It doesn't matter who erected the barrier, the end result is that the USSR was not able to run successful influence campaigns or inject money into the US politics on the scale Russia is doing today.
USSR was an oligarchy before. Now it is a dictatorship, so operations have a single decision maker. Also, Putin is highly interested in ops which extend his influence and his ability to steal.
Uhh Japanese internment and Mexican repatriation were genocidal actions. The US only stopped mass stochastic involuntary sterilization of natives in the 1970's. Some still happen to this day.
If you don't know your own country's history why are you speculating on the history of the USSR?
> Uhh Japanese internment and Mexican repatriation were genocidal actions
No, they weren't, “genocide" has a meaning, and neither of those fit it; it doesn't just mean “bad”. (OTOH, you ar every much correct that the Native American genocide continued in the period in question.)
This is a semantic argument that I have no real interest in arguing.
Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing. Genocide as a criminal charge is mostly a political matter.
California literally admitted that they targeted citizens of Mexican descent for the explicit purpose of illegally cajoling them into emigration and enforced deportation. You learn about it euphemistically as "repatriation" (if at all because almost no HS curriculum teaches this) because oopsie.
If the USSR rounded up all the Japanese and put them in a camp, you wouldn't hear the end of it in the West. Roosevelt himself used the term concentration camps. You learn about it euphemistically as "internment" because "they had a good reason to do it, and sometimes you know we get things wrong!!". An argument that can really only be used if you prelabel good guys and bad guys.
The main difference between US camps and USSR camps is that the US camps were nicer and had food.
The quality of repression scales with the wealth to some degree. The USSR couldn't support the same quality of life for their prisoners that the US could.
Today the US refuses to provide the same quality of life for their prisoners that less wealthy OECD countries do provide.
> Roosevelt himself used the term concentration camps. You learn about it euphemistically as "internment" because "they had a good reason to do it, and sometimes you know we get things wrong!!".
“Internment camps” and “concentration camps” are historical synonyms, the latter has subsequently taken on additional negative loading because of euphemistic use of the term for German extermination camps.
> The main difference between US camps and USSR camps is that the US camps were nicer and had food.
That's... A fairly substantive difference. Detaining people without just cause is bad. Doing so without food is murder.
WW2 era ethnic (primarily, but not exclusively, Japanese) internment in the US was definitely a violation of moral human rights, as were numerous post-WW2 efforts targeting people in the US of Hispanic/Latino ancestry, often on the pretext of illegal immigration. Neither was genocidal; not all bad things are genocide.
> “Internment camps” and “concentration camps” are historical synonyms, the latter has subsequently taken on additional negative loading because of euphemistic use of the term for German extermination camps.
This is completely wrong.
The term concentration camp was invented in the Second Boer War. It described a tactic of war used by the English against to Boers and native Africans. Because Boers and Africans did not have centralized cities and lived off the land rather than having industrialized farming the developed tactics of disrupting the supply lines didn't work on them. The supply lines were too horizontal.
So first they burned and salted the land so that Boers and Africans could no longer subsist. Then they forced the people whose lives they destroyed into what they called concentration camps.
~50k people died in these concentration camps essentially every 3rd person that went in.
The forcible population transfer at gunpoint is what differentiates concentration camps from internment camps which were used by the Spanish in Cuba in the Ten Years War.
Unlike the English who simply treated humans like cattle and forced them to move the Spanish evicted Cubans and killed those who did not comply after 10 days. The US took the English route for the Japanese, while using the Spanish name to differentiate themselves from Nazis who also ran concentration camps.
Likewise it's really funny to say that GULAGs were genocidal while US internment wasn't, because literally there's less intent (in the Western legalistic sense) of genocide in the GULAG case. GULAGs were equal opportunity in terms of ethnicity. Japanese internment wasn't. GULAGs were a problem because the USSR got addicted to slave labor relations that it recreated from a previous era, the USA of all countries has no real standing to criticize it on those grounds because the US still does this to this day, which is why the old Sovietologists were grasping at straws to ideologically differentiate between two similar systems. The big 4 western theories of the function of GULAGs (Solzhetsyn, Consquest, Applebaum and Bauer) literally do not include ethnic cleansing. That's a neologism.
There's no point in continuing the discussion since you literally do not even know the history of what you're talking about.
Edit: To make it crystal clear.
The difference between the GULAG system and the Soviet population transfers and the US internment and deportations that gives more creedence to US commiting ethnic cleansing is the ethnic composition of the material benefactors of those actions and their victims.
The people who were victims in the US were targetted minorities who were disposessed of their wealth by their fellow white citizens.
The people who were victims in the USSR were not targeted minorities, and the benefactors were not an ethnic majority whose main benefit was taking their victim's property.
Thank you for the history of the term "concentration camp"; I'd always wondered where that came from. I got that they "concentrated" groups of people in smaller locations, but it always seemed weird to me to focus on that aspect. Makes a lot more sense considering the Boer's & native African's (previous) way of life.
Regardless, though, I feel like you aren't really arguing the salient question anymore: did Japanese internment during WWII constitute genocide? As I understand the term -- mass murder and extinction of an ethnic or cultural group -- no, Japanese internment was absolutely not genocide. Jewish (and other) internment in Europe during WWII absolutely was, though, given the intent (and unfortunate amount of success) at killing large numbers of the people imprisoned.
Words have meanings, and those meanings matter. Otherwise we're just flinging around emotional charge without talking about anything real.
> Likewise it's really funny to say that GULAGs were genocidal while US internment wasn't
I believe you're the first person to bring up gulags, so that's a bit of a straw man.
The person you replied to upthread acknowledged (a bit late for my taste, but acknowledged) that what the US did to native peoples in the 1800s was genocide, so I'm not sure why you're still arguing that point. I don't think you can make a case that the Mexican Repatriation was genocide, as this was about forced migration, not murder and extermination. (The atrocities around Native Americans were also partially about forced migration -- which was more of an excuse than a goal -- but the end result was indeed genocide.)
Again, all of these things are bad! But (as another poster said), just because something is bad and is targeted at a particular ethnic group, that doesn't mean it's genocide.
Your understanding of what constitutes genocide is mistaken. It's not just murder. Any widespread or systematic attempt to remove an ethnic group from existence in a particular region counts, even if it's not successful or doesn't result in massive loss of life, if the intent is to disrupt that ethnic group's ability to sustain itself. Forced removal falls under this, as does ethnic reeducation. Japanese internment during WWII was arguably a genocidal act because its character as an act of ethnic cleansing (even if temporary, in hindsight) is often a first step to outright extermination. Thankfully, the war went well for America, and we felt no need to succumb to dangerous impulses; however, should Midway or other engagements have not gone well, or had the war been drawn out, putting a strain on resources, you would have seen starvation rates rise in the camps, at the very least.
You're making distinctions in service of, "Well, we weren't THAT bad," but generally, I would think the nominal international champion of freedom and justice would want to stay away from even the whiff of such things.
> During the Cold War, ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union were treated just as bad as US minorities.
This part is simply not true.
> Today the situation is even worse.
This part is.
The USSR was never institutionally racist. Russian chauvanism was still a thing in the USSR and that was relic of the Tsarist era that keeps on giving.
The USSR's repressions were not a cut and dry wealth transfer between ethnicities unlike the US policies.
At their worst in terms of American morality, institutionally targeted programs were to enforce political control and break nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups.
The vast majority of the repressions in the USSR were a result of the explosive growth of productive forces. It's very hard to make the case for the USSR that the benefits of those productive forces inherently benefitted Russians over everyone else.
It's very easy to make the case in the US for white supremacy.
Looking at your statements from a Hungarian perspective, I think you are wrong
1. The USSR always discriminated non Russian speakers.
2. Collectivisation and military occupation was used as a large scale wealth transfer. In addition forced reeducation camps and population swaps were used to put Russian observers into positions where they were first amongst equals
Russian imperialism has always been the core of the Soviet union.
When people rised up against Russian occupation they got slaughtered in Hungary in 1956 and later in 1968 with the Prague Spring Russian oppression continued
I think you are misusing “institutionally” and mean something more like “openly” or “explicitly”, because everything you cite in support of this describes rather than refutes institutional racism.
Institutional racism includes institutional policies, practices, and structures with racially/ethnically biased effects, not just those with explicit racial/ethnic targeting, and even moreso not just those based on racial/ethnic animus.
The justifications upthread are a mix of explaining deliberate bias as not based on animus and explaining biased effects as not being deliberate bias; neither refutes institutional racism.
"enforce political control and nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups"?
This literally means stop nationalist secession movements. Literally no country on earth basically lets their citizens secede dude. Russians were ALSO the target of such programs.
It's like saying state atheism is uniquely Islamophobic or uniquely anti christian or uniquely antisemitic.
I'm not saying it's not repression. It totally is, but it's not racist.
There's some apocrypha that I'd need to dig up the source to but IIRC the story goes that after WWI Keynes was researching the economic impacts of the WWI war economy. His conclusion was essentially that if normal people understood how capitalism worked in practice, they'd revolt because all industries effectively become rackets.
Yeah the reality is that a lot of people think that prior to and after WW2 and/or the Russian revolution the USSR was equivalent somehow to the US. That was never the case the USSR was a backwater and always behind. Tsarist Russia was a backwards undeveloped slave state. In that light the USSR punched above its weight.
The reality is that rapid industrialization regardless of your ideology is an extreme productive process which magnifies the effects of production which are not in and of themselves free of negative outputs. In USA capitalism like in USSR communism the negative outputs of production are simply ignored and the people who they affect have no choice in what negative effects they must bear and what is being produced.
yeah the funny thing about these comments you have a bunch of people conflating a lot of stuff.
For people who think the USSR was "more corrupt" they're often talking about a narrow conception of corruption that is defined by the US on technical terms.
Or they're simply talking about the behavioral differences between rich vs poor countries.
Boeing's quality issues are a great example because it's very obviously corruption, but not in the US technical sense. But the reality is that Boeing and the US government basically said yeah fuck it, do your own QA for the 737 Max and then after the fuckups turned around and said okay we won't charge you the full fine. And that would have just gone away if the 787 fuckups didn't happen. Now suddnely people look really bad giving Boeing sweetheart enforcement deals.
Americans think corruption is a cop pocketing $ on the side of the highway, but it's not corruption when the cop confiscates $ on the side of the highway without trial, gives it to his police department, which pays out the confiscated funds as bonuses, new equipment, and other various frivolities.
At least the Soviets spit in your face when and how they wanted to and were limited by physicality. Americans make a Rube Golberg machine where saliva of their oligarchs is collected throughout the day in massive quantities and piped out of the building where it happens to land on your face 80% of the time. Then they will tell you it's your fault for being in the way of the spit pipes.
We cannot recognize corruption in the US because our corruption is mechanical, and we've precluded that mechanical things cannot be a form of corruption.
USSR corruption was more visceral and obvious, that's pretty much it. This makes a lot more sense if you understand that all measures of "corruption" don't define corruption but use the perception of corruption.
Another example. Ukraine is a corrupt country, no doubt about it. But the "anti-corruption" NGO complex in Ukraine essentially prevents certain laws from passing like sourcing laws which exist in all major developed countries. They see these laws as a form of corruption, which in and of themselves they're not. The other reality is that a lot of the anti-corruption NGO's are corrupt. The reason they argue against sourcing laws is because foreign entities stand to lose money if Ukraine has to buy a certain percentage of goods from Ukrainian factories. Foreign money buys NGO's easily there, so NGO's don't' want their funding to dry up. So everything is in stasis.
But by Western standards none of the above is "corruption" because while the people making these deals can likely speak freely, by Western standards it's really easy to hide this corruption as coincidental and unrelated business decisions.
In reality corruption itself is an industry because it's a way to make money and a tool to make money with. Corruption is not a really simple thing to adjudicate
Behavioral programming is just creating a specific type of rules engine which is very close to a state machine.
This example is also really complex in reality because it inherently requries muxing of temporal events, which is really difficult for most average industry programmers.
With event driven systems what I've seen is that your average programmer is comfortable and likes 1:1 maps but cannot handle any kind of reduce functionality esp over a temporal range.
Typically adoption of something like this would be easier if the event represented a change in the state of the whole board rather than a change in the state of a cell.
TBH this is somewhat reinventing Observables for React.
The issue of legalese in ToS is the same issue of "bad code" or "bad engineering". The law is just another system, another conceptual language of communication, except one filled with way more vaguaries, edge cases and grey areas than any software we make.
Companies like they do not want to pay for "good engineering" don't want to pay for "understandable contracts".
However the company itself doesn't want to allocate resources regardless of the actual cost.
Because regardless at your $/hr, a contract that protects the company in the same way and is understandable by the user takes MORE HOURS, than one that just protects the company and fuck the user.
Lots of these lawyers at companies with internal council could do this are a resource that is over utilized already. There's no room for more hours.
I think it's really funny a lot of these scare pieces intimate that a US based PR guy for a Chinese company would be privy to intimate details about Uighur detention.
These grandstanding asks are just McCarthyism. It's like if the EU was asking a Facebook representative about ICE and CBP rounding up children.
What are you even talking about?