B1rd wrote:
But regarding what was said in this thread, I'm wondering if Vipper is going to just wiggle out of backing up his unprovable assertions, like how I don't know what I'm talking about regarding the Soviet Union.
Your post suggested that people were just idly cooperating with Stalin's regime and giving his dictatorship more power, but that's completely lacking the context of his repressive government. People informing on their friends and such were only doing so because they themselves were threatened- similar to what happened in Nazi Germany where informing on Jews was highly 'encouraged'.
Besides, plenty of people would actively try and hide things from the state in the Soviet Union too, although it's hard to get any meaningful statistics- it certainly wasn't a case where everybody simply cooperated with the state, because if that were true, they wouldn't have to behave in such a violent and oppressive manner in order to get what they wanted. Forced disappearances etc due to the secret police,
Basically, you shouldn't be using the Soviet Union as an example of people refusing to do what was morally right despite threat of persecution, because the threat was significant enough to actually control people on a psychological level. Ideals of standing up to a tyrannical government are pretty, but not actually an option to the majority of people living in the USSR.