'Bring back the USSR'

Moscow - Several thousand Russian communists were marching to celebrate international Labour Day in Moscow on Saturday, with banners calling for a return to the Soviet Union and denouncing privatisation of the Russian economy.

Organisers said they expected some 30 000 people to rally to the red flag of the communist party, for a march which used to be one of the high points of the Soviet year.

Security was tight for the demonstration, with participants even obliged to go through metal detectors in order to head off possible terrorist attacks.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1520506,00.html

What kind of world have out leaders, political and power elite, made when everything we do is a 'possible terrorist attacks'?

If the USSR came back, these same people wouldn't be allowed to demonstrate and exercise free speech. Allowing the expression of political dissent was not a trademark of the Soviet system, to say the very least.

Land of the free?

Incarceration rates in George W. Bush's America
and Stalin's USSR:

USSR (1950): 1423 per 100,000
USA (2002): 2298 per 100,000

Incarceration rates for Black men in South Africa
before ANC rules and in contemporary America:

South Africa (1993): 851 per 100,000
USA (2002): 7150 per 100,000

Firstly, I'm betting that if you removed Drug War POWs from those numbers the figures for the US would be dramatically lower. Also, those numbers for Stalin were "official" and certainly don't include all those who disappeared or were incarcerated in mental hospitals (because we all know that disagreeing with the government is a symptom of mental illness).

The notion of a "democracy" that is at war with large
portions of it's population is brain-damaged on it's face.
The drug war violates at least half of the first ten
amendments to the Constitution.

The stats are from "The International Use of Incarceration"
by Marc Mauer, The Sentencing Project. I don't know off-hand
where he got them. You can find the article in the Utne Reader
Jan/Feb 2004.

I will certainly agree that Stalin was an asshole, but the
point is that we are not in a position to lecture on the subject,
and our claim to be "free" is poppycock.

Or you think their lives are somehow less affected by being in jail than those of other political prisoners?

when , what is it, nine or ten grab everything the peasants say "same o same o".

reminds me of what shrub et al want to do when they promote 100% estate tax exemptions.

Starving, homeless, or dying of easily treatable diseases.

They just wouldn't be counted. Or do you still believe that those 10 million Ukrainians who starved to death were just a figment of the West's imagination?

all this moralising about abstract rights is what got Russia to this stage in the first place. Russians today have fewer de facto rights than they did before the fall of Communism - or do you think Putin is a democrat?

everyone had enough to eat, a place to live and the knowledge that when they retired they would not have to rely on dumpster diving just to survive. There's a reason lots of people in the former Soviet Union are now nostalgic for many aspects of the old system.

They knew that complaining about one's standard of living was a one-way ticket to a mental hospital.

:eyes:

I just know my history, much of it firsthand from parents and grandparents of my schoolmates (half my high school was Ukrainian). People used to laugh at their claims about the Ukrainian genocide- until the KGB opened its archives and confirmed the famine was created on Stalin's orders. Face reality- by the time Hitler came to power, Stalin had already murdered between 8 and 12 million people. Even with nukes and Vietnam the yanks have not in their entire history caused as many deaths as Stalin managed to do in a couple of decades. And let's not forget the other heroes of communism- Pol Pot scored a couple of million corpses, Mao is the all-time champ with 20+ million, and nobody will ever know how many have been put to death by the Kims in Korea. No ideology has ever caused death on a greater scale than communism.

whose government was supported by... let me see... oh yeah, it was the US, wasn't it? You do know that the reason the US loved old PP so much was because he was opposed to both China and the USSR, don't you?

You might also find the following interesting reading: http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/ukfam2.html