There were quite a few postal stamps featuring Laika. I had these two in my stamps collection when I was a kid: [1], from Mongolia, and [2], from Romania.
There's a song from Mecano. Two lines always hit me. I will try to translate it.
And while Earth was trowing a giant party
where happiness mixes tears in the champagne
Laika just was looking out the window
What could be that giant colored ball?
And why do I keep spinning it around?
Akino Arai also had a haunting song about the Sputnik 2 mission as a metaphor for a breakup.
Translation:
With enough air and water for seven days
And someone's uncompromising wishes
The laika dog on Sputnik
Doors which will never again open now close
To think that I must go on living
In some distant place unfamiliar to you
That we can never feel the same things
In the Czech Republic, they have an oldie 50s style rock tune based on "Rock Around the Clock", with lyrics mentioning the Laika.
Sovětští mužici Those Soviet chaps
vypustili družici Let out a satellite
Lajku do ní nacpali They stuffed Laika into it
a nažrat jí nedali. Not giving her anything to eat
Na kytaru trsaj rock'n'roll. Strum rock'n'roll on your guitar
Lajka letí k Měsíci Lajka's flying to the Moon
hlady žere družici Eating the satellite out of hunger
Lajka volá SOS Lajka's calling "SOS"
ať tu chcípne jinej pes! "Let another dog croak here!"
Na kytaru trsaj rock'n'roll. Strum ...
The Prague Spring events put a damper on this kind of thing.
If you like happy endings, also check Belka and Strelka [1]. Not only did they safely travel to space and back, Strelka later gave birth to 6 pups, and one of them went on to live in the JFK White House.
Technically, any present given "to" a US president is White House property; presumably, it became Johnson's dog after Kennedy's assassination, and, assuming the dog was still alive, later Nixon's.
I'm honestly taken aback at the poor taste of this comment. The dude adopted a cute puppy and cared for it. That's not a good reason to be murdered.
I don't know exactly when this happened, but tensions were high after the Cuban missile crisis, and a peace offering in the form of a cuddly creature to love doesn't really seem terrible to me.
do you really think that the decision to own that dog had some sway in his assassination? why?
What you said just comes off as a snide comment about someone murdered that you didn't care for, which is to say that I think the comment was low-quality and purposely inflammatory.
>and he wasn't murdered for any good reason.
do you have some insider insight you'd like to share with the class?
> do you really think that the decision to own that dog had some sway in his assassination
Not the dog directly, but it's indicative of an attitude. It was okay for that US President to be keeping some dog or any other form of gift from the Cold War enemy side.
Look at what Shinzo Abe got murdered over: a personal vendetta over his ties to the Unification Church.
All it takes is one whacko, that's all I'm basically saying.
(No inflammation was intended and I didn't see one, luckily; in any case, I'm not about to participate in some flame war, let alone on this kind of topic. Actually, I had been about to delete the comment myself, but my attention was taken away and I became busy. My 10 minute posting delay went by, and someone replied to it. I not only don't like my comment, but the whole topic area. Anyway, having it thankfully flagged isn't deletion, but better than nothing.)
You do. How would you otherwise demonize a Country that reached peak industrialization in a couple decades starting from a rural, semi-feudal society?
- That established the 8 hour work day in 1917,
- legalized abortion in 1920,
- erradicated illiteracy and achieved a literacy rate of 75% starting from 25%,
- Was the first country to build satellites and men to space?
- Provided a decent standard of living to all their citizens while also suffering inmense pression from the First World?
You really have to grasp straws to criticize a country that made such enormous progress in such short time and that improved the lives of millions while also being attacked from left and right.
Millions starved to death in collectivization, even more millions displaced from their homes and sent to gulags. Intelligentsia eradicated as a class. The biggest and potentially richest country in the world collapsed due to planned economy.
And that’s just my layman knowledge typing on a phone, I’m sure many historians can decimate your comment even harder.
> Millions starved to death in collectivization, even more millions displaced from their homes and sent to gulags. Intelligentsia eradicated as a class. The biggest and potentially richest country in the world collapsed due to planned economy.
Communism didn’t work, for sure, but I’m not sure how this takes away from the things that the Soviets did accomplish, which op listed above.
I also find it interesting the standard we judge the Soviets by. Millions have starved under capitalism, but in comparison to what? the Western world where we’ve been constantly at war with some country in the world, treating brown people as less than humans, causing refugee crises in the millions and civil wars?
I know the typical response to this comment is something like, “Oh but that’s whataboutism”. Well the reality is that as an American, I we should have the self awareness to recognize that we’re like a skunk complaining about the stench from another skunk.
Back to the original topic - the anti Russia frenzy is in full swing. This much should be clear to anyone, based on the tone of this article.
The economy arguments always annoyed me about communism. No country would have an easy time avoiding economic collapse with a US and all her allies global embargo going on for decades. Plus we probably would not have won WWII so quickly if we had not resorted to using a planned economy to turn the nation from an economically depressed state still in the great depression into a global superpower.
The embargos weren't out of spite; the Soviet Union was an aggressive bad actor in a myriad of ways.
I'm not sure why implementing a wartime economic measures is supposed to be a knock. The US economy is far from a textbook definition of capitalism, just like Communist China is nothing like the dictionary definition of Communism. All economic systems are hodgepodge of economic systems, full of good and bad ideas, some with more good than others.
You are the kind of guy who believes that American sanctions against Venezuela are "well-meaning", that the bombing of civilian populations are "shameful errors", that lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was "an honest mistake", that the invasion of Afghanistan was done to "combat terrorism" and that the bombing of Syriah was to "promote democracy and freedom", right? You sincerely believe that, correct?
USSR did fairly well in the 50s, 60s and 70s though. Most of the really bad things (e.g. mass starvation) happened years before the cold war started. American companies like Ford invested into building factories in the Soviet Union in the 20s and 30s hardly a sign of an economic embargo.
So you’re implying that US should cooperate with autocratic regimes and empower their rulers to further oppress the people living there? Obviously they tried that as well and I’m sure you’d criticize it as much. So which one is the right option?
They should’ve hanged Sadam back in 91, the only problem is that it took two wars for that to happen. Getting rid of the Taliban was the right thing to do as well, but again the fucked up there miserably as well. Same in Syria (obviously you have the Russians involved there to which complicates things)
"So you’re implying that US should cooperate with autocratic regimes and empower their rulers to further oppress the people living there? Obviously they tried that as well and I’m sure you’d criticize it as much. So which one is the right option?"
Communist governments are not "autocratic regimes that oppress the people living there". That's propaganda. They are socialist governments where the proletariat controls the State through its Vanguard, which is the Communist Party. If there is a fact that distinguish socialist countries is the desire to provide a high standard of living to their citizens, with a special emphasis in education, health care, and erradicating poverty. The USSR, Cuba, China, and all socialist countries were extremely successful in that, so no, they don't "oppress" their people, the people actually govern the State, and not the capitalists.
Comunist states are very sucessful, that's why the West needs to invest so much in wars, propaganda, coup attempts and economic warfare to try to destroy them.
Think for a millisecond, if socialist states weren't sucessful, why the US would spend so much effort in trying to destroy them? It doesn't make sense, simply let them fail, after all, communism doesn't work, right? Why would someone dedicate any effort to destroy something that is already doomed? The answer is simple: communism DOES work, IT IS sucessful, and if let alone would quickly become unstopable. That's why the West has always tried to destroy it, because they don't want the world to realize that a viable option to capitalism exists.
The mythical "they murdered A GAZILLION PEOPLE". Yeah, totally made up numbers made by anti-soviet historians that inflated numbers and considered natural causes as "murder". You can say what you want about the Soviet Union, but thinking that they ORDERED the killing of millions is complete derangement.
Were there economic problems and famines? Yes, of course, all countries with a rural economy are exposed to famines. Let me introduce you to the Irish famine, that killed millions in a capitalist country, such as Ireland.
Can we count the millions dying of hunger is capitalist countries as victims of capitalism?
"O'Leary pointed out that the decision-making by the government of the day was based on capitalist principles rather than ethnicity; its aim was to reduce the tax burden on the middle-class (who were of both main ethnicities) by clearing the 'unproductive' landless poor from Ireland."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
- the worst nuclear accident on the planet
Thats a funny way of calling the bombing of Iroshima and Nagasaki. Iroshima and Nagasaki were not accidents, they were the purposefully killing of millions by an atomic bomb. They were not accidents, THOSE were murders.
> The mythical "they murdered A GAZILLION PEOPLE". Yeah, totally made up numbers made by anti-soviet historians that inflated numbers and considered natural causes as "murder".
Tankie with his "made up numbers" again. What next are you going to say? Holocaust is made up to mud the name of the glorious Reich that lifted Germany out of poverty?
The numbers are literally made up by an organization called "The victims of communism memorial foundation", that was literally started by the US government with the express purpose of spreading propaganda.
Bringing up the atrocities committed by others as a defence of Russia is an interesting angle. You know that more than one country can do bad?
The killing of millions is hard to dispute. Take just one incident, the Holomodor. That engineered catastrophe killed millions and Russia now appears to be trying to wipe out Ukraine again.
It's disingenuous to pretend all of the USSR criticism in this thread is in good faith. Yes, multiple countries can be bad, but clearly one of them is getting way more airtime than the others.
A failed government that oversaw complete collapse of its economy, population and and empire is likely to get a lot of criticism, even if it didn’t commit a huge number of murders, invasions and atrocities.
And a government that colludes internationally to sabotage democratically elected foreign governments, that has committed the worst war time atrocities the world has ever seen, governed by an undemocratic process, where its own citizens can't afford life saving medicine, should get way more criticism than it does.
Are we really to the place where people are openly denying Stalin and the Bolshevik revolution each killed millions? You should go to 4chan with the other Qs and revel in your conspiracy theories.
Fewer than a quarter of a million people died in both atomic attacks combined, including post-war illnesses. Why is your desire to defend the Soviet Union more important to you than accurate information?
When someone is whatabouting the WWII atomic attacks in order to pretend that the Holodomor is normal and fine, then yes, it's exactly the defense I think it is. There's an order of magnitude (or two, depending on which sources you take seriously) of difference in casualties. Further, one was an act of war on military targets, and the other doesn't even have that "justification," whether you consider it a justification or not.
Fucking USSR apologist. The regime was threatened by poets! Like how could you possibly argue that sending poets to a labor camp to die was for the betterment of the people?
Edit: For anyone wondering what this poster is about, take a look at their brief comment history and all will be cleared up.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but to me and I think a lot of people that are likely to be on this site the Soviet Union just doesn't conjure up many rosy images or anything - no squeeze is needed.
Having a list of accomplishments doesn't negate criticism. I'd actually argue going from a semi-feudal rural society to a hyper military-industrial one in such a short timespan and in a forced top-down approach actually made things worse in the long run. I'm biased though, since the only people I know from the Soviet Union were the ones who escaped.
and later banned it. But then again tankies tend to be quite lose with facts
> Provided a decent standard of living to all their citizens while also suffering inmense pression from the First World?
What?! Is this sarcasm? Millions of people starved to death to a large extent due to misguided bolshevik policies between 1917 and the 1940s. That is arguably true only starting in the 50s and 60s.
Really? You must not have been alive during the Cold War 1
Edit: watch Red Dawn, read the article, and comment back with your comparison of treatment of Soviet Russia.
In my reading of the article the only negative statement about the Soviet society was the statement that they lied about the time of death and fictionalized the science for propaganda. The rest of it reads as a humanizing story of the dog and it’s experience without a specific political agenda. I could very well have imagined any other society as the context. I feel you must be overly sensitized to have read this as anti Soviet.
I also found the timing of the post a bit odd. Given the recent events I would think twice before publishing or linking to anything that could be interpreted as propaganda in either direction. I am writing this as a 100% pro-Ukraine guy.
And here we are, a post that defends the Soviet in 2022. Something I thought was impossible, talking as someone who had the (mis)fortune of living under the communists.
A character you meet early in the game Pathologic 2 is named Lika (Лиза), and wears a dog head. I thought it was just a neat name until my friend who is Russian pointed out the background and reference to Laika.
Funny, Lisa with "s" would be "c" Latin in Russian, which begs the question if the above mentioned error in the wiki is not actually a reverse translation error - hence why they say "Lika" in it, maybe they meant to translate "Lisa" from English to Russian and was like "eh, K or C is the same".
I've got to agree with you here. Every day, animals around the world are given cancer, AIDs, heart attacks, and all manner of diseases in the name of advancing science. As many as 12 million animals are dissected or vivisected in US schools alone annually.
Laika was an important stepping stone towards humans in space. It's sad a dog died, but some people are a bit melodramatic.
I gain all the advantages of modern medicine etcetera that come from animal research. I'm not blind to that fact. I'm also aware that my empathy levels vary according to the animal in question, which is awful (but true for many/most/all people).
And yet, given the power to make such a decision I'd ban all animal experimentation without question (and I'd include Laika's situation in that).
If it is so vital that an experiment be performed, then a willing human volunteer should be found. If no human is willing to undergo these tortures in the name of science and for the sake of humanity, then the experiment in question is apparently not that vital after all.
In these situations, humans have the choice and humans have the benefit. We should leave other species out of it.
At least Laika server for a noble cause. What I think is terrible is the fact that Soviet Army tied up bombs on dogs and let the run after enemy tanks on the WWII. Humans sometimes acts disgustingly.
The German death machine grinds down circa 30 million Soviet people, majority of them civilians, the hot take is being mad the red army for tank dogs. Sometimes the comments here are really special in their lack of context.
It wasn't one or the other, it was both 30 million dead AND some unknown number of dogs killed that very likely didn't make a meaningful difference in the Soviet war effort. Congrats on getting down to the level of your enemy, I guess.
Like strapping a bomb to a dog that might very well just run off into the woods or throwing it with your arm like everyone else, right? Somehow I feel like the tank dog idea didn't come up from cutting edge military science but rather some drunken soldiers with a bomb and a stay dog and a fucked up sense of humor.
It was a serious Soviet military program. The dogs were trained to run under tanks.
A dog can run much further than a soldier can throw, which was pretty much the point. If you're close enough to throw something at an enemy tank, you are typically dead.
I don't think we even need to go as far as the second World War. Animals get shit treatment all day, every day, everywhere. Even if you look at pets, which are supposed to get the best treatment of them all, even they are often mistreated or outright abused. And then we can into other territories like service animals, meat and fur, and lab animals. There's so much horror going on at any moment that I think if we treat one right, that's the exception, not the other way around.
Horses and camels were being used for wars for centuries and they were occasionally killed in action, it is not disgusting at all if you think of it objectively
That’s a better death than Laika got. Laika got put into a cramped box, subjected to 5Gs, and died of heat stroke. Being bombed to death is at least fast.
• glued bags filled with napalm to bats bodies and caged the live bats inside a bomb casing[1];
• used foxes caught in China and Australia whose fur was painted with a radioactive radium paint[2] to have them released on Japanese shores to unleash rampant fear onto the superstitious Japanese;
– the US did it in the name of democracy and freedom of humanity. And when the British procured and euthanasied hundred of rats to fill their bodies with explosives[3], they did it in the name of His Majesty the King and to defend and to save the British Empire.
Granted, the Soviets were the preantepenultimate evil with their anti-tank dogs, and nothing else counts.
[0] «In 1943, U.S. forces considered using armed dogs against fortifications. The aim was for a dog to run into a bunker carrying a bomb, which would then be detonated by a timer. Dogs in this secret program were trained at Fort Belvoir. The dogs, called "demolition wolves", were taught to run to a bunker, enter it, and sit while waiting for a simulated explosion. Each dog carried a bomb strapped to its body in canvas pouches, as with the Russian method» – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog#Use_by_other_cou...
[1] «The bat bomb was conceived by Lytle S. Adams (1881-1970), a dental surgeon from Irwin, Pennsylvania who was an acquaintance of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt […] In his letter, Adams stated that the bat was the "lowest form of animal life", and that, until now, "reasons for its creation have remained unexplained". He went on to espouse that bats were created "by God to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence, and to frustrate any attempt of those who dare desecrate our way of life." Of Adams, Roosevelt remarked, "This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into» – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb#cite_note-Couffer-4
[2] «The United States Radium Corporation provided an answer in the form of its glow-in-the-dark paint, which contained radium. The health risks associated with the paint weren’t unknown. As early as 1917, women detailing watch dials with the luminous paint suffered from anemia, bone fractures, and necrosis of the jaw, a result of them using their pursed lips to shape the contaminated brush tips into a fine point. Despite that danger, the OSS continued with Operation Fantasia» – https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unsuccessful-wwii-plo...
[3] «But the most exotic device was the "explosive rat". A hundred of the rodents were procured by an SOE officer posing as a student needing them for laboratory experiments. The rats were skinned, filled with plastic explosive, and sewn up. The idea was to place a rat among coal beside a boiler. When they were spotted, they would immediately be thrown on to the fire, causing a huge explosion» – https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/27/richardnortontayl...
I don’t really agree. Farming meets a basic human need. The food chain is the food chain, after all. Laika died for purely political purposes, to show how superior the Russian space program was.
I know contrarianism hot takes are a big part of this site, but a few rebuttals to this sentiment:
1) Farming at least serves a purpose (food for humans).
2) The vast majority of people who eat meat do not support the farming and slaughter of dogs. They're tremendously emotionally intelligent, social creatures.
3) Sacrificing an animal for science may be morally justifiable if it saves human lives, but this was not one of those situations. A quote from one of the scientists assigned to Laika’s program:
> “The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.”
> 2) The vast majority of people who eat meat do not support the farming and slaughter of dogs. They're tremendously emotionally intelligent, social creatures.
I didn't say that dogs are both emotional and intelligent, I said they're emotionally intelligent, meaning they can understand the emotions of humans. Pigs and octopuses may be more objectively intelligent than dogs by most measures (problem solving, memory, etc.). But much worse at empathizing with us, so in return, we empathize less with them.
Therefore? "empathizing with us" == "emotionally intelligent"
If dogs rather than pigs and octopuses gain human empathy through the appearance of understanding the emotions of humans, is intelligence in this sense equivalent to manipulative capability?
Author Nick Abadzis got a lot of responses about the factual, sad fate of Laika in his graphic novel. So much that he wrote several alternate (entirely fictional) endings to the story to make readers feel better.
This is appalling but at least, as others commented, Laika got to be celebrated. For an example of real heartless exploitation of animals, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair. This psycho is still held in high esteem. Not only that, many such experiments continue to be made for research.
Ethics review boards these days understand that potential outcry is proportional to the amount of empathy the public has for a specific type of animal. Even beyond the "potential outcry" angle, universities understand that such experiments threaten to reduce the public's ability to trust in the scientific process itself, which they rightfully recognize as an existential threat. I've taken the mandatory animal ethics course as a result of doing consulting work at a large research university, and it's clear that getting approval for an experiment involving any kind of primate is essentially impossible. Dogs and cats would be extremely difficult, random mammals like pigs and rabbits would be quite difficult, even arbitrary rodents would be non-trivial. As a result of seeking the path of least resistance, most experiments took place on flies, bees, worms, spiders, fish, mice, and the one specific breed of rat that is more-or-less automatically approved for all experiments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_rat).
What was it about the 20th century that produced such heartless people? Lead exposure? I understand that the 20th century is far from an aberration in terms of human cruelty, but there is an element of sadism that feels different than other centuries.
For instance, read the first sentence from Harlow's Wikipedia page:
> Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 – December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development.
Did we really need to torture these creatures for decades to understand the importance of care giving? The experiments seem like a flimsy pretext for torture.
You can't really explain these things, but you might be able to explain this guy.
>In 1971, Harlow's wife died of cancer and he began to suffer from depression. He was treated and returned to work but, as Lauren Slater writes, his colleagues noticed a difference in his demeanor.[6] He abandoned his research into maternal attachment and developed an interest in isolation and depression.
I don't know about you, but when I think about the cruelty and sadism of the 20th century, I think about all of the wars and mass murders. Animal cruelty sort of pales in comparison to all of that. I'm not saying this to deflect from your question; I literally think this is part of the explanation.
Going back to poor Laika for a moment, you could adapt an old, morbid joke: "we're going to murder all the kulaks and one dog." "Why the dog?" "Why the kulaks?"
Just anecdotal, but some older people I've known who grew up on farms are probably the most indifferent to animal suffering, as long as the animal provides meat or whatever their utility is. Animal welfare is only a thing kids are concerned about that they need to grow out of. Combine that attitude with the growing scientific revolution and desire to partake in scientific experiments and such, and I could see how this emerges.
To them animals are tools, not feeling creatures. And in their defense for virtually all of human history, except for recently animals were always tools.
Judaism actually has a law called "Tza'ar ba'alei chayim" which prohibits unnecessary suffering to animals, and mandates a procedure for painless slaughter. This was unprecedented for its time - back then no one cared at all.
I don't know about the US, but in my neck of the woods that's still the case. Rural folk don't care about animal welfare at all — you'd be laughed out of the room for trying to discuss something like that. Feeding chickens and pigs for meat and then slaughtering them is just something you normally do.
Having spent a decent chunk of my childhood in a rural area (and seen many pigs being killed by various methods, none of them very humane), I also don't care about this stuff too much tbh.
> Did we really need to torture these creatures for decades to understand the importance of care giving?
Yes, we did. Look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitalism people didn't even understand how much humans need care, never mind animals. The people placing these babies into care did so with the best intentions, but insufficient knowledge.
> In 1945, the psychoanalyst René Spitz published an article in which he explained how deprivation of social interactions can lead to a condition named "hospitalism" in infants. According to Spitz, young children who are cared for in institutions can suffer from severe impairment in their development because they are not provided with sufficient maternal care.
We figured this out without needing to torture monkeys. Apparently, though, this was not sufficient for Harlow, as he created his pit of despair almost 30 years later.
We could have done most animal experiments on humans instead but our species has long set up rules that favor the exploitation of "other" over ourselves.
2022 and some people are still being tortured for more than 20 years in Guantanamo bay without charge or a proof of committing a crime, we can just blame lead exposure of course.
Author Nick Abadzis created a graphic novel of the story of Laika [1]. While I expect it includes some fictional elements, a lot of the story in the graphic novel was true, including Laika's unfortunate demise. He got so many comments about the sad ending that he wrote several alternate endings to placate his readers. You can se them in reference [2].
184 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadhttps://youtu.be/zsV-qozMz9A
https://youtube.com/watch?v=N3zMmc8UG2g
https://youtu.be/xsIef9QqE30?t=2m00s
https://dynamic-media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-o/08/b...
The Monument to the Conquerors of Space in Moscow, constructed in 1964, also includes Laika!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Conquerors_of_...
[1] https://c7.alamy.com/comp/D0GC31/postage-stamp-from-mongolia...
[2] https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/~KgAAOSwySVaHdDz/s-l1600.jpg
She also survived.
it was so wholesome up until that point
Translation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpwfDTPX2Ek
If we pay attention to the legend then we'll have to accept that in Earth is one less dog and in heavens one more star
[1] https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/12/belka-and-strelka-sovi...
EDIT: Nice YT vid with footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCBWIi2vQ4k Looks like they took it in their stride!
I don't know exactly when this happened, but tensions were high after the Cuban missile crisis, and a peace offering in the form of a cuddly creature to love doesn't really seem terrible to me.
Nobody said it was; and he wasn't murdered for any good reason.
do you really think that the decision to own that dog had some sway in his assassination? why?
What you said just comes off as a snide comment about someone murdered that you didn't care for, which is to say that I think the comment was low-quality and purposely inflammatory.
>and he wasn't murdered for any good reason.
do you have some insider insight you'd like to share with the class?
Not the dog directly, but it's indicative of an attitude. It was okay for that US President to be keeping some dog or any other form of gift from the Cold War enemy side.
Look at what Shinzo Abe got murdered over: a personal vendetta over his ties to the Unification Church.
All it takes is one whacko, that's all I'm basically saying.
(No inflammation was intended and I didn't see one, luckily; in any case, I'm not about to participate in some flame war, let alone on this kind of topic. Actually, I had been about to delete the comment myself, but my attention was taken away and I became busy. My 10 minute posting delay went by, and someone replied to it. I not only don't like my comment, but the whole topic area. Anyway, having it thankfully flagged isn't deletion, but better than nothing.)
https://flickr.com/photos/incanus/10332309885/in/album-72157...
they'd squeeze anything to make russia/ussr look bad, however little.
You don’t need to squeeze anything to make Russia/USSR look bad.
- That established the 8 hour work day in 1917,
- legalized abortion in 1920,
- erradicated illiteracy and achieved a literacy rate of 75% starting from 25%,
- Was the first country to build satellites and men to space?
- Provided a decent standard of living to all their citizens while also suffering inmense pression from the First World?
You really have to grasp straws to criticize a country that made such enormous progress in such short time and that improved the lives of millions while also being attacked from left and right.
Communism didn’t work, for sure, but I’m not sure how this takes away from the things that the Soviets did accomplish, which op listed above.
I also find it interesting the standard we judge the Soviets by. Millions have starved under capitalism, but in comparison to what? the Western world where we’ve been constantly at war with some country in the world, treating brown people as less than humans, causing refugee crises in the millions and civil wars?
I know the typical response to this comment is something like, “Oh but that’s whataboutism”. Well the reality is that as an American, I we should have the self awareness to recognize that we’re like a skunk complaining about the stench from another skunk.
Back to the original topic - the anti Russia frenzy is in full swing. This much should be clear to anyone, based on the tone of this article.
I'm not sure why implementing a wartime economic measures is supposed to be a knock. The US economy is far from a textbook definition of capitalism, just like Communist China is nothing like the dictionary definition of Communism. All economic systems are hodgepodge of economic systems, full of good and bad ideas, some with more good than others.
hahaha. Let me laugh more: HAHAHHAHAHA.
You are the kind of guy who believes that American sanctions against Venezuela are "well-meaning", that the bombing of civilian populations are "shameful errors", that lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was "an honest mistake", that the invasion of Afghanistan was done to "combat terrorism" and that the bombing of Syriah was to "promote democracy and freedom", right? You sincerely believe that, correct?
So you’re implying that US should cooperate with autocratic regimes and empower their rulers to further oppress the people living there? Obviously they tried that as well and I’m sure you’d criticize it as much. So which one is the right option?
They should’ve hanged Sadam back in 91, the only problem is that it took two wars for that to happen. Getting rid of the Taliban was the right thing to do as well, but again the fucked up there miserably as well. Same in Syria (obviously you have the Russians involved there to which complicates things)
Communist governments are not "autocratic regimes that oppress the people living there". That's propaganda. They are socialist governments where the proletariat controls the State through its Vanguard, which is the Communist Party. If there is a fact that distinguish socialist countries is the desire to provide a high standard of living to their citizens, with a special emphasis in education, health care, and erradicating poverty. The USSR, Cuba, China, and all socialist countries were extremely successful in that, so no, they don't "oppress" their people, the people actually govern the State, and not the capitalists.
Comunist states are very sucessful, that's why the West needs to invest so much in wars, propaganda, coup attempts and economic warfare to try to destroy them.
Think for a millisecond, if socialist states weren't sucessful, why the US would spend so much effort in trying to destroy them? It doesn't make sense, simply let them fail, after all, communism doesn't work, right? Why would someone dedicate any effort to destroy something that is already doomed? The answer is simple: communism DOES work, IT IS sucessful, and if let alone would quickly become unstopable. That's why the West has always tried to destroy it, because they don't want the world to realize that a viable option to capitalism exists.
No it doesn’t. Communism destroyed itself, at the end western powers had very little to do with it directly.
Honestly I can’t tell if your whole post is sarcasm. Tanks go brr, amirite comrade?
- the murder of millions of innocent people
- the worst nuclear accident on the planet
Russia was bad then and continues today. Nothing needed other than history to make that case.
Were there economic problems and famines? Yes, of course, all countries with a rural economy are exposed to famines. Let me introduce you to the Irish famine, that killed millions in a capitalist country, such as Ireland.
Can we count the millions dying of hunger is capitalist countries as victims of capitalism?
"O'Leary pointed out that the decision-making by the government of the day was based on capitalist principles rather than ethnicity; its aim was to reduce the tax burden on the middle-class (who were of both main ethnicities) by clearing the 'unproductive' landless poor from Ireland." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
- the worst nuclear accident on the planet
Thats a funny way of calling the bombing of Iroshima and Nagasaki. Iroshima and Nagasaki were not accidents, they were the purposefully killing of millions by an atomic bomb. They were not accidents, THOSE were murders.
Tankie with his "made up numbers" again. What next are you going to say? Holocaust is made up to mud the name of the glorious Reich that lifted Germany out of poverty?
The killing of millions is hard to dispute. Take just one incident, the Holomodor. That engineered catastrophe killed millions and Russia now appears to be trying to wipe out Ukraine again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Edit: For anyone wondering what this poster is about, take a look at their brief comment history and all will be cleared up.
Having a list of accomplishments doesn't negate criticism. I'd actually argue going from a semi-feudal rural society to a hyper military-industrial one in such a short timespan and in a forced top-down approach actually made things worse in the long run. I'm biased though, since the only people I know from the Soviet Union were the ones who escaped.
> legalized abortion in 1920,
and later banned it. But then again tankies tend to be quite lose with facts
> Provided a decent standard of living to all their citizens while also suffering inmense pression from the First World?
What?! Is this sarcasm? Millions of people starved to death to a large extent due to misguided bolshevik policies between 1917 and the 1940s. That is arguably true only starting in the 50s and 60s.
Edit: watch Red Dawn, read the article, and comment back with your comparison of treatment of Soviet Russia.
In my reading of the article the only negative statement about the Soviet society was the statement that they lied about the time of death and fictionalized the science for propaganda. The rest of it reads as a humanizing story of the dog and it’s experience without a specific political agenda. I could very well have imagined any other society as the context. I feel you must be overly sensitized to have read this as anti Soviet.
Russia != Soviet
Russians != Soviet
This story != anti soviet
https://pathologic.fandom.com/wiki/Lika
"3" like letter in Cyrillic alphabet is "z" in Latin. You can hear it when pressing the sound button in here:
https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=%D0%9B%D0%B...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze_(Cyrillic)
This tone is really harsh, animals dying to push science forward is still common today and acting like they were "heartless" for it is disingenuous.
Laika got to be remembered, which his already much more than can be said of most test subjects.
Laika was an important stepping stone towards humans in space. It's sad a dog died, but some people are a bit melodramatic.
https://history.nasa.gov/animals.html is a quick summary.
And yet, given the power to make such a decision I'd ban all animal experimentation without question (and I'd include Laika's situation in that).
If it is so vital that an experiment be performed, then a willing human volunteer should be found. If no human is willing to undergo these tortures in the name of science and for the sake of humanity, then the experiment in question is apparently not that vital after all.
In these situations, humans have the choice and humans have the benefit. We should leave other species out of it.
After all, the goal was to have humans go into space and survive the trip back.
That doesn't really change anything.
> Laika got to be remembered, which his already much more than can be said of most test subjects
I doubt that was much comfort to her.
She wouldn't understand what it means to live or die for something.
Still being the first mammal in Earth orbit is wild. Man's best friend indeed!
That was my point, yes.
The real problem was that the training they did was so superficial that the dogs made more harm than good.
A dog can run much further than a soldier can throw, which was pretty much the point. If you're close enough to throw something at an enemy tank, you are typically dead.
That said, this had limited success at best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog
• copied the Soviet anti-tank dog programme[0];
• glued bags filled with napalm to bats bodies and caged the live bats inside a bomb casing[1];
• used foxes caught in China and Australia whose fur was painted with a radioactive radium paint[2] to have them released on Japanese shores to unleash rampant fear onto the superstitious Japanese;
– the US did it in the name of democracy and freedom of humanity. And when the British procured and euthanasied hundred of rats to fill their bodies with explosives[3], they did it in the name of His Majesty the King and to defend and to save the British Empire.
Granted, the Soviets were the preantepenultimate evil with their anti-tank dogs, and nothing else counts.
[0] «In 1943, U.S. forces considered using armed dogs against fortifications. The aim was for a dog to run into a bunker carrying a bomb, which would then be detonated by a timer. Dogs in this secret program were trained at Fort Belvoir. The dogs, called "demolition wolves", were taught to run to a bunker, enter it, and sit while waiting for a simulated explosion. Each dog carried a bomb strapped to its body in canvas pouches, as with the Russian method» – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog#Use_by_other_cou...
[1] «The bat bomb was conceived by Lytle S. Adams (1881-1970), a dental surgeon from Irwin, Pennsylvania who was an acquaintance of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt […] In his letter, Adams stated that the bat was the "lowest form of animal life", and that, until now, "reasons for its creation have remained unexplained". He went on to espouse that bats were created "by God to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence, and to frustrate any attempt of those who dare desecrate our way of life." Of Adams, Roosevelt remarked, "This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into» – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb#cite_note-Couffer-4
[2] «The United States Radium Corporation provided an answer in the form of its glow-in-the-dark paint, which contained radium. The health risks associated with the paint weren’t unknown. As early as 1917, women detailing watch dials with the luminous paint suffered from anemia, bone fractures, and necrosis of the jaw, a result of them using their pursed lips to shape the contaminated brush tips into a fine point. Despite that danger, the OSS continued with Operation Fantasia» – https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unsuccessful-wwii-plo...
[3] «But the most exotic device was the "explosive rat". A hundred of the rodents were procured by an SOE officer posing as a student needing them for laboratory experiments. The rats were skinned, filled with plastic explosive, and sewn up. The idea was to place a rat among coal beside a boiler. When they were spotted, they would immediately be thrown on to the fire, causing a huge explosion» – https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/27/richardnortontayl...
It sounds rather similar to how the Russians treat their mobilised soldiers to this day.
https://history.nasa.gov/animals.html is a more straightforward recounting of the various tests and animals involved, including the V-2 tests.
1) Farming at least serves a purpose (food for humans).
2) The vast majority of people who eat meat do not support the farming and slaughter of dogs. They're tremendously emotionally intelligent, social creatures.
3) Sacrificing an animal for science may be morally justifiable if it saves human lives, but this was not one of those situations. A quote from one of the scientists assigned to Laika’s program:
> “The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.”
How about farming those pigs?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/2013...
If dogs rather than pigs and octopuses gain human empathy through the appearance of understanding the emotions of humans, is intelligence in this sense equivalent to manipulative capability?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika_(comics)
https://www.bigplanetcomics.com/category/comics/the-alternat...
For instance, read the first sentence from Harlow's Wikipedia page:
> Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 – December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development.
Did we really need to torture these creatures for decades to understand the importance of care giving? The experiments seem like a flimsy pretext for torture.
>In 1971, Harlow's wife died of cancer and he began to suffer from depression. He was treated and returned to work but, as Lauren Slater writes, his colleagues noticed a difference in his demeanor.[6] He abandoned his research into maternal attachment and developed an interest in isolation and depression.
From the wikipedia page.
Going back to poor Laika for a moment, you could adapt an old, morbid joke: "we're going to murder all the kulaks and one dog." "Why the dog?" "Why the kulaks?"
Judaism actually has a law called "Tza'ar ba'alei chayim" which prohibits unnecessary suffering to animals, and mandates a procedure for painless slaughter. This was unprecedented for its time - back then no one cared at all.
Having spent a decent chunk of my childhood in a rural area (and seen many pigs being killed by various methods, none of them very humane), I also don't care about this stuff too much tbh.
Yes, we did. Look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitalism people didn't even understand how much humans need care, never mind animals. The people placing these babies into care did so with the best intentions, but insufficient knowledge.
Your knowledge comes from these experiments.
We figured this out without needing to torture monkeys. Apparently, though, this was not sufficient for Harlow, as he created his pit of despair almost 30 years later.
[1]. https://www.nickabadzis.com/laika-graphic-novel
[2]. https://www.bigplanetcomics.com/category/comics/the-alternat...
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/remember...
Look at that good girl :-( We really don't deserve dogs.