Again, you've got to be careful here, because historical and dialectical materialism makes this tricky. The pure idealist position -- not saying you're advocating it, but it's certainly easy to fall into -- is that of Rosseau and his ilk: under primitive communism, humanity lived an idyllic life, and then property and the agricultural revolution entered and started us off on a long train of opression and conflict within the species. There is truth to this, but isn't the whole story. As every new mode of production brings with it an increase in human power over nature, it also brings an expansion in concrete "rights," because humanity can now better defend itself against external nature. Thus the great slave civilizations of the ancient world were actually an improvement on hunter-gatherer society, and feudalism was an advance over slavery, since the average medieval peasant lived a better life than the average Roman slave, and the average Roman slave was better off than the average tribesman under primitive communism (if only in terms of life expectancy and being able to preserve his subjectivity in the face of hostile nature). The long view is that humanity moves from primitive communism to advanced, technological communism, with everything in between a neccesary transitional stage as humanity pauses and asserts its control over the external world. But what we need to be careful of is applying a moral valuation to any point in the transition. The level of social development can never be higher than the level of economic development, and at any point in history, humanity basically tends to the most equitable arrangement possible under the current development of productive forces.
So there's a proper, Marxist way to understand "natural rights," but you need to be careful here, because generally, it's a term used by Lockeans and other "classical liberals." Rights exist socially, because what is characteristically human is a social phenonomenon, rooted in humanity's ability to collectively transform the world around us: as Marx puts it, "man is a species being," and the humanity comes to know itself by production. Liberalism makes rights abstract and inhering solely in the atomized individual (himself a kind of abstraction, since there is no human being who does not exist and reproduce his nature via participation in some kind of collective), which ultimately means that rights can be debated and curtailed (or expanded). The concrete cannot be easily changed, but the fully abstract can. Thus liberalism is, in effect, a giant con game. It claims to make "human rights" unassailable by rooting them in the individual, but in the process makes them such that they can be defined out of existence.
You weren't moved in the depths of your being by John Galt coming out of his bunker and making the sign of the dollar (a US government currency) in the air like a benediction?
Exactly, after decades of socialist development. In that same time, Russia went through a collapse and what was arguably an attempted genocide by the United States. That they aren't a complete fascist hellhole like Ukraine or the Baltics after all that is something of a miracle.
Comrades, why are some of us surprised? We all know what the modern Russian state is. Not even China is fully "progressive" on this issue, so to expect Russia to be is somewhat -- well, delusional. Remember what the "critical" in "critical support" means.
I've heard a version of this from certain traditionialist Catholics -- that Nagasaki was targeted because it apparently had a cathedral and a relatively large Catholic population. Almost certainly untrue, but I didn't correct it, because at least it got them opposing US war crimes (the atomic bombings are real sacred cows here, that you simply cannot critcize).
Extremely common. And before that, there were bombing raid drills -- get under a table or into a doorway when the siren goes off, because Soviet missiles are inbound. Both my parents remember these. It was complete propaganda, designed to instill fear into people, because there's no way a simple wooden barrier is going to protect you from a thermonuclear strike -- as my very cynical grandpa apparently said, "don't hide when you hear the siren, just bend down and kiss your ass goodbye." Unfortunately, school shooting drills serve a much more real and practical purpose.
Again, you've got to be careful here, because historical and dialectical materialism makes this tricky. The pure idealist position -- not saying you're advocating it, but it's certainly easy to fall into -- is that of Rosseau and his ilk: under primitive communism, humanity lived an idyllic life, and then property and the agricultural revolution entered and started us off on a long train of opression and conflict within the species. There is truth to this, but isn't the whole story. As every new mode of production brings with it an increase in human power over nature, it also brings an expansion in concrete "rights," because humanity can now better defend itself against external nature. Thus the great slave civilizations of the ancient world were actually an improvement on hunter-gatherer society, and feudalism was an advance over slavery, since the average medieval peasant lived a better life than the average Roman slave, and the average Roman slave was better off than the average tribesman under primitive communism (if only in terms of life expectancy and being able to preserve his subjectivity in the face of hostile nature). The long view is that humanity moves from primitive communism to advanced, technological communism, with everything in between a neccesary transitional stage as humanity pauses and asserts its control over the external world. But what we need to be careful of is applying a moral valuation to any point in the transition. The level of social development can never be higher than the level of economic development, and at any point in history, humanity basically tends to the most equitable arrangement possible under the current development of productive forces.