[Jgoauh]

Hello, sorry i didn't reply sooner, i searched the original article for quotes and additional context but the website seems to have been updated and i cannot find it, making my original comment useless now.

I didn't mean to question or minimize the pressure and domination put on everyday people by authoritarian systems. My comment was meant to question the website's implications that this could all be deduced by the content of the photographs.

For the Parade comment specifically, i dislike the idea that the Soviet Union's ideology and tactics and motives can be deduced by the appearance of the parade, all thanks to Manhoff instead of decades of witness accounts, geopolitics and historian work.

I generally care more about how opinions are formed than what those opinions are. I also hate the anti-intellectual assumptions that what is bad looks bad, what looks bad is bad, and conversely that what looks good is good. You find this any time people talk about how nice killers were. My point was that if you wait for things to look bad before you question them, you will never question anything. But this last paragraph is just rambling and has nothing to do with your well written reply.