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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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