The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.
Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.
In America black people are diagnosed schizophrenic or psychotic because they talk about institutional racism to white clinicians that don’t believe them
I’m sure this comments section is going to be thoroughly hinged
Yeah, waiting utill guys from lemmy@ml and lemmy@hexbear come here and start protecting the USSR.
Jokes aside, is there any really independent instance? Or at least one that kinda in the middle?
Cause currently it feels like one side of lemmy on crack and support Soviets (which I can’t stand, cause I lived in post-soviet country and I know why soviet system failed = cause it’s piece of shit), while other heavily tripping on LSD, while supporting palestine (which I can’t stand, cause I’m not into killing and raping, no matter the excuse “Al Jazeera” propagandize).
From my perceptive both are in da wrong and I get shit from both sides, lmao. Do I like, get back to reddit? Or there some place that won’t ban me for my “radical opinion”?
Try sh.itjust.works. Most folks don’t notice us.
Why would you recommend your instance to a Zionist?
Not a word of complaint about Israeli 4k livestreamed genocide? Shooting children in the head? Blowing up hospitals? Murdering aid workers? Starving an entire population in an open-air prison?
You could condemn both October 7th and Israel but you don’t. Your “middle” is skewed as fuck.
Your opinion isn’t “radical”, it’s straight up genocide-apologist.
Your opinion isn’t “radical”, it’s straight up genocide-apologist.
And just like that “I hate hamas and people that do raping\killing” turns into “you focking genocide-apologist”. That why I can’t stand you people.
Okay, maybe I need to add some clarity. I will try to explain it to you like you are 5, cause it’s most probably pretty close: hamas wants to kill everyone. Their current target: every jew. They won’t stop. Their religion - kill jews and kafirs. Google what “kafir” is. By condemning Israel you basically saying “stop fighting and give up”. That basically mean “stop resisting and let them kill you”. You saying that jews needs to die. You are the person that can be described as “genocide-apologist” here, not me.
Hahaha! You psychotic buffoon!
You must be a troll or deep inside an islamophobic rabbit hole to concoct that fairytale!
Israel is not all jews. Stop conflating the two. Many jews are horrified by what Israel is doing.
Fuck Israel. Fuck Hamas.
I am against ALL genocide without exception.
Quite, I fully intend to have civil and reasonable fact based discussions about the USSR which will not trail off into tribalistic whataboutist tirades.
A big part of Soviet propaganda is their use of whataboutism is deflect criticism against their regime. Supporters of the USSR and far left ideologies have inherited this tactic, which is why whenever you see anybody criticize someone on the far left, they always resort to using whataboutism, especially about the US. It’s recycled material from a dead regime.
I don’t consider the USSR or CCP to be far left or really any form of left. They’re just red fascists.
Wow. How did you pull all of that out of your ass?
This isn’t something new, controversial, or some hidden secret. It’s something that’s academically studied and well documented. This was literally the USSR’s go to propaganda tactic when it was still around. Literally only out of touch tankies cannot comprehend common knowledge like this.
Sure, but does all of the far left do that and did they get it from the Soviet Union?
You made a far out strawman argument. Admit it.
That’s why we are on Lemmy though, to have broader points of view without much censorship.
The Soviet Union at its height had the largest percentage of incarcerated individuals, more than double the USA’s percentage of the population today. These were hard labor camps, too, where millions worked until they died.
this is only true for the stalin years i think.
in any case, living in a country without due process kinda sucks
Yeah it actually got better even before Stalin died, but yeah.
and yet people romanticise and justify that shit
I’ve had a Tankie write me a 10 page essay comment, with citations, about how great the 1930s economy was. The middle of a famine.
Ikr I was in a similar debate. I just gave up. I was going to type this — usually said when a person just doesn’t like to find a middle ground and keeps screaming that they are right:
“ठीके बाबा. तूम्ही महान, आम्ही लहान. तुम्हाला चार पाय, आम्हाला दोन पाय. तुम्ही गाढव आम्ही माणूस.”
Translation: Ok bro. You are great, I am not. You have 4 legs, I have 2. You are a donkey, I am a human.
incarcerated
What an ugly word! Oh no no no they were being cured of their mental illnesses in dedicated institutions and provided with advanced education in special schools.
The school of digging frozen turf in Siberia while starving for instance or the hospital of getting beaten with a phonebook
This is wrong and you’re a shitbag liar. Don’t think people don’t see you out here spending your free time floating thread-to-thread just to shit on socialism.
Peak U.S. incarceration rate in 2008 (it’s highest) was about 760 per 100,000 people in the total population. The average imprisonment rate in the Soviet Union during the Gulag era was 714 per 100,000 residents. Some Soviet incarceration rates between 1934 and 1953 were likely the highest ever recorded for a modern nation. More than six million people in the U.S. are now under some form of correctional supervision—more than the number imprisoned in the Gulag at its peak.
Some sources:
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Gopnik, Adam (30 January 2012). The Caging of America. The New Yorker.
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Applebaum, Anne (2003). Gulag: a history. By Anne Applebaum. ISBN 978-0-7679-0056-0.
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Liptak, Adam (28 Feb 2008). 1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says. The New York Times.
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Getty, J. Arch; Rittersporn, Gabor T.; Zemskov, Viktor N. “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence”.
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Rosefielde, Steven (2007). The Russian economy: from Lenin to Putin. By Steven Rosefielde. ISBN 978-1-4051-1337-3.
Estimates of the 1938 Gulag Population and other corrective labor programs, from the book
“The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror
Oleg V. Khlevniuk
Translated by Vadim A. Staklo”
Are about 6,000,000 total.That’s 3.5% of the total population of the USSR in 1939.
Encyclopedia Britannica estimates a much more conservative 5,000,000.
The USA’s 0.7% doesn’t come anywhere close. Even if you ignore the numbers after The Great Purge you’re still looking at neck and neck numbers from the two, with USSR’s 1.4M being over 0.8%.
Peak U.S. incarceration rate
The average imprisonment rate in the Soviet Union
Uh-huh. Not like that rings the statistics manipulation alarm at all or anything.
«Is normal, ignore that товарисщ»
Some Soviet incarceration rates between 1934 and 1953 were likely the highest ever recorded for a modern nation.
Did uhhh… did you mean to paste this bit or forget to trim it before you posted? Is the US not a “modern nation?” Aren’t you calling the guy who said “soviets locked up more % than current US” a “shitbag liar” while posting evidence that supports his point? The fuck is going on, were you trained on shit data? You need a better prompt or something?
Uh-huh. Not like that rings the statistics manipulation alarm at all or anything.
Not really; if you read (lmao) more into it, you’d find that those scholars that I cited argue that it’s preferable to use averages rather than try to get precise YoY level numbers because it’s difficult to source consistent data for several chunks of time and regions.
Did uhhh… did you mean to paste this bit or forget to trim it before you posted? Is the US not a “modern nation?”
The “modern nation” reference was talking about the group of post-industrial nations at the time in which the USSR existed. I.e. “for all modernized, non-developing nations at that time”.
But I hear you, fam. Fair criticism. I used two different adjectives to describe the relative parity between the two countries. Silly of me.
But since you also clearly prefer to fling shit rather read a fucking book or two, I’ll distill a line for you that’ll hopefully stick:
At its peak in 1953, the estimated incarceration rate in the USSR was around 1,558 per 100,000.[1]
That’s less than the 2022 US rate calculated by the USBJ statistics I quoted in a separate post. Certainly not double the US’s current incarceration rate. I suppose you’ll bitch about me comparing current US rate to the 1953 rate, but that’s why it’s a fucking rate/per population. Moreover, the point I was making is that the US has gotten worse than the days of the USSR’s Gulags.
But sure. It’s entirely possible I’m just manipulating statistics and providing citations to nefariously dispute—** checks notes **—the guy who spams Stalin memes, gets banned from communities for calling people tankies, and who spouted a random take without any attempt whatsoever to provide supporting evidence.
«Is normal, ignore that товарисщ»
Go fuck yourself, patriot. :)
[1] E. Belova, P.R. Gregory. “Political economy of crime and punishment under Stalin”. Publ. Choice, 140 (3–4) (2009), pp. 463-478.
Sure, averages are better, but nonetheless instead of being consistent and using the average for both, you use the “peak” of one and “average” of another, as if that doesn’t look suspicious.
I’m not even saying the US doesn’t incarcerate more people per capita, I’m saying using “peak v avg” is a bad system because at best it makes you look like a liar.
Also I’m saying you’re probably a tankie if you’re on lemmy defending the USSR, yeah. Walks like a duck and talks like a duck and all.
Ёб твою мать.
>> ignores explicit response to original claim with the requested follow-up statistic
>> conflates objection to whitewashing the American carceral state with pro USSR sentiment
>> repeats childish insult for which OP was being called out
>> makes duck analogies mid chirping
>> hurls misogynistic insult to “fuck your mom” in Russian
You’re not beating the illiteracy accusation.
I s’pose you’re right. Walks like a chauvinistic Russian Nazi, talks like a chauvinistic Russian Nazi and all. 😗
I’m literally reading and writing lmao, that beats the illiteracy argument. Would be a lot more effective and worth arguing against if we were speaking instead of communicating via the written word, but as that is not the case it isn’t worth my time to refute the ad hominem attack, until I want to call you a fucking idiot for trying it that is, you fucking idiot.
You’re just mad I noticed, stay mad дебип.
Oh I’m so mad. Big big mad. You’re so right, king. 😗🧠🐦
Why are you comparing the peak year of the usa numbers with an average rate over a longer period for the ussr? Insulting others also doesn’t help your credibility. Nothing you said disproves the assertion of the person that you’re calling a liar.
Can yall please pretty please stop fucking supporting horrible regimes and then also trying to use them as examples of socialism? You’re not helping anyone. You’re literally only hurting the appearance of socialism.
Its like you don’t get that you actually have to sell people on the idea. You certainly won’t convince people with bashing people over the head with delusional or pedantic at best history rewritings/retellings about horrible people.
Those people were bad, socialism is good. Separate the ideas. Everything is better this way.
It’s because some parts of Lemmy are actually just psyops for Russia and China, just like all those facebook groups during the 2016 elections and all those foreign maga influencers outed during a recent leak.
There is also the question if you are working for some group. Hcf has provided numbers that refute your statement. Is there a reason why they can be doubted or do I have to assume that your statement was made-up?
I already responded to HCF’s claims.
And before you (or anyone else) nitpicks about “BuT tHaT wAS 2008”—that’s because I’m comparing peak periods.
If you want the latest estimates available, and if you really start digging, it looks much worse for the US. The total correctional population in 2022 was estimated to be 5.4 million people (according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics report). The estimated US adult population in 2022 was 260.6 million.
That’d mean that the latest numbers are about 2,072 in 100,000 people.
But sure, shitting on the USSR is a neat trick for downplaying how completely abysmal the US has become.
USA population in 2022 was about 333,287,557
Yes, but you’re posting primary sources for people who can barely glaze through a wikipedia article and a youtuber transcript for their ideological stances.
All you got to do with intransigent USSR haters is determine if it is because they believe Putin is an upgrade, or if they yearn for the Tsardom to soothe their monarchist brains.
Don’t work harder than ultranationalist racists and/or ICE supporters.
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Link to source?
How about
“The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror
Oleg V. Khlevniuk
Translated by Vadim A. Staklo”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vkt98Or
The Encyclopedia Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/place/GulagThe book estimates 4,000,000 in gulag after the great purge in addition to another 2,000,000 additional corrective labor programs equaling 6,000,000 total, while the enyclopedia estimates 5,000,000 total. The 1939 USSR population historical data was 170,557,093.
The Soviet Union at its height
“Its height” is a very soft way of saying “during the Nazi invasion that ended up in the death of 25 million Soviet citizens”
These were hard labor camps, too
False. The GULAG system was simply a prison system. Soviets believed in work as a manner of reintegration into society, correctional labor is not hard labor camp. The vast majority of prisons were near big cities like Moscow or Leningrad.
where millions worked until they died
As far as I know, the number of Gulag deaths is about 700k, not “millions”, but I’m quoting this from memory so feel free to correct me with actual data if you have it. It’s easily disproven that Gulags were labor death camps by looking at the death rate over time:
You can see a peak death rate during the famine occasioned by the Nazi invasion (again in a period where 25 million Soviet citizens died). People died of hunger inside and outside prisons, albeit logically at a higher rate inside them.
The Famine was caused by the soviets policy changes decentralizing aggriculture in the assumption that farmers would still grow enough for everyone.
We know that this is true because the Chinese tried the same damn thing and got the same damn results during their own revolution.
You don’t know what you’re talking about and it shows. The famine you’re referring to happened in 1931-1933, not WW2. By the late 1930s, agriculture in the USSR was collectivized almost wholly and producing better crop yields than ever in history in the region due to the rapid industrialization and usage of tractors and fertilizers.
This rapid industrialization (main reason why the Soviets pushed for rapid collectivization in the late 20s and early 30s) was driven by the geopolitical need to create a heavy industry + military machinery to fight Nazism. If it had not been for the rapid industrialization (which admittedly led to around 5 million deaths in 1930-1934 from hunger), the Soviet Union would have fallen to Nazism and tens of millions more would have been exterminated, remember that the Nazi Generalplan Ost was the extermination of the non Germans between Berlin and the Urals.
You literally blamed the famine on the Nazis in your previous comment!
You can see a peak death rate during the famine occasioned by the Nazi invasion (again in a period where 25 million Soviet citizens died). People died of hunger inside and outside prisons, albeit logically at a higher rate inside them.
Yes, the 1940s WW2 famine, a whole 10 years later
Somewhat relatedly, the W Bush administration expanded mental health screening and recordskeepint, and broadened the use of somewhat dangerous antipsychotics for non psychotic conditions in the wake of the Patriot Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Freedom_Commission_on_Mental_Health
Pretty sure America does that.
“Liberalism is a mental disease!”
A phrase often said by MAGAs. It’s no distance at all saying the same thing about nationalism.
I’ve seen “conservativism is a mental disease” too. People love that shit.
To be fair, you have to have zero empathy—or extremely low intelligence—to still vote Conservative, when we’re literally living in the Information Age. Either way, I say both are in fact mental disorders.
A lot of it is fear, too. Those people are raised to fear anything different.
I would put their fears in the “low intelligence” category.
also LOW information to. i saw some pseudo-leftist YTUBERS(whole drama behind them if you followed them) that are magats that are very low information. pre-pandemic they brought up an OBAMA era, oil pipline(canada-usa) and they could not even formulate sentences or words how to discredit the news. (but any trump related events they were immediately silent on, hmm seems like people figured out your allegiance to which party)everyone in the comments said you shouldnt comment on things you do not know.
That’s the spirit.
fundamentalism+ actual mental illness is a dangerous mix. i once saw a video of a guy with schizo and said he fell into alt-right views, and really screwed up in the head.
How about liberalism + actual mental illness, is that dangerous?
(Or any ism for that matter.)
I think that’s far less common among the left than the saying “peer reviewed study shows conservatism highly correlates with mental disorder”.
The phrase comes from a shitpile book with the title: Liberalism is a Mental Disorder by some guy trying to eclipse Rush Limbaugh in 2005.
It’s not just a thing they say - these people genuinely believe that compassion is a mental illness.
Liberalism is not as dogmatic as other ideologies, because liberalism itself encourages free thinking and going against the grain.
It’s entirely different when the state authority not only says it but takes away your freedom & subjects you to abuse. How are so many here missing that crucial distinction?
Kinda how it works in our late stage capitalist societies to be honest, except that it’s collective pressure/belief instead of state-imposed.
You have trouble accepting the shitty state the world is in? You don’t want to be exploited and end the month with not enough to pay your rent? You’re fed up with that human crushing machine that keeps on destroying the planet because There Is No Alternative?
Well, you should consult you might be a tiny bit depressed. Take antidepressants and shut the fuck up. Learn to see and focus on the beauty in life and the little things instead. Take small hobbies, a lover or a cat. How you deal with all of that is your own individual problem.
Does it seem so normal that you really can’t see any other way? Congratulations, you are well programmed. Those problems aren’t to be delt with on an individual level, they are political.
In the past, most people formed unions and parties and did strikes, political rallys, protested and burned the landowners’ manors as a way to process those kind of feelings.
Stoicism has become commoditized as a way to convince people that their lot in life is just their attitude, and the more they put their shoulder to the wheel to produce for the top of the pyramid, the more it works out for them, rather than questioning the wheel. The hustle and grind culture is just as much the goal of something like the heritage foundation as “deport the brown people.”
Which is weird because stoicism evolved out of cynicism and inherited it’s philosophical hatred of authority at least historically.
see also that nihilism’s origins were not in destructive apathy as the term is frequently used to mean though, but instead to mean that if someone finds themselves not believing in any pre-existing meaning they have the power to assign their owo meaning to life. we exist in a world that always tells us to find our purpose in life. nihilism tells us to stop waiting for meaning to find us and instead to determine one for ourselves
One must imagine sisyphuwus happy
Fucking hilarious. twanx
As someone who works as a therapist in the mental health system in America, this is not at all how it works.
It’s not what you are doing. It is how it has evolved though.
Apart from fringe activist groups, who thinks of politics as something they have to make happen on a daily basis?
The political way to process through the various clashing forces that make our societies has almost totally given way to the individualized injunction of dealing with the consequences. It’s in the zeitgeist, all the injunction to self-care, self-improvement and so on. If you are centered on yourself, you won’t priorize the collective.
And saying that doesn’t negate the usefulness of psychology and therapy work at the individual level. Nor does it imply a big conspiracy or something of the sort.
Apart from fringe activist groups, who thinks of politics as something they have to make happen on a daily basis?
Lots of people actually. The comparison you’re making between many people being generally uninterested in politics vs mental illness being criminalized by the state is, frankly, ridiculous.
You seem to have misinterpreted my point.
It’s not about people being uninterested in politics, it’s about most people losing the ability to even see politics as something else than some topic you could be interested in or not. To feel like they might be able to have any kind of meaningful effect on their environment. And it’s not about mental illness being criminalized it’s about mental illness being used (conscientiously or not) as a tool to fight against dissent.
And why would it be ridiculous? Culturally enforced and internalized rules are way stronger than the ones enforced by coercion. I agree that it’s worse on a personal level to risk being arrested for a thought crime and institutionalized or sent into some camp as a result of it. But as a society it’s less effective and pernicious than the collective apathy and political impotence we’re swimming in.
Under the Soviet union people saw or knew other disappeared. They knew something was happening and that they’d better shut up about it. When you were caught as an enemy of the state or of the ideology, you at least had a clear indication of what outside force is at work against you. Psychologically it’s very different.
Nowadays apart for the few percents that are actually politically active (and even some if not most of those are not spared on the inside), people feel that it’s their fault if they don’t fit in, they feel or are told by the ambient noise that they have to fix themselves, that the problem is them. That there is a disconnect from reality, from the world. The classical “what is wrong?”. And to be happy, to fix that, all they have is to consume, focus on themselves, find themselves, improve, or just look like they’re doing that. Like rats taking electrical discharge after discharge with no way to get out or even understand what’s causing it in sight.
it’s collective pressure/belief
The “scientific” aspect is largely psychiatric.
So
a government authority takes away your freedom & subjects you to abuse
you depress yourself about having to work & pay for shit or deal with your feelings
same thing! 😊
I can’t believe everyone who buys this equivalence bullshit of illegitimate abuse & coercion in one case and lack thereof in the other. It’s like they have some submission kink to getting dominated.
You’re either not trying to understand what I’m saying or willingly chosing to misrepresent it. I have no time to discuss with people acting in bad faith.
Edit: Excuse-me I thought you were another poster. I think I answer your points here: https://lemmy.zip/comment/23154125
The rough gist I’m getting is some poorly substantiated claim of ignorance of general exploitation as worse than overt abuse of human rights, eg
Yes, comrade, I’m locking you up and abusing your fundamental rights, but think how bad you’d have it free, doing the same work with a better standard of living & lower economic inequality while whining about exploitation!
Perhaps workers could earn better without “exploitation” in liberal democracies, but historical record & economic data show the opposite:
- the Soviet system stagnated & deteriorated behind liberal democratic counterparts at living standards & economic growth while still exploiting workers & abusing their fundamental rights
- several liberal democracies continue to achieve lower economic inequality & better living standards than communist states.
The Soviet Union gave up & dismantled itself for this reason. There was no tradeoff of human rights abuses somehow yielding a better life for a less exploited, average worker. For all its rhetoric, the Soviet workers got the worst of everything.
Per the philosophy of social democracies, socialism doesn’t require human rights abuses. Authorities abusing human rights are definitely worse than authorities not doing that & letting people fail on their own terms. In the case of those liberal democracies beating the performance of communist states, those “exploited” workers are freer & doing better than the “unexploited” ones. Given the results, it’s hard to find your notion of “exploitation” credible: I think it’s full of shit & mostly in your deluded theory that’s failing to bear out.
How do you read what I’m writing and understand from it that I’m defending the USSR? Two things can be bad at once.
What I’m saying is that in our late stage capitalism societies, mental health is also instrumentalized to avoid changing how things work.
So it’s like lemmy.ml
Oh you mean like they want to do with trump derangemnt syndrome? Yeah, it’s out of the dictatorship playbook.
The problem is psychiatry in general. Always been a tool for hegemonic control.
They also didn’t like genetics because it was anti Marxist-Leninist to them. They didn’t like the concept of inherent traits.
i believe they tried to have thier pseudo-science scientist explain it away with thier own.
From the article, western sources claim some 15k people affected over the entirety of the Soviet Union. So yeah, something that did happen, but still quite a minor thing for a country with 300 million people over 70+ years of existence.
For comparison, over 700k people experience homelessness today in the USA, which is arguably at least as damaging to mental (let alone physical health), and if we count the number of people who have experienced homelessness over the past 70 years in the USA it’s several million if not tens of millions.
Sounds oddly familiar to “If you’re against the online safety act you’re siding with pedophiles.”
Only considered it?
May want to check out what’s happening in USA and UK.
Fucking Trump wants to deport citizens for disagreeing with him.
I live in the UK. Being against the UK government is not considered a mental illness.
I feel like some random Austrian painter did the same thing.
