Space program:
USSR: Soyuz
USA: Star Wars (Pentagon's)

Show trials:
USSR: Andrei Sakharov
USA: José Padilla

Preferred scapegoats:
USSR: Jews, Gays, Brown-Skinned and Orientals
USA: Gays, Brown-Skinned and Orientals

Wannabe reformer to preside over collapse of system:
USSR: Mikhail Gorbachev
USA: Hillary Clinton?

Maybe the ones in Miami...

"C'est un scandale !"

Goverment organization devoted specifically to spying on, instilling fear in, and arresting without cause its own citizens:
USSR: OGPU/NKVD/MGB/KGB
USA: Department of Homeland Security

Also, I just want to address the following statement.  I know we're kinda having fun here and perhaps embracing a bit of hyperbole here and there.  But this common misperception is one of the things that gets under my skin...

Passive population incapable of rebellion:
USSR: You pretend to pay us and we pretend to work - but we know you're lying to us.

I think there is this idea that without Calvinist and Capitalist incentives there is no impetus for a work ethic.  And I think that's a bit of outdated propaganda.


"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."

Most hated enemy:
USSR: Russian intellectuals
USA: French intellectuals

In any reasonable world it would be "USA: American intellectuals"

But oh no.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

USSR:  State imposition of ideological filters on scientists' research, publication, and travel
USSA:  check

The only difference between those in thrall to big business is that the Republicans got too greedy. The Dems usually settle for stealing money from sweetheart public works projects. They also fix local elections, the Repubs have been trying to fix national elections (and doing pretty well at it).

Show me a viable socialist/populist/communist/etc candidate in the US.

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

To name a few:

1. Preferred scapegoats:
USSR: Jews, Gays, Brown-Skinned and Orientals
USA: Muslims, Gays, Brown-Skinned and Orientals

You are talking about Brezhnev's times, right? Early 1960s - 1982? Who on earth do you mean by Brown-Skinned and Orientals? Numerous Indians, Syrians and Vietnamese who were studying in Moscow and Leningrad?  Black people  from Africa (mostly Angola and Mosambik)?Well, I personally would love to watch any person to dare to say anything ...er... politically incorrect about them, our little brothers and sisters from developing world who fights them bloody fat american and western european imperialists. Not sure about imprisonment but surely  such reckless words would ruin any career. If you mean people from the ex-Soviet respublics, say, Georgia or Armenia, well, some kind of unfriendly relationship could've been found in Russian part of the USSR (like regional jealousy in any part of the world)  but mind you, the level of unfriendlyness towards Russian in Georgia or Armenia was  higher.

On the other hand, being probably an atheist, you have missed the true scapegoats - religious people, be they orthodox Christians or Jews or Buddhists or Muslims - on a par with Gays they used to have only two options - either mental hospitals (Now, have you seen a God, any God? No and you claim He(she) exists? Yer mad, totally mad but we'll do our best to treat you) or prisons (for messing with hostile imperialist values and probably being their spy).

2. Satellite countries:
USSR: Bulgaria, Rumania and Poland
USA: Bulgaria, Rumania and Poland
Sorry, we had more, including a half of Germany.

3. Most hated enemy:
USSR: Russian intellectuals
USA: French intellectuals
There was a lot of intellectuals who did well in the USSR, especially among those who worked with nukes and space programms. Sakharov, Solzhenitsin were an exception, not the rule. And, of course, good education itself was valued then and, thankfully, is valued now much higher than, say in the UK (never been to the USA so can't compare :-) ).

4. Health system. Your article refers to the later time, 1990s. What would you want after the state collapse? In Soviet times our dentistry was a total and absolute crap, the rest... hmm... at least people from all over the USSR used to  be sent to the Moscow and Leningrad hospitals free of charge if they suffered from, say, cancer.

5. What Trotsky has to do with 1960-1980s? He was murdered many years ago, after all.

6. GULAG as the system imprisoning or killingthe  millions of innocent people didn't exist  already in  Brezhnev's times.

   The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against Gregory Jenkins, a former high-level White House staffer who enacted a policy that unlawfully excluded individuals perceived to be critical of the administration from public events where President Bush was present. The policy is laid out in an October 2002 "Presidential Advance Manual" obtained by the ACLU.

    The ACLU filed today's lawsuit, Rank v. Jenkins, after obtaining a heavily redacted version of the Presidential Advance Manual from the Justice Department. This manual is the Bush administration's guide for planning presidential events around the country, and it repeatedly instructs organizers about "the best method for preventing demonstrators," "deterring potential protestors from attending events," "designat[ing] a protest area . . . preferably not in view of the event site or motorcade route," and the like.

    The lawsuit names as plaintiffs Jeff and Nicole Rank, who were arrested at a Fourth of July presidential appearance at the West Virginia State Capitol because they were wearing T-shirts critical of the president, and Alex Young and Leslie Weise, Denver residents who were thrown out of a town hall meeting with President Bush because they had an anti-war bumper sticker on their car.

When they say "heavily redacted," they are not kidding. The "Presidential Advance Manual" is 103 pages long. Other than the title page and the table of contents, there are precisely six pages which have not been completely redacted.

But those six pages are enough to enrage anyone who strongly believes in the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. The ACLU helpfully provides a PDF version of this document on their website. The title page bears the warning: "It is a violation of Federal law to duplicate or reproduce this manual without permission. It is not to be photocopied or released to anyone outside the Executive Office of the President, White House Military Office or United States Secret Service," and is further stamped: "SENSITIVE -- DO NOT COPY." I am assuming that since it already exists in the public domain that it is not illegal to quote it here. [I hope.]

The first interesting tidbit comes from page 32, under the heading: Section V. Crowd Raising and Ticket Distribution.

The Lead Advance will assign a member of the Advance Team or trusted volunteer to help raise the crowd and to organize a ticket distribution system. Proper ticket distribution is vital to creating a well-balanced crowd and deterring potential protestors from attending events.

Wow. That last sentence is so Orwellian it makes your head spin. I don't think I've ever seen such a naked display of doublethink in any official government document in my entire life. The White House wants to create a "well-balanced crowd" by "deterring potential protestors." Think about that for a minute. It only makes sense in the English language if you define "well-balanced crowd" as "a crowd composed entirely of people who believe what we believe."

it's the italicised bit (my emph) above that gets to me.  doncha just long to know what was in the other pages?

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

Torture:
USSR: Lubianka
USA: Guantanamo

Sorry if you can not tell the difference between Gulags and Guantanamo...

------------------------------ Rutherfordian RDRutherford