Anti-communist fighter pursuing a suspected member of the 'Securitate' secret police, Bucharest, Romania, 1989
Anti-communist fighter pursuing a suspected member of the 'Securitate' secret police, Bucharest, Romania, 1989
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ACAB
And C is not for cops
And the first A is for Ackshually
And B is for Bidenism
Edit: @Judge_Jury@hexbear.net has informed me that B is for beast mode. Maybe one day I shall ascend to Padawan in the Way of Chapo-Posting.
The C is for counterrevolutionaries, I understand. Of course as a group, it also encompasses cops.
Why not both?
The USSR and it's satellite states where heavily policed.
I'd still trust a Soviet cop before I trusted an American one. The American's more prone to 'fear for his life' and dump his entire mag into my chest at a traffic stop. And that's not even getting into potential blackbaggings by the FBI and CIA, where they've literally got clandestine black sites all over the place to get their jollies torturing political prisoners; so I mean. Couple that with the fact that y'all destroyed the Soviets, it's kind of a moot point; so 'ACAB' can only really refer to one strain of pig motherfuck anymore.
I’d still trust a Soviet cop before I trusted an American one.
That reveals a frightening lack of understanding of Soviet cops.
And that's far from saying American cops are trustworthy.
And that’s far from saying American cops are trustworthy.
Are you really suggesting they are trustworthy?!
... no, that's literally the opposite of what was said.
no, that’s literally the opposite of what was said.
That’s good, I was worried there for a second.
That reveals a frightening lack of understanding of Soviet cops.
Would you mind expanding on this (please include sources)?
Would you mind expanding on this (please include sources)?
Considering you're from Lemmygrad, I doubt your sincerity in requesting this.
You don't have to believe if you don't want, but maybe consider providing it for other commenters on your instance who might stumble upon this thread.
There are any number of stories that even a cursory look will bring you
According to former inmates, there were 52 kinds of torture used in the prison. Historian and Gulag researcher Lidia Golovkova, author of the book Sukhanovskaya Prison: Special Facility 110, compiled a detailed list of the ‘methods of interrogation’ used there. ‘It was regarded as the most horrific prison in the whole of the Soviet Union’, she told me. ‘The usual, simplest method used was beatings, which could go on for days, with interrogators working in shifts. They would beat prisoners on the most sensitive parts of their bodies; it was known as ‘threshing the rye.’ The second most common method was sleep deprivation, which could go on for 10-20 days. During interrogation, prisoners were often made to sit on a leg of an upturned stool, so that the slightest accidental movement would send the leg into their rectum.
‘Another form of torture was known as the “Sukhanovka Swallow”, where inmates were trussed up with a long towel that was forced between their lips like a horse’s bridle and then pulled down behind them and tied under their feet. You would think no one could stand this for more than a few seconds, but its victims were left like that for days on end. There were also overheated punishment cells, so called “tallow-boilers”, or in winter, prisoners could be dumped in barrels of icy water. Other methods of persuasion included prisoners having needles and pins forced under their fingernails, their fingers being crushed in a door, or being forced to drink their interrogator’s urine.’
I asked Golovkova whether people sometimes held out and refused to sign confessions even after torture. ‘That was very rare. The pain of the beatings and torture was so excruciating that 50-year-old generals would forget themselves and start crying for their mothers. General Sidyakin lost his mind and howled in his cell like a dog. Many prisoners were sent off to psychiatric hospitals for compulsory treatment immediately after their interrogation.
‘I only know of one documented case of a prisoner who refused to confess despite being tortured. He was Mikhail Kedrov, a member of a Moscow aristocratic family who became a Leninist Bolshevik and member of the Cheka, [the first incarnation of the Soviet secret police apparatus]. In 1939, Kedrov, with his son Igor and one of his friends, who also worked for [what in the 1930s was renamed] the NKVD, wrote a letter about abuse of power in the Security Services, and all three were immediately arrested and interrogated for 22 hours or more. The two young men were shot first, but Mikhail Kedrov refused to confess to anything, no matter what tortures he was subjected to. Amazingly, a court found him not guilty of any crime, but he was still not released from prison; and when the USSR entered the Second World War in 1941, he was executed on the direct orders of Lavrenty Beria.
Where to begin?
First, for the sake of argument, let's assume every word in that excerpt is uninpeachable historical fact. Taking it as fact, it is no worse than what the U.S. has done at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, that blacksite the Chicago PD used to disappear and torture people, etc., to say nothing of the horrors of the many dictatorships the U.S. installed and propped up throughout the Cold War. If you see this conduct as some moral event horizon you should want to burn the U.S. to the ground. This is not whataboutism, this is asking if you really give a shit about this stuff, or if it only offends your sensibilities when the Bad Countries do it.
Dispensing with the assumption that the except is proven fact, let's examine the reliability of the sources (I'll spoiler this section to not clog up the thread, but suffice to say it doesn't look great):
spoiler
- Lidia Golovkova: A search for "Lidia Golovkova historian cv" doesn't turn up anything. Nor does the alternate spelling "Lydia." Searching her on Google Scholar returns no articles she authored. She appears to be a real person -- looks like she attended a conference organized by "The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia" in 2002 -- but I've found nothing that would speak directly to her credibility as a historian, or lack thereof. She appears to be cited fairly regularly (sometimes in academia, more often in articles like the one you quote from), but it also looks like she's cited in the same breath as noted hack Robert Conquest (example). Generously, she might be associated with positions only a minority of historians hold. Less generously, it looks like she's doing motivated reasoning and pop history, like Conquest.
- Sukhanovskaya Prison: Special Facility 110: Found a few mentions of this book, but no English translations. Two mentions in particular (here and here) both cite Russian-language editions. It's odd how many of the same English excerpts can be found with a "cursory" search, despite the book at minimum not being widely available in English. Looks more like quote mining/citation hunting than all of these authors actually assessing what they're referencing. It would be difficult for English speakers to evaluate, for instance, whether this work is consistent with information from USSR archives that were released after the country fell (a major turning point in Sovietology which separated serious historians from propagandists; see Conquest).
- Open Democracy: Funders include the Ford Foundation, which has a long tradition of funding anti-communist activity and a corresponding political motivation, to say nothing of its well-documented ties to covert U.S. anti-communist programs. Hell, one of the architects of the CIA served as chairman of the Foundation! Open Democracy is not some neutral organization; there's a clear political bent.
Those who do no investigation have no right to speech; so rather, we're assuming in good faith that you brought sources to back up your claims. If you haven't, you should really quit while you're behind. And in light of your sources; which admittedly, I haven't found a sideways link in their funders yet, more investigation is needed-- I'd still trust a Soviet over an American given the amount of Black blood on the hands of American policing-- murdered, and carcerally enslaved alike.
So you don't have sources, just propaganda.
lol
Shockingly, they actually did provide a source