My wife hates dealing with authority and won't engage in politics. When I questioned was this a deliberate policy, she said yes as that is how there family survived in the USSR by being as low a profile and anonymous as possible. I said, you mean you didn't want to end up on the wrong list. No, we didn't want to be on any list as last weeks good list could be next weeks fulfil the regimes punishment quota list.
The local political commissioner was like a semi-god as your life was in his hands. If you upset him your family was an enemy of the state, not pay a big enough annual bribe, your family was an enemy of the state, he fancied your mother/wife/sister/daughter and they didn't oblige, your family was an enemy of the state. The family would then be arrested or more likely just disappear to never to be seen again.
When TB jokes about culling as the real power is not in who is the bagman with the gun and a set of orders, but as I've said before, the real power is who decides who goes on the lists and why? The quickest way to wipe out humanity would be for everybody to cull everybody that offends anybody in thought, word or deed as everybody would have culled everybody else in a few days.
In the decadent west we have the luxury of democracy, laws, an independent judiciary and human rights with most people insulated with what really happens in dictatorships where the ruling regime have the total power over everything, including the monopoly on legal state violence which in practice means everything is leased to you by the state, everything, including you life. Any lease can be terminated without notice, at any time, with no right of appeal.
Good examples of the constant and excessive use of 'legal' state violence are: Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, DPRK & Russia (especially Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya & the annexed Donbas (DNR/LNR) and Crimea regions in Ukraine).
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Topic: Grand tour (Read 5495 times)