Yes, if you would like to read his full message, here it is:

This merits a response. Several points, first, it seems you've misinterpreted either the meme or Dr. Parenti's chapter. Second, no one denies the existence of the gulags or political prisoners in the early decades of the soviet union. Third, the question here, at least so far as I see it, and as Dr. Parenti sees it, is 'are the Gulags bad enough to be anomalous as a prison system in terms of brutality, scale, and arbitrary-ness?' The answer, quite simply, is no, certainly not in the context of the 20th century, and certainly not compared to the liberal empires that existed at the same time as the soviet union. Examining sources like Trotsky's letters, Tuchachesky's statements to the Czech General Staff, American Diplomatic cables, NKVD records and even the testimony of known zealots and liars like solzhenitsyn, it is clear that the Gulag system, while certainly unfair and brutal, imprisoned a lower proportion of the soviet population than the United States prison system does currently, and was far less brutal than the colonial prisons operated by the liberal empire, or the pre-revolutionary prisons of the Tsarist regime. In fact, the Gulags killed comparatively few people, many of those who died were actually ukrainian nationalist militants (notoriously responsible for the pogroms during the civil war), Trotsky-ite conspirators, ex-tsarist military officers, and later Nazi collaborators. This is all not to say that it was a fair system, or that the Soviet Regime committed no excesses, merely that the documented reality matches neither the bourgeois propaganda, nor the common conception of the soviet regime as either genocidal, insane, particularly murderous, or extraordinarily unfair. Now for the unfairly personal and defensive portion of this response: if you're intending to use this as a way to call me out, or to red-bait, stop. Call out culture is stupid and ineffective, it seeks to cut down on the range of acceptable expression and is actually just used as a cudgel against anything the reader does not like. The one thing I agree with reactionaries on, other than the fact the CNN is fake news, is that humor should not be limited. Aesthetically speaking, if a joke is funny to the person telling it and the primary audience, it is worth telling. obviously, context should play a role in what jokes you do and do not tell, and there's no sense being needlessly offensive in order to be edgy.