads like propaganda, trying to hand-wave away one of the greatest works of journalism in the 20th century. Of course it reads like a novel and not an exposé - he had to memorize a huge portion of it. But it's an accurate indictment nonetheless.
I think that you seeing this work of fiction as one of the greatest works of journalism of the 20th century is exactly why I posted. I agree that the gulag system sucks? So don't think I'm in favor of the USSR or something, because I'm not. But the book's content isn't real, it's largely fabrication, and you can say something like "I think he speaks to the truth of the situation despite not accurately representing facts and statistics" if you want to. But I don't think it's right to act like The Gulag Archipelago is anything but a novel, albeit one that maybe expounds truths beyond its content, especially in an arena like this which claims to value factuality.
I also think you missed the part where the author acknowledges that it's a work of fiction and informed by real experiences but not meant to relate to reality per se. So while I value your input (of course!) I can't help but wonder if a re-read of previous comments might be in order.
Solzhenitsyn is required reading today for Russion schoolchildren. That alone ought to speak to its importance and accuracy -- not of figures per se (unbeknownst to him, some of his sources were not accurate), but the reality of the horrors committed by the Soviets, which he experienced first-hand.
Have you read at least the first few chapters of The Gulag Archipelago?
I don't know what country you are from, but I doubt its any with experiences of death camps. Take your non historical post truth head out of your ass and realise that MILLIONS of people were killed in nazi germany, the gulags, by the chinese communists. MILLIONS others were starved to death because food was confiscated from them.
These systems don't SUCK. They were the lowest points of human history.
I'm so fucking angry with apologists like you. You have no idea what people went through.
> I don't know what country you are from, but I doubt its any with experiences of death camps.
I'm sorry that I wasn't sufficiently excoratory of the gulags. What adjective do you think would make you feel I have an acceptable level of distaste for forced labor camps?
I also don't think the gulags were death camps, weren't they "reeducation" and labor camps? Unlike a death camp, the point is to produce labor (in large part this uncompensated, essentially slave, labor was a major contributor to the USSR's ability to take on a half decade's industrialization in a fifth of the time, or so I'm led to believe).
> I'm so fucking angry with apologists like you. You have no idea what people went through.
I don't think you're in a state to have a rational conversation about politics, because it sounds like you have personal or familial experience with these institutions. I know some of my close friends have very close ties to the Trail of Tears in the USA and I also avoid talking to them about the issue - not because it's taboo, but because I don't think there's a meaningful conversation to be had there. It was an atrocity, and will never be made right. What can you say to that?
