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Both have torture and executions. If you are a true opponent of either establishment your fate is almost exactly the same. Misery and death for you and your loved ones.
The answer to this question depends on your own beliefs and how tolerable they are to a a given regime, not how tolerant a regime is, because there is no such thing as a tolerant regime except in the sense that it is secure and unchallenged. Power suffers no competitors. If you are dangerous to the establishment you will be robbed, killed, tortured. No exceptions.
What you're doing here is simply denying moral community to terrorists and other enemies of yourself, a (to a degree) supporter of the establishment. You're fine with some people getting tortured and executed. Because they're not human in the sense you care about.
This is fine. It's nothing special. But if we want to have any sort of reasonable debate about the nature of politics, you have to remove yourself from this ideological frame and consider things from the outside.
I'll gladly embrace the bailey: repression is a key element of every single political regime that has ever existed, including the one you live under right now, and no regime could even exist without it. As for the quantity of the repression, it's a function of how secure the regime is and essentially nothing else.
I am a utilitarian, numbers matter to me. The main difference between gitmo and the gulags are the scale. Now, I thought gitmo was an abomination when it was first established by GWB and I think the same to that day.
We have two options to compare these systems. One is to count every act of state violence against members of the population. Of course, this puts us in morally ultra-relativist territory: "Some states have the death penalty for murder, rape, gay sex, criticizing the party, theft, not bowing deep enough, apostasy, listening to enemy radio stations, arson. All of these serve to keep the regime in power, therefore all of the acts forbidden are morally equal as forms of political dissent." Or we could claim that some of these acts are intrinsically more political than others. States not (at least in principle) punishing murders leads to a bad equilibrium (feuds), so almost all states at least notionally have laws against murder on the book.
But even if you count the whole US prison industrial system as pure repression, by the numbers I would gladly pick the US over the 1940s USSR even through a veil of ignorance where I materialize as a random citizen. And that is before we even go to the indirect advantages of having less repression, like
The version I could agree on is 'every system of government has a minimum of repression it requires to stay in power'.
Some governments deal out too little repression and are overthrown, like the Weimar Republic.
But a common feature of the more repressive governments is that they overdo repression. Almost no organization ever declares that its mission is accomplished and disbands itself. The secret police is no exception. There will always be someone who is the first to stop applauding after Comrade Stalin gives a speech, some intellectual who is the least aligned with the party line.
And some ideologies are more accepting of repression than others. A communist who declared that the class struggle is over, all the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries are defeated would have to answer uncomfortable questions about when exactly the communist utopia will become reality, while in a liberal democracy a lack of life-or-death conflict should be the default state.
One's moral position is entirely irrelevant to descriptive analysis.
You're playing the Botero to my Machiavelli here. The idea that the USSR is better or worse than the USA is less than useless to predict the behavior of either power. I won't have the Prince submit to God's higher power as a prerequisite of our discussion, because I'm interested in how politics actually works, not how it ought to.
This is a widely believed myth that does not understand that Hindenburg's maneuver to the right was precisely meant to repress the communists in a way he thought he could better control. He couldn't of course. But Weimar had much stronger repression than people think.
You are directionally right however in that it is his own scruples that led to him being circulated away. A common feature of the fall of elites is that they grasp for hard power at the last minute but do not possess the resolve to use it when it is actually necessary.
This I think is our real disagreement. You (and you are in numerous company there) believe that ideology is the precursor to political action, that people think of things to do and then do them, and therefore that various ideologies can justify themselves into doing various levels of things.
I disagree. I think ideology comes after political action, and is merely a justification mechanism. I think any group who has large enough an interest to do something will find a way to justify it within any ideological framework, to degrees that look absurd from the outside.
And I can engage to my side the countless points in history in which politicians have acted seemingly against their declared principles. They are almost too numerous to count. Was Reagan collaborating with Iran really coherent? Was Mao declaring himself "right wing" at the end of the cultural revolution coherent?
It was not, but coherence is a luxury you build on top of power. Not the other way around.
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There can be different scales of repression though. A regime that can securely survive a larger range of human behaviors will restrict its populous to a wider range of behaviors than a less secure regime.
Its true that all regimes have boundary conditions of what they will accept, and that outside of those conditions they will suppress to whatever degree is required to be effective.
But different regimes have different ranges they permit and different means for being flexible and changing those domains.
You're just flattening everything to one question- "does a boundary exist" without considering the relevance of the properties of that boundary.
This is true, but it is also not a function of ideology. Merely of how secure a regime is.
It's the insecurity that allows the state to grow total, not ideology that prevents it from doing so.
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This comment is unhinged. I'm reminded of the quote (paraphrasing) "You condemn a black-and-white morality as having only two colors; but you replace it with grey, which is only one."
To my knowledge, the Obama administration only sought the torture and execution of one US citizen on political grounds (Snowden). I'm quite happy to deny "moral community" to the nation's enemies, which is why I drew the line at US citizens.
Putin's Russia is wildly different. Take for instance Trump's election while Obama was in power. How does that fit into "Power suffers no competitors"?
What about Abdulrahman al-Awlaki? I suppose being the family of a political enemy is "political grounds" but then that decays into agreeing with me.
Unlike you, I'm not convinced that the ceremonial power structure of the US maps onto its real power structure. In a presidential election, who the ruling class is is almost never on the ballot. And when it is is precisely when the historic assassinations start to happen.
I admit I had not heard of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki before.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121103143344/http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-airstrike-that-killed-american-teen-in-yemen-raises-legal-ethical-questions/2011/10/20/gIQAdvUY7L_story.html
Is that actually the best example you can come up with? I think it proves my point.
I mean we are talking about civilian US citizen casualties of the Obama administration specifically. That's a narrow category that people only really care about because citizenship is supposed to entitle you to some protection from the US government on paper (but does not because power comes first and constitutional decorum second).
We can talk more broadly about how the US treats its enemy populations if you want. People seem to have forgotten about Abu Grahib. I have not.
Fair enough. But you're the one who brought up the Obama administration by specifically claiming it used "torture and executions" (plural) as methods of political repression. To me "political" implies intra-country, not extra-national, but maybe you meant a more expansive definition of that word?
You talk abstractly about vague notions of 'political repression', but I have no idea who, concretely, you're talking about.
I see, well I certainly did not mean it that way in this case. I'm talking specifically about threats to a given established regime. What distinctions or origin we draw I don't really see as relevant. I'm talking about how power treats its challengers writ large.
Anyone who is a political enemy of the United States. In the Obama iteration that means mostly islamists, known or suspected, and their friends and family.
Certainly not friends of your average westerner, but they're not granted trial or human rights which they are entitled to according to the ideological principles of the American regime. Clearly demonstrating that power is ultimately unconstrained by ideology.
And it'd be foolish to think that this is exceptional, given the US has engaged, on its own civilian population, in arbitrary internment and mass immolation even in quite recent history.
At this point I want to stress that I'm not trying to tarnish the reputation of the US in particular, we all have skeletons in our closets, and it's a very nice country indeed. But it is still a country. And power works there the same way it does everywhere else in the world, however much we want to delude ourselves that magical dirt or pieces of paper make it otherwise.
Vae victis.
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The twisting to come to this conclusion is almost head spinning. I hear what you're saying from a 10,000 foot level, but the boots on the ground reality does not match with your assessment of this hypothetical. Some regimes and societies are better to live in than others. That is just a fact. If you would rather live under Stalin than Obama then I don't think anyone can have a real conversation with you unless you're a hard core USSR stan.
For who? For whom? If I were a bolshevik and all else were equal, it would be the rational choice.
Besides, I'm not seeing a counter argument.
How about a more extreme example then rather than just the revealed preference as shown by the Berlin wall needing to be put up. Just about anyone in the world would rather live in the USA than Bangladesh. One country and society is obviously better by any reasonable metric I can personally think of. Just because both governments may do something you don't like doesn't make them the same.
Who said I don't like it? That's never been in contention here. It doesn't matter if I like it or not, nor if you do, it's how things are.
In practice I do think our predicament is a bit tragic, would be nice if Isildur could hold the ring and be just fine, but I'm still waiting for you to engage the point instead of some imagined position.
Being a "True Opponent" of either Putin (and establishment in Russia) or Obama (and establishment in US) does not have the same result. So by "True Opponent", what do you mean exactly?
So what's the difference? The delivery mechanism for the explosive charge that ends you, the lunch menu of the prison you rot in without a trial or what?
What? You didn't answer my question in any way shape or form. If you can't tell one country from another and what is better about some of them then what are you even here to discuss?
I think I can tell the difference quite well. I can characterize it in specific terms.
And indeed I think that predictions that use my characterization are more accurate than yours.
For instance I can explain why the UK jails a lot more (about 4x) people for political crimes than Russia or why Russia more readily kills its political prisoners.
Can you?
pol·i·tics
1. c. the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government
In those terms, a true opponent is someone who can challenge such a control. With or without violence, with or without designs of control for himself. Anyone who endangers the serenity of a sovereign.
I use the word true because as you know, it is routine in the exercise of power by foxes to setup fake opposition that only ever demands more control for the establishment. These people are usually left alone, because they are friends, not enemies.
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