Summary
Trump expressed support for sending American citizens to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, praising President Bukele’s tough-on-crime stance.
The U.S. already deported 238 Venezuelans there under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, despite federal judges calling the transfers unlawful and ordering returns.
Trump said he’d be “honored” to send repeat U.S. offenders abroad if legal. Critics, including judges and rights advocates, condemned the plan as unconstitutional and authoritarian.
Legal experts warn no U.S. law permits outsourcing American incarceration, raising serious due process and human rights concerns.
I’m curious about how well-informed most Americans are about the Soviet Union. Do they know that it was once a place where ordinary people were accused of crimes without evidence, taken away without a trial, and never seen again? Do they know that this generally happened because of the smallest suspicion that a person was not fanatically loyal to the government, rather than a violent criminal? Do they know that a million people were killed this way? And do they know that the Soviet Union was one of many places like that?
I expect that the Soviet Union doesn’t seem particularly relevant to younger generations of voters, but isn’t this the sort of lurid history that did interest them as adolescents? And don’t older voters remember the Cold War?
Part of the problem is the cold war propaganda was so laser focused on “communism bad” that much of why the USSR was bad was lost. The older generation still have a knee jerk reaction to the word communism that right wing media frequently exploits to generate a cheap emotional reaction by accusing any group they don’t like of being communist. Meanwhile the real horrors of the USSR are largely ignored lest people start drawing parallels with current events.
Yes, Americans have somehow come to believe that, among the things the USSR did, providing housing and education to ordinary people is bad, while disappearing people based on their political opinions to be killed or worked to death in gulags is good.
I think the sad reality is: Criticism of the Soviets by now has been reduced to just a surface level “feeling” of their tyranny. Basically a thought of what made it tyrannical was the lip services to communism and the red flags - not understanding the actual problems underneath. In the worst case, some people even openly say, that it’s just that they put the wrong people into the Gulag, to then post memes about throwing lefties out of helicopters.
I think history has shown by now, both the Soviets’ criticism of US imperialism, and the West’s criticism of Soviet human rights abuses has always had huge hypocrisies within, both systems very much capable of the crimes of the other. We need another international class based movement, that doesn’t get caught up in national interest like that.
HitlerPig’s leashholder, Putin, began his career in the late-stage Soviet Union’s KGB, when things were so so corrupt, chaotic, wrecked, etc. that they simply collapsed under the weight of their own incompetence.
Putin knew how to navigate the chaos and even use it to his advantage, and now he’s plunging us into political and economic chaos so he can exploit and loot us, with HitlerPig and Musk as his muscle.
I wonder how many Americans know that this was the reality in Chile, after the USA funded and supported a coup that killed the elected president in the only truly stable and functional democracy of South America at the time, in order to instate a ruthless dictator.
My former boss did time as a kid in a gulag. He spent years there. He could not tell you what he did. He is Jewish so it could be that but it was post Stalin.
I recently re-read vol 1. of the Gulag Archipelago and it’s striking how similar MAGA-ism and Stalinism is. I’ve known a fair number of Republicunt and MAGA types who cheer on all the tough-guy orange stuff being applied to other people. They don’t read books and certainly not history books, and don’t understand that Stalin didn’t just terrorize the Other, he intentionally wrought terror on the entire society, from top to bottom. Nobody was safe. The Terror might have started with the peasantry (not sure) but it certainly didn’t end there. The “intelligentsia” was one target, but so was the military (which Stalin purged) and veterans and scientists and engineers and religious bodies. If you looked like you had the slightest bit of potential power or potential influence in society (or were just too damn educated), and if you seemed to be even slightly uncommitted to the Great Leader, then he or his lackeys would see to it that your door was kicked down in the middle of the night and you dragged off for torture until you “confessed”. Then a “tribunal” (not judges) would sentence you and it was off to the gulag and to a life of slavery in the Arctic cold, for decades or until you died. Or just a bullet to the head.
Separately, there was the mass-starvation (for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor) inflicted on certain Soviets - a byproduct of Stalin’s ideologically-driven re-engineering of the economy. I’ve read some opinions that starvation was the intent - a genocide against a potentially non-loyal segment of the citizenry.
This is where we’re heading.
The settler-states need to be de-Nazified.