[History] Why were disabled people persecuted in the USSR?
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For the same reason they were persecuted in Nazi Germany; for being a burden upon the nation who drain more resources and productivity than they contribute.
It's pretty much a given that in 'socialist' and 'communist' totalitarian states, you at best ignore the disabled, or just... make them disappear somehow.
It's one of those funny, funny things. Where do you find the most buildings and services with disabled access? In the capitalist countries that you're told don't care about people and are just a few billionaires and their slaves.
Even now there are almost no accommodations for the disabled in Russia, plenty of people have a very difficult time. I think the Moscow Metro still has no elevators, but I have seen people get creative on the escalators.
It's a very prominent problem.
I used to have a website link to map of Russian cities, predominately Moscow, which listed each street and each building and how many people had disappeared from each building. Living in the center of Moscow I recognized there were many buildings in my neighborhood. Really really creepy, including our next door building.
However when I just went to search for that link which I've had many years, it's 404'd - https://memoryfull.ru/purge/repressions.html
Check the wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://memoryfull.ru/purge/repressions.html but I see there should be an interactive google map which doesn't work
Nice find. Using wayback to a 2011 save there is a little more. But the maps are gone.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110718095315/https://memoryfull.ru/purge/repressions.html
Yeah. Maybe you should look around the site in the archives to see if they ever published the data set as a simple file to download. Sometimes those get captured too.
URL checks out.
I'm beating myself across the head for not having archived it, it's just not something I think about frequently and then when I went back to find it .. nyet.
I remember the maps so well as most of the buildings listed still stand, and I poured over it. I think if I were really determined to find a source that saved/archived it, I would look to something like Novaya Gazeta or Memorial.
Interesting…
So I’m an Olympics/Paralympics nut, right (don’t know exactly why. Guess I was the right age for Sydney 2000, and it went from there!), and one thing I explicitly noticed this year is that Ukraine absolutely dominated a lot of the Paralympic sports, in a way they didn’t at Olympic level. Like, matched only by “Great Britain”, the US, Germany (of course), and bloody China…
Russia, by contrast, did well, but nowhere near on the same level, which I found surprising (Putin did, however, give at least some of the Paralympians Russian “medals of honor”, when they returned, so it’s not like they were “invisible” in Russia, lol).
I realise that Russia and Ukraine are not the same, and I also realise that the whole ROC/RPC “banning of Russia” debacle would have impacted things, but it does make you think: if Russia invested in Paralympic sport in the same way that Ukraine and Germany obviously do (also Poland, to a lesser extent) - man, how good could they be??!
Same problem with Japan, who were the hosts, obviously… Though they seemed to view the Paralympians with even more of a dismissive sneer, which is… Unfortunate, but perhaps unsurprising given Japan’s historical obsession with uhh… “Purity”… 🤢
Are you sure about that? Because that doesn't match my experience when talking to any Japanese people. Maybe that's just compared to Americans who couldn't care less about the Olympics, and don't even know what Paralympics is... but many Japanese actually treat it as a legitimate sporting contest. Some of it airs on TV like the Olympics, and the news stations give regular updates on the results. People might not know individual competitors like they do famous olympians, but they anticipate the results and add the totals for Olympics + Paralympics together to see how well Japan did vs. other countries.
You certainly cant gauge national excitement for an event based on how well the athletes perform.
Controversial, but I’m technically “disabled”, now (“yay”… 🙄), so…
Look, while I obviously don’t think we should kill, exile or ostracize “disabled people”, I do think the West makes FAR too many concessions for “disabled people”, including myself, to the point of absurdity…
Not EVERY building needs ramps. Not every concert, or speech, needs sign language interpreters. We DO NOT need to change our whole society to make it easier for every single disabled person. We SHOULD cure everything we can, and I don’t give a shit about “disability idpol”. And finally, we absolutely do not need all three of the INAS games (“intellectual disabilities”), the “Special Olympics” (same again) and the Paralympics (also now includes “intellectual disabilities”)…
“Disabled people” aren’t special. There’s a grey area; a… Median point, somewhere between what the Nazis and Commies did, and the exact opposite extreme we see in the West nowadays, where we condescend and treat “disabewd peepoo” like special magical fairies, or similar bullshit… 😒
There’s my take for the day.
And yes, all of this goes for me, too.
Society absolutely should not have to change anything, to fit around me or my… Slow (currently rapid) decline in health.
Just let me work as best I can (rather than giving me “free” money or other “free” shit), try to be patient with the things I can’t control, and then leave me the fuck alone. Don’t treat me like I’m “special”, and do not, DO NOT treat me like a retard, or someone who needs “special considerations/modifications”…
And hell, I don’t even look “disabled” (you probably wouldn’t even know, if you saw me) so just fucking imagine how it is for those who do… 🙄
Are you saying your MS testing came back positive?
Honestly, being told by multiple doctors that I might never be able to see fully again is… One of the worst moments of my life, ever.
And then the doctor told me to, in essence, “suck it up”, and my mother told me to “get over it and stop complaining”…
So yeah, it’s been a tough week, ha.
Honestly, the MS nurse treating me like I was fucking retarded is almost preferable to ^^ that. 😒 Almost.
I'm sorry to hear it's been like this. And the confirmed diagnosis, most of all.
Were any of the doctors optimistic about at least treating symptoms? It may be incurable, but giving up is a bad mindset that will make you miserable. Any of the doctors not telling you to give up, may be one to take the advice of.
Yeah, I sympathize. I am not sure how common it is to be faced with that kind of thing, but I think others experience it without the drastic medical source.
In a way, it's the perfect excuse to take a step back and re-evaluate your goals. This is not simple and it can be a huge pain to get advice about. I do strongly encourage you to attempt it (the re-evaluation of goals), because...well, what other option do you have? You do not want to be an invalid, you don't want people to treat you like one, which may mean them not feeling sorry for you, so you have to take some care not to fall deep into the pit of despair you may feel calling for you.
As an example of re-evaluated goals: I used to have the goal of being a video game dev. Eventually - after enough failure - I looked at it deeper and realized I actually had two goals hidden inside that one that were what mattered: the simple joy of co-operative effort with other people that share a desire rather than a responsibility, and the anxiety-soothing effect of finely tuning a series of systems to work well. I've actually gone a layer deeper on both of those since then, but I won't detail it here.
To the point, all humans need to have goals. Taking them away from a man can destroy him, but it's up to the man whether it does. I hope you can find a new set of goals moving forward, because it's hard to be happy without goals. I can't speculate on what may be beneath your lost goals, but you should give it some thought.
Yeah. Yeah it did. 😞
Very sadly yes. And it’s gotten worse, lol…
Shit’s bad right now, ahahahaha…
I’m only really “disabled” in that I can’t fucking see to function, still. I wouldn’t claim it if it was just the diagnosis. 🤷🏻♂️ And if my sight comes back, I won’t claim it then, either. But for now, I can’t even drive a car (!!), or ride my fucking bike, or work properly. So I think it counts, lol…
Thanks for remembering, I guess, ha. 😖
Just read that exercise makes the Optic Neuritis worse. Fuck.
Yeah honestly, I’m… Struggling right now, dude. These things are all my reasons to keep living, so to lose those… Is very, very hard. 😞
Look up Kelly Cartwright, Keira Stephens, Olivia Breen, Isis Holt, Lauren Parker or Vanessa Low, if you want evidence of “disabled people” (who are also all at least an 8/10) living their absolute prime lives, and achieving more than most of us ever will, and then tell me again how modern “Western” society doesn’t give “the disabled” enough of a “leg up”, honestly… 🙄
Yes, I know almost certainly far too much about this topic, lol…
They were probably just shot.
executed not persecuted
if you can't be of use to glorious party utopia out you go