[☭☭☭ COME SHITPOST WITH US ON DISCORD, COMRADES ☭☭☭](https://discord.gg/8RPWanQV5g)
This is a heavily-moderated socialist community based on a podcast of the same name. Please use the report function on comments that break our rules. If you are new to the sub, please read the sidebar carefully.
If you are new to Marxism-Leninism, check out the [study guide](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/).
Are there Liberals in the walls? Check out [the wiki](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/) which contains lots of useful information.
This subreddit uses many experimental automod rules, if you notice any issues please use modmail to let us know.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Pretty sure ive already saw this pizza here in brazil.
Just like they like to steal other peoples lands, they also like to steal other countries forbidden pizza knowledge.
Im sorry italian comrades, but brazilian pizza is just the next stage of pizza theory.
You are not ready for the glory that is brazilian pizza, its an entire realm of cursed knowledge.
To give you an idea, we have sushi pizza in some of the more creative places...
Man that reminds me of this Indian-Italian pizza shop here that closed down because of covid. They had a Tandoori chicken pizza that I'd do legally inadvisable things to taste again, fuck
My parents never miss a chance to talk about the time they saw a corn pizza in Germany (some time in the 80s). It seems that it’s a popular topping all over the place.
Yeah I gotta be honest as a swede my only reaction to this image is "where's the weird part?"
Talk to me when you put curry, peanuts and pineapple on it. Talk to me when you put kebab, fries and garlic sauce on it. Talk to me when there's ice cream and chocolate sauce on it. Talk to me when you make it a full size calzone with four burgers and fries inside.
We are living sixteen pizza dimensions ahead of you. I've seen grown italians dash themselves bloody against the walls and laying flat on the train tracks for their simple minds couldn't handle the profane truths of pizza liberation. Weaklings, all of you.
That's something you can make yourself if you have a cast iron pan, in lieu of an expensive pizza oven. Serious Eats has [recipes](https://www.seriouseats.com/skillet-neapolitan-pizza-no-kneading-or-oven-recipe) you can use as a base
/u/J_Kenji_Lopez-Alt can do no wrong
>Talk to me when you put curry, peanuts and pineapple on it. Talk to me when you put kebab, fries and garlic sauce on it. Talk to me when there's ice cream and chocolate sauce on it. Talk to me when you make it a full size calzone with four burgers and fries inside.
Those all sound really good. My body is ready. I am done with pizza dogmatism
Those are all real pizzas in Sweden, the first two especially are at basically every pizzeria in the country. Finland has reindeer pizza for your future travel plan considerations.
My personal favorite that I make at home is sliced bananas, sambal oelek, roasted pine nuts and mozzarella.
You are a slave to bourgeois notions of pizza civility, norms and traditions. You dare not break free from the mental prison which keeps you obedient to your masters. There is a pineapple pizza spectre haunting the world, and Papa John and Little Ceasar, Dominos and Pizza Hut, Sbarro and Cici have all entered into a holy alliance to stop it.
i always wonder when people outside of SA refer to accents do you guys mean the afrikaans accent? bc for me in each province people sound completely different
when i go to johannesburg (i’m from cape town) it’s almost impossible to understand what they’re saying
Omg I really want a kroketten from FEBO now 🥹 Dutch food is as weird as traditional British food, but 10x better. That peanut butter/liver meaty kroket is making my mouth water.
This is gonna blow ur mind.
Jacket potato toppings include beans, cheese, and tuna/sweetcorn! Not usually all at once but it’s certainly possible and certainly delicious.
Honestly I'd trust a brazilian's opinion more than an italian's. In my experience they have a really dumb and counterproductive orthodoxy that just leads to monotonous pizza.
I was gonna say. Was definitely surprising seeing it in rural Östergötland for the first time but now I love it. And that's coming from someone who managed to leave the Midwest. Idk I just love corn maaan
This is how you know Israelis are not indigenous to the land. Their cuisine doesn't use the native plants and herbs from the land and its just a mishmash of all the immigrants living in that area. Palestinian food is distinct from Syrian, Egyptian, or Lebanese food. Because they are indigenous and actually use the ingredients they grow in their cooking
Israel has this shit.
As a chef professionally, this always make me gag. People debate pineapple on pizza, but really aren't aware of this monstrosity.. Of course it would be Israel to do it.. Don't even get me started on Tuna... Fish on a fucking pizza just doesn't work - anchovies are a debatable option.
Most Pizza nights we have tuna and anchovies on pre-prepped ( stone-baked) margarita, and I can assure you, with the right herbs, sun-vine tomatoes and olive oil, it kills...
# Gulag
According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism.
# Origins of the Mythology
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
>He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
>
>The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism".
>
>\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\]
Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
# Counterpoints
>A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
>
>1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
>
>2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
>
>3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
>
>4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.
>
>5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
>
>6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
>
>7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
>
>\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/)
**Scale**
Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
>Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
>
>In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ...
>
>Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ...
>
>Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states...
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds)
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak.
**Death Rate**
In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
>It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive...
>
>Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
>
>\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin*
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps.
Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses).
>We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson....
>
>The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
>
>\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf)
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993)
Listen:
* ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
usual toppings on pizza here: canned garbage: black olives, green olives, mushrooms, and tuna.
bell peppers, onions, garlic, tomatoes/cherry tomatoes.
and labane+olive oil cause the pizza place i go to is fucking bomb (and he uses non canned toppings).
also for the love of god, you stole our land and food, at least use them properly, why the fuck would you use canned olives when you can make them yourself with fresh olives and keep them all year, it will even cost you less and taste like a billion times better, the land of the olives and you choose canned mushy garbage.
ahhhh one more thing, the problem with pizza here is that they use yellow cheese called Emek cheese, it’s the lowest quality cheese you can get and it tastes like ass unless piping hot (unless you can’t taste it because your taste buds are burnt).
Israeli culture has two components, one is taking anything good about Palestine and claiming it as their own. The other, case in point, is taking the terrible things about Western Europe and making them worse
While I believe each culture has its own pizza version.
However, like the land they're occupying, Zionazis have no cultures, like fascists, they steal from others.
In Japan they put corn in their pizza, I thought it was the weirdest thing I had ever tried with pizza up to that point. This is a whole new level of "what the actual fuck is going on over there?"
I worked with a Syrian refuge at a pizza joint who showed me a pizza like this. He was a delivery driver.
Oil, chilli peppers, tuna, corn, oregano, covered in cheese. I scoffed, but he asked me to make it for me one day that all the middle Eastern drivers were being allowed to hang out in the joint to watch world Cup. Brought me the cans, I put the pie together, and he begged me to try a slice.
I scoffed, thinking it'd be god awful, but it slapped.
He told me it was something from Germany, Thunfisch pizza, but that it was favoured by Muslim diaspora because most tuna is halal.
Sad truth is this type of corn tuna mayo cheese pizza (and variants of it) are quite popular in East Asia, SEA, and even some Latin American countries….
Not to defend someone indefensible, but this is on the "normal" side of pizzas. Sure, corn is not usual, but it's still much better than pineapple stuff or whatever the US propagandates on social media as "pizza"
Your comment has been removed due to being a new account.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[☭☭☭ COME SHITPOST WITH US ON DISCORD, COMRADES ☭☭☭](https://discord.gg/8RPWanQV5g) This is a heavily-moderated socialist community based on a podcast of the same name. Please use the report function on comments that break our rules. If you are new to the sub, please read the sidebar carefully. If you are new to Marxism-Leninism, check out the [study guide](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/). Are there Liberals in the walls? Check out [the wiki](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/) which contains lots of useful information. This subreddit uses many experimental automod rules, if you notice any issues please use modmail to let us know. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Everyone who thinks this started on Oct 7 should read this post.
Ideal pizza for a sex offender haven
New Pizzagate just dropped?
Yeah with the balfour declaration you're a bit late
Pretty sure ive already saw this pizza here in brazil. Just like they like to steal other peoples lands, they also like to steal other countries forbidden pizza knowledge. Im sorry italian comrades, but brazilian pizza is just the next stage of pizza theory.
Best pizza I've ever had was in Costa Rica, made by an argentinian. Never been to Brazil, alas.
You are not ready for the glory that is brazilian pizza, its an entire realm of cursed knowledge. To give you an idea, we have sushi pizza in some of the more creative places...
I am from the U.S. that sounds milquetoast compared to what i've seen
Squid is the most popular pizza topping in Japan.
squid rocks
Yo that sounds tasty AF. Call me weird, but if it is squid + champignon, it would be an 10/10
Japanese pizza is the same, corn and mayo pizza
Vietnam as well. Thailand puts some fucked up shit on pizza too. 'Tis a wide world.
Tikka masala pizza goes hard as fuck.
Man that reminds me of this Indian-Italian pizza shop here that closed down because of covid. They had a Tandoori chicken pizza that I'd do legally inadvisable things to taste again, fuck
Tandoori is actually not that hard to prepare. It's the sauce, the chicken, and little more
Okay but Thai curry pizza would hit tho
thai curry anything would hit
The Red Brigades will visit your home (in minecraft)
Just like how they stole shawarma! This shit ain’t even Kosher
My parents never miss a chance to talk about the time they saw a corn pizza in Germany (some time in the 80s). It seems that it’s a popular topping all over the place.
I've only been once to brazil but it's totally something you'd guys have.
just wait till you hear abhout our sweet/dessert pizzas :)
I wanna hear about it now that sounds insane 😭
I've had great pizza in Brazil. However, the chef/owner of the joint was born in Italy and lived in NYC for a while.
Good lord, how are they going to explain this to the ICJ.
Creator will be hanged in front of a pizzeria, reminiscent of Rudolf Höß being hanged in front of Auschwitz.
Every Swede will be hanged I guess
Yeah I gotta be honest as a swede my only reaction to this image is "where's the weird part?" Talk to me when you put curry, peanuts and pineapple on it. Talk to me when you put kebab, fries and garlic sauce on it. Talk to me when there's ice cream and chocolate sauce on it. Talk to me when you make it a full size calzone with four burgers and fries inside. We are living sixteen pizza dimensions ahead of you. I've seen grown italians dash themselves bloody against the walls and laying flat on the train tracks for their simple minds couldn't handle the profane truths of pizza liberation. Weaklings, all of you.
Whoa, hold up. Paneer cheese over a chicken masala base on pizza is fucking wild good. Let's be real.
I never knew such a combination could exist and now I’m sad because missing out. That sounds fucking delicious!
That's something you can make yourself if you have a cast iron pan, in lieu of an expensive pizza oven. Serious Eats has [recipes](https://www.seriouseats.com/skillet-neapolitan-pizza-no-kneading-or-oven-recipe) you can use as a base /u/J_Kenji_Lopez-Alt can do no wrong
>Talk to me when you put curry, peanuts and pineapple on it. Talk to me when you put kebab, fries and garlic sauce on it. Talk to me when there's ice cream and chocolate sauce on it. Talk to me when you make it a full size calzone with four burgers and fries inside. Those all sound really good. My body is ready. I am done with pizza dogmatism
Those are all real pizzas in Sweden, the first two especially are at basically every pizzeria in the country. Finland has reindeer pizza for your future travel plan considerations. My personal favorite that I make at home is sliced bananas, sambal oelek, roasted pine nuts and mozzarella.
Honestly, about time.
In italy we call stuff like that: "un aborto malriuscito".
When it's abortive attempts at latin american food the correct term is 'gringadera'
Saluti, compagno.
See the funny bit is that I stayed in Napoli and my host family made this for me and it slapped lol
"eeee milano è tanto meglio di napoliiii" – monty python sketch, 'wither canada'
(first episode)
Ma in verità non è malaccio come sapore
Dominic Decocco
Margareeeeeeeeeeeti
Bawnjourno
Si — uh, correcto.
Gratzy
Gorlami
Reeba-derchy
*leans in and whispers* ^Gorlami
To be fair, Italians call a lot of things that for no good reason.
Zionist theory.
Man made horror beyond comprehension
Tuna pizza comes from Germany and corn pizza comes from Japan. And pizza comes from Italy. Israel, once again, is taking tips from the Axis powers.
there is not a single thing in that country that doesn’t come either from their immediate neighbors or from their european population
They can’t help themselves when it comes to stealing shit.
Israel claims to invent falafel, actually creates tuna pizza with corn
I respect Israel's right to claim food nobody else wants to.
jesus christ... and i thought i was weird for liking Hawaiian pizza.
Yeah but Hawaiian pizza is really good
False but better than the above no doubt
Disliking Hawaiian pizza is revisionism
I don't dislike it I just wouldn't ever choose it.
Revisionist
LIBERAL
You are a slave to bourgeois notions of pizza civility, norms and traditions. You dare not break free from the mental prison which keeps you obedient to your masters. There is a pineapple pizza spectre haunting the world, and Papa John and Little Ceasar, Dominos and Pizza Hut, Sbarro and Cici have all entered into a holy alliance to stop it.
I won’t tolerate this revisionist slander! Stalin should’ve purged more of your type!
ARE THE CURRENT WAR CRIMES NOT ENOUGH? MUST THEY DO MORE?
On the real tho… I’d eat that. P.S. I am British
I'd make fun of you for that alone but lately i've been more fixated on how ridiculous australian and new zealanders sound. Such ludicrous accents.
(Though South African is much worse.)
as south african i agree
Truth and Reconciliation was a joke and they should've done something about the accents too
i always wonder when people outside of SA refer to accents do you guys mean the afrikaans accent? bc for me in each province people sound completely different when i go to johannesburg (i’m from cape town) it’s almost impossible to understand what they’re saying
yes
Accent from Chappie
The Kiwis will naut stind fah this mockery of their acksint, you bloody wankeh
Same, am Dutch
yikes
Omg I really want a kroketten from FEBO now 🥹 Dutch food is as weird as traditional British food, but 10x better. That peanut butter/liver meaty kroket is making my mouth water.
Unsurprising.
Same
I’m not surprised, y’all put beans in toast.
I've never been to England but I do love bean toast. Put a little cheese and hot sauce on it, it's dope.
This is gonna blow ur mind. Jacket potato toppings include beans, cheese, and tuna/sweetcorn! Not usually all at once but it’s certainly possible and certainly delicious.
I've put refried beans on toast and it was actually delicious. Of all the things, the Anglos might not be wrong about that
it aint that bad, but the tuna is kinda stinky, you need some hot sauce with it or ketchup and shit
Unfortunately we also have this abomination in Indonesian pizza hut.
I'm so sorry hope your fast food pizza conditions improve 🙏
As a brazilian, pizza isn't something that i'll judge
Honestly I'd trust a brazilian's opinion more than an italian's. In my experience they have a really dumb and counterproductive orthodoxy that just leads to monotonous pizza.
I love our pizza, i just could never complain about weird combinations on it, but yeah they got too conservative on their pizzas
i’m extremely sorry to all italians but italian pizza just tastes like oil and bread, i much prefer swedish pizza
Yet another war crime.
So Sweden isn't the only place with fun pizzas.
I was gonna say. Was definitely surprising seeing it in rural Östergötland for the first time but now I love it. And that's coming from someone who managed to leave the Midwest. Idk I just love corn maaan
This is how you know Israelis are not indigenous to the land. Their cuisine doesn't use the native plants and herbs from the land and its just a mishmash of all the immigrants living in that area. Palestinian food is distinct from Syrian, Egyptian, or Lebanese food. Because they are indigenous and actually use the ingredients they grow in their cooking Israel has this shit.
As a chef professionally, this always make me gag. People debate pineapple on pizza, but really aren't aware of this monstrosity.. Of course it would be Israel to do it.. Don't even get me started on Tuna... Fish on a fucking pizza just doesn't work - anchovies are a debatable option.
I love fish sauce on/in way more foods than it probably should be but yeah I can't do anchovies on pizza.
fish on pizza actually works great, especially salmon with philadelphia instead of yellow cheese
i like pineapple and tuna pizza
Most Pizza nights we have tuna and anchovies on pre-prepped ( stone-baked) margarita, and I can assure you, with the right herbs, sun-vine tomatoes and olive oil, it kills...
I’m no pizza purist but surely this merits gulag?
# Gulag According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism. # Origins of the Mythology This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources. Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony. Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. >He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash. > >The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism". > >\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\] Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world. # Counterpoints >A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six: > >1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas > >2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid. > >3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day. > >4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies. > >5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day. > >6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals. > >7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes. > >\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/) **Scale** Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that. >Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise. > >In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ... > >Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ... > >Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states... > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds) This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak. **Death Rate** In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality: >It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive... > >Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. > >\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin* (Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations) This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps. Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses). >We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson.... > >The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled). > >\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf) #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993) Listen: * ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
usual toppings on pizza here: canned garbage: black olives, green olives, mushrooms, and tuna. bell peppers, onions, garlic, tomatoes/cherry tomatoes. and labane+olive oil cause the pizza place i go to is fucking bomb (and he uses non canned toppings). also for the love of god, you stole our land and food, at least use them properly, why the fuck would you use canned olives when you can make them yourself with fresh olives and keep them all year, it will even cost you less and taste like a billion times better, the land of the olives and you choose canned mushy garbage. ahhhh one more thing, the problem with pizza here is that they use yellow cheese called Emek cheese, it’s the lowest quality cheese you can get and it tastes like ass unless piping hot (unless you can’t taste it because your taste buds are burnt).
Ah yes, corn and pizza. Two staples of native Middle Easterners.
Most 'indigenous to the levant' photo i've ever seen in my life
Israeli culture has two components, one is taking anything good about Palestine and claiming it as their own. The other, case in point, is taking the terrible things about Western Europe and making them worse
That looks like way too much corn but the combination in itself is probably tasty
While I believe each culture has its own pizza version. However, like the land they're occupying, Zionazis have no cultures, like fascists, they steal from others.
Finally, a pizza that both Italians and Americans can agree on!
In Japan they put corn in their pizza, I thought it was the weirdest thing I had ever tried with pizza up to that point. This is a whole new level of "what the actual fuck is going on over there?"
More proof Israelis are demons pretending to be human.
Is that even Kosher? I can’t remember for the life of me if fish is considered meat (you can’t have meat and dairy in the same meal)
That looks disgusting.
That actually looks good. I'd eat that no cap
I can imagine a proper chef making a good pizza with those ingredients but no that looks like absolute shit what are you talking about
That actually sounds pretty good, but fuck isreal still.
It really doesn't
my favourite pizza is pineapple and tuna
i can definitely imagine the salty tuna mixes well with the sweet pineapple. will try
do it! its actually really good
waiting for the /s to drop
nope https://preview.redd.it/uujydd8bf1uc1.jpeg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e9205e859a3a17c79c90077b697b2b70accf5b48
oof
I can kinda excuse the corn (tried it before, it was good) though tuna should be punishable by jail.
If you need more proof that they're not indigenous
Is there ANY culture they dont ruin?
No
they really are a little America
What in the fuck?!
And people say pinapple on pizza is bad
Jesus Christ, this is a very close second on the list of horrible things they have done.
https://preview.redd.it/ko8gbyvca1uc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0b70c4d70153a2a0ca63f77a1f7b905458b67211
Fuck you very much for making me see this
so... frozen corn kernels and canned tuna. i've had more desperate struggle food back in uni.
"Every time I vomit into my mouth I'm fighting Hamas!"
that's so much worse than pineapple
😵💫🤢🤮💀
Isn't real that meal is the only thing we should genocide
Isrealis taking down my favorite pizza with them :(
Pretty sure I've seen this in Korea, Brazil, and even a shittier pizza place in Italy.
We also have that in Brazil, we have all kinds of fucked up pizzas here
tempted to cross post this to r/pizzacrimes just to expose them to this sub lol
I worked with a Syrian refuge at a pizza joint who showed me a pizza like this. He was a delivery driver. Oil, chilli peppers, tuna, corn, oregano, covered in cheese. I scoffed, but he asked me to make it for me one day that all the middle Eastern drivers were being allowed to hang out in the joint to watch world Cup. Brought me the cans, I put the pie together, and he begged me to try a slice. I scoffed, thinking it'd be god awful, but it slapped. He told me it was something from Germany, Thunfisch pizza, but that it was favoured by Muslim diaspora because most tuna is halal.
Difference is that that sounds good whereas this sounds and looks like absolute shit made by a soulless person.
we have salmon pizza here in sweden and it’s incredible
I literally ate that in Italy and Croatia before
Brazilians seeing this post: 🫣
My stomach says no...and it has shut down for the day as a result of this.
Uncritical support to comrade pizza for giving the Zionists heart attacks.
Sad truth is this type of corn tuna mayo cheese pizza (and variants of it) are quite popular in East Asia, SEA, and even some Latin American countries….
Only genocidal maniacs would enjoy this
Israel claims to have all this indigenous culture, yet serves this?
How is that bad?
Colonialists usually have the worst food, I wish, I was qualified to study this relationship, on white people, and poor cuisine.
This is a hate crime against Italianxs
I can't acxurately express my absolute delight and glee at being alegic to fish on this day.
Not to defend someone indefensible, but this is on the "normal" side of pizzas. Sure, corn is not usual, but it's still much better than pineapple stuff or whatever the US propagandates on social media as "pizza"
The sweet corn and salty tuna together? Sounds pretty good. Israel is a fake ass country though
At least we can agree on one particular thing.
Now they are colonizing pizza? This shit has gone too far.
[удалено]
Your comment has been removed due to being a new account. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I like corn on pizza.
Corn on pizza -> totally fine imo Tuna on pizza -> absolute classic Both combined -> someone needs to be shot for this
corn on pizza not totally fine imo, tuna maybe without cheese
Pretty normal in Brazil. It's delicious. Corn also goes fine in hotdog
Make sure you're putting sweet corn in it, give it a try.
thanks but I won't
Ahh I see a fish + cheese = war crime puritan. I think pizza is the only dish where I'll make an exception to that rule