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 Lone Cat wrote:
About the Church of Blood, built on the spot where Ekatenburg Massacre took place 100 years ago. What are the inscriptions regarding to the incident written there? What did the Russian Orthodox church called the Bolshevicks (and also Lenin and Stalin) ? do they called Bolshevicks Satanists and do they also call Lenin 'Antichristo'?

The Church and the Bolshevicks (And later the Soviets) are sworn enemies.

There are lots of inscriptions on and surrounding that church. Which ones do you mean? The big golden ones above the windows? Those are just verses from the Book of Psalms.
During the initial revolution the Church was an enemy of the Bolsheviks. The Church of course called the Bolsheviks things like godless and anathema, and probably every other mean word they could think of. Maybe some priests would even have called the Bolsheviks satanists or Lenin the antichrist. Given the fact that it was war and there were all kinds of atrocities, using such curse-words doesn't seem unlikely.
Here, I found a White song from the Civil War with english subtitles:


It was popular with supporters of the White movement in the Far East. It shows a lot of how they thought about things.

Anyways, the Church survived the revolution of course, and in the Soviet Union they praised the Bolsheviks just like everyone else did. It is not like they had a choice.
In modern-day Russia, the Church is very ambiguous towards the Soviets and the Bolsheviks. On one hand, they hate them for the persecution that the Church and religion in general experienced in Soviet times, but on the other had they also recognise that the Soviets and Bolsheviks are still very popular with the majority of the Russian people. So, in the present day priests aren't very likely to say anything positive or negative about the Soviets (there are exceptions of course), much less go as far as to call them satanists or the antichrist. It would upset too many people.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

Rosebuddy wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
It does make a significant difference if its a private or state actor that deprives people of food, because circumstances are entirely different. States are on an entirely different level of responsibility, because a state is in control of the lives of its own citizens. What CEO's contribute in lack of food or destruction of environment is terrible, but you can't point the finger at them and directly blame them for famines because the food is still being sold (granted its extremely troubling and should be tackled) to them, you can at a state if you look at policies.

Leaving food production in the hands of private actors for the sake of generating profit is inherently depriving people of food because if they can't buy it they aren't supposed to eat it. Organising most food production so that people farm whatever is most profitable instead of what is locally sustainable will unavoidably create food shortages.


That you keep repeating that communists always intentionally starve people and capitalists never do is getting annoying because, well, it's what Britain did to India and Russia was stricken with incessant droughts and famines for a thousand years before 1917 due to having at best mediocre soil for large-scale agriculture, after 1917 they had a period of civil war and existential war and then once they had finished industrialisation and collectivisation and were no longer the direct target for immediate extermination, suddenly famines weren't a problem anymore.

No, this is another false equivalence. Famines we talk about in a capitalist system are frequently caused by crop failure or situations like war, not a problem of profitability. Because at the end of the day, supply and demand step in, combined with the fact that just the highest profitability doesn't always allow for singular exploitation. Because there is a limit to how much you can sell in one nation. Even 'poorer' nations get products from multinationals because a lot of profit plus a little profit is still better than only a lot of profit. If the food industry causes famines by buying up food you would see famines year after year in the same poor regions they buy food from. Not to mention the fact that farmers with modern methods can produce more food than required. Famine is much more of a threat to a subsistence economy, yes people might go hungry in capitalist systems, but large scale famines because of buying up food leaves nothing is just out there. Who would enforce that?

Sigh, either you're not getting the point or just ignoring what I write. I don't keep hammering on communists while letting capitalists off the hook. This is a thread on celebrating 100 years of communism, which is why I write more about it. Note that I did call out imperialism and the UK for causing the Bengal famine. Two communist states, the PRC and the SU, deliberately engineered some of the largest 20th century famines. So I'm neither bashing on all communism or neglecting capitalism, I'm specifically talking about two communist governments creating famine. Existential threats or civil war had nothing to do with either the 1930's famine in the SU or the Great Famine in the PRC. These famines were caused because the two states that had control over production and distribution of food, forcibly removed food from starving areas. Famines never had to be a problem in either case, famines were a problem caused by criminal mismanagement and unwillingness to face reality of what was happening or simply not caring about it. There is no but, there is nothing that counts as extenuating circumstances for either the PRC or the SU. The famines stopped because they never had to have occurred in the first place, its easy to make a problem stop when you yourself are the cause of it.

The deliberate part of the famines is something that is often stressed in anti-communist propaganda, but something for which in reality, there is barely any evidence. In my opinion, you should not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. After all, famines were frequent before the Soviets ever got to power, as they are in every pre-industrial society (which Russia in 1917, and even in 1930 still was in many places). The famine was caused by a combination of natural causes, the lingering effects of war and above all horrible agricultural mismanagement. It was not a deliberate policy of the Soviet Union, though once it began, they did little to provide relief and in fact their attempts to intervene in some cases only made it worse. Still, there is no evidence they did that out of malice. If you read the documents of that time, it seems much more that they did try to help but were horribly misguided in their views as to what was the cause of the famines, causing their attempts to fail. But it was not that they didn't care, or even worse that they had actually somehow engineered all of it. If that had been the case they would never have sent food aid on such massive scale as they did. If only they hadn't then so grossly mismanaged that aid...
So yeah, did the Soviets cause the 1930 famine? Definitely yes. But did they do it on purpose? No. I have heard this story many many times, but never have I heard or seen a single shred of evidence for that.

I said it before, but I'll say it again: communism and Lysenkoism are not the same thing.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

Rosebuddy wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
It does make a significant difference if its a private or state actor that deprives people of food, because circumstances are entirely different. States are on an entirely different level of responsibility, because a state is in control of the lives of its own citizens. What CEO's contribute in lack of food or destruction of environment is terrible, but you can't point the finger at them and directly blame them for famines because the food is still being sold (granted its extremely troubling and should be tackled) to them, you can at a state if you look at policies.

Leaving food production in the hands of private actors for the sake of generating profit is inherently depriving people of food because if they can't buy it they aren't supposed to eat it. Organising most food production so that people farm whatever is most profitable instead of what is locally sustainable will unavoidably create food shortages.


That you keep repeating that communists always intentionally starve people and capitalists never do is getting annoying because, well, it's what Britain did to India and Russia was stricken with incessant droughts and famines for a thousand years before 1917 due to having at best mediocre soil for large-scale agriculture, after 1917 they had a period of civil war and existential war and then once they had finished industrialisation and collectivisation and were no longer the direct target for immediate extermination, suddenly famines weren't a problem anymore.

No, this is another false equivalence. Famines we talk about in a capitalist system are frequently caused by crop failure or situations like war, not a problem of profitability. Because at the end of the day, supply and demand step in, combined with the fact that just the highest profitability doesn't always allow for singular exploitation. Because there is a limit to how much you can sell in one nation. Even 'poorer' nations get products from multinationals because a lot of profit plus a little profit is still better than only a lot of profit. If the food industry causes famines by buying up food you would see famines year after year in the same poor regions they buy food from. Not to mention the fact that farmers with modern methods can produce more food than required. Famine is much more of a threat to a subsistence economy, yes people might go hungry in capitalist systems, but large scale famines because of buying up food leaves nothing is just out there. Who would enforce that?

Sigh, either you're not getting the point or just ignoring what I write. I don't keep hammering on communists while letting capitalists off the hook. This is a thread on celebrating 100 years of communism, which is why I write more about it. Note that I did call out imperialism and the UK for causing the Bengal famine. Two communist states, the PRC and the SU, deliberately engineered some of the largest 20th century famines. So I'm neither bashing on all communism or neglecting capitalism, I'm specifically talking about two communist governments creating famine. Existential threats or civil war had nothing to do with either the 1930's famine in the SU or the Great Famine in the PRC. These famines were caused because the two states that had control over production and distribution of food, forcibly removed food from starving areas. Famines never had to be a problem in either case, famines were a problem caused by criminal mismanagement and unwillingness to face reality of what was happening or simply not caring about it. There is no but, there is nothing that counts as extenuating circumstances for either the PRC or the SU. The famines stopped because they never had to have occurred in the first place, its easy to make a problem stop when you yourself are the cause of it.

The deliberate part of the famines is something that is often stressed in anti-communist propaganda, but something for which in reality, there is barely any evidence. In my opinion, you should not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. After all, famines were frequent before the Soviets ever got to power, as they are in every pre-industrial society (which Russia in 1917, and even in 1930 still was in many places). The famine was caused by a combination of natural causes, the lingering effects of war and above all horrible agricultural mismanagement. It was not a deliberate policy of the Soviet Union, though once it began, they did little to provide relief and in fact their attempts to intervene in some cases only made it worse. Still, there is no evidence they did that out of malice. If you read the documents of that time, it seems much more that they did try to help but were horribly misguided in their views as to what was the cause of the famines, causing their attempts to fail. But it was not that they didn't care, or even worse that they had actually somehow engineered all of it. If that had been the case they would never have sent food aid on such massive scale as they did. If only they hadn't then so grossly mismanaged that aid...
So yeah, did the Soviets cause the 1930 famine? Definitely yes. But did they do it on purpose? No. I have heard this story many many times, but never have I heard or seen a single shred of evidence for that.

You've heard the story, you just haven't looked hard enough. Its not just propaganda, many influential historians have worked on this topic in the last two decades, free of Cold War bias. You know what the most curious part of the 1933 famine was? That peasants/farmers tried to get into cities to get food as it was made available there, which is completely contrary to normal famines where urban populations go to the countryside as farmers usually are the ones that posses any remaining food. Not only did Stalin ordered the region sealed off, you even needed special passports to get into the cities in the area, the only place food was available, and which peasants weren't able to acquire. Hell, by 1933 the Soviets had forcibly sent back around 190.000 peasants into the starvation zone (T. Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London 2010) 45). People in the Gulags such as at Belomor were given terrible food rations, about 1300 calories a day, yet they were better rations than the people in the starvation areas in 1933 could get. Not just better, about two to three times as much as the peasants on collective farms in areas such as Soviet Ukraine got in 1933 (A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York 2003) 64-65). Just the fact that the Soviets fed Gulag inmates in some of the most inhospitable areas in the world better than the actual starving population says something.

Of course the collectivization to feed industrialisation did its part. Meaning that 'kulaks' or the most successful farmers were deported as enemies of the state. Collective farms were allowed to take the seed grain (required to have a harvest the following years) from independent farmers, so taking that was basically a death sentence as those farmers could no longer grow food (R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1932-1933 (London 2004) 8-11, 24-37). Not only that, the Soviet government set the harvest of 1931 as the baseline for what should be supplied each year. But this was critically a harvest that had not been affected yet by deportations and collectivization, meaning that the baseline was entirely unobtainable in 1932 to 1933. The effects of collectivization were devastating on output because of the upheavals it brought. When the Ukrainian party leader Stanislaw Kosior reported in 1931 that the baseline was unobtainable, Lazar Kaganovich told him that "the real problem was theft and concealment" (Davies, 72-95). So with that line of approach the Soviet government started requisitioning seed grain from even the collective farms, because they were obviously hiding their produce and sabotaging collectivization, yet that meant that next year would bring no harvest at all (combined that sounds pretty 'malicious' don't you think?'). Stalin even privately admitted there was a famine going on, but crucially did not implement food aid, even telling Kaganovich that "it is imperative to export without fail immediately", continuing the requisitioning during the famine (Snyder, 35). Stalin knew what his orders meant, he did not care, in his mind the famine was the work of sabotage. Watchtowers were set up to control the movement of peasants and communist youth organizations were mobilized to go door to door to confiscate anything they could find (Snyder, 39). Ukrainians in Poland collected money as famine relief, but their offers were rejected, no outside help was accepted.

Stalin could have ended the famine by just temporarily stopping food exports or even releasing grain reserves of three million tons, but he did none of that. I could go on for a while (with more sources), but I have made my point sufficiently clear, it was malice, not stupidity that fed the 1932-1933 famine in the Soviet Union. There was plenty of food available in-country. Yet the Soviet government deliberately withheld it. This was no ordinary famine, it was the result of deliberate policies of the Soviet government even after the consequences were becoming horribly obvious. It was a malicious and deliberately driven famine by the Soviet government.

To stress again before others, not you Iron Captain, criticizing me again for blaming all of communism for famines: I'm criticizing the communist governments that did this, not the actual political theories behind communism/socialism.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
The deliberate part of the famines is something that is often stressed in anti-communist propaganda, but something for which in reality, there is barely any evidence. In my opinion, you should not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. After all, famines were frequent before the Soviets ever got to power, as they are in every pre-industrial society (which Russia in 1917, and even in 1930 still was in many places). The famine was caused by a combination of natural causes, the lingering effects of war and above all horrible agricultural mismanagement. It was not a deliberate policy of the Soviet Union, though once it began, they did little to provide relief and in fact their attempts to intervene in some cases only made it worse. Still, there is no evidence they did that out of malice. If you read the documents of that time, it seems much more that they did try to help but were horribly misguided in their views as to what was the cause of the famines, causing their attempts to fail. But it was not that they didn't care, or even worse that they had actually somehow engineered all of it. If that had been the case they would never have sent food aid on such massive scale as they did. If only they hadn't then so grossly mismanaged that aid...
So yeah, did the Soviets cause the 1930 famine? Definitely yes. But did they do it on purpose? No. I have heard this story many many times, but never have I heard or seen a single shred of evidence for that.

You've heard the story, you just haven't looked hard enough. Its not just propaganda, many influential historians have worked on this topic in the last two decades, free of Cold War bias.

You say that as if the Cold War is over, and all the bias has suddenly disappeared.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
You know what the most curious part of the 1933 famine was? That peasants/farmers tried to get into cities to get food as it was made available there, which is completely contrary to normal famines where urban populations go to the countryside as farmers usually are the ones that posses any remaining food.

That is not curious at all, since that is where the authorities sent all the food. It is a communist economy after all. The authorities took the food provided by the farms and redistributed to everyone according to their need. That was the theory at least. The cities were the centers from where stuff was supposed to be redistributed. However, in practice a lot of things often went wrong with this process, so the food stayed in the cities and never actually got redistributed back to the needy peasants.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Not only did Stalin ordered the region sealed off, you even needed special passports to get into the cities in the area, the only place food was available, and which peasants weren't able to acquire. Hell, by 1933 the Soviets had forcibly sent back around 190.000 peasants into the starvation zone (T. Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London 2010) 45). People in the Gulags such as at Belomor were given terrible food rations, about 1300 calories a day, yet they were better rations than the people in the starvation areas in 1933 could get. Not just better, about two to three times as much as the peasants on collective farms in areas such as Soviet Ukraine got in 1933 (A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York 2003) 64-65). Just the fact that the Soviets fed Gulag inmates in some of the most inhospitable areas in the world better than the actual starving population says something.

Yes. And you know why they were forced back? Because these were mostly farmers, working (or supposed to be working) in one of the Soviet Union's most important agricultural areas. When the famine hit, a lot of people abandoned the farms to get into the cities. This of course had the effect of reducing production even further, making the famine even worse and thus causing even more people to abandon their farms, reducing production ad inf.. These measures were introduced by the Soviets in an attempt to break the vicious cycle. The other reason to confine people was to prevent a flood of refugees into neighbouring regions. While not being in a state of famine, food still wasn't exactly plentiful in surrounding areas either. They would have been unable to feed (or house) the refugees.
And that people in the Belomor camp got more food is kinda obvious. The White Sea region is very far away from Ukraine and Southwestern Russia, the areas where the famine was. There was no famine in Northern Russia, so why should they've led the people in the camps there there starve?

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
(T. Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London 2010) 45).
(A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York 2003) 64-65).

I admire the fact that you properly refer to your sources, even though this is a forum discussion and not an academic paper.
But the sources you cite do bring up some problems. I do not know if this is your idea of reputable historians or reputable sources, but it is not. Both are not proper academic sources, and are written with a clear bias, written by people who have clearly displayed an anti-Soviet and anti-Russian bias throughout their lives.
I would recommend getting information from authors who maintain a somewhat more neutral tone in their writing. Academic papers have to remain free of bias, and are therefore an excellent source of information. I recommend reading them instead of non-academic literature which is primarily interested in selling copies (and thus often writing in a sensationalist manner) or impressing upon people the views of the author. Wheatcroft, to who you also have referred, is a good example of a much more neutral and therefore much better source. I definitely recommend his articles on the subject.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Of course the collectivization to feed industrialisation did its part. Meaning that 'kulaks' or the most successful farmers were deported as enemies of the state. Collective farms were allowed to take the seed grain (required to have a harvest the following years) from independent farmers, so taking that was basically a death sentence as those farmers could no longer grow food (R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1932-1933 (London 2004) 8-11, 24-37). Not only that, the Soviet government set the harvest of 1931 as the baseline for what should be supplied each year. But this was critically a harvest that had not been affected yet by deportations and collectivization, meaning that the baseline was entirely unobtainable in 1932 to 1933. The effects of collectivization were devastating on output because of the upheavals it brought.

Aye, that is typical Soviet stupidity. Those independent farmers were then supposed to go to the collective farms, but the Soviets vastly overestimated the willingness of people to join these collective farms (there were pretty good reasons people didn't want to join those, but that is another story). So now they had eliminated independent farmers as planned, but this did not translate in a growth of the collective farms as expected. The Soviets had really high hopes and expectations for the collective farms, and they based their policies on that. When those collective farms then failed to perform, they got in trouble.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
When the Ukrainian party leader Stanislaw Kosior reported in 1931 that the baseline was unobtainable, Lazar Kaganovich told him that "the real problem was theft and concealment" (Davies, 72-95). So with that line of approach the Soviet government started requisitioning seed grain from even the collective farms, because they were obviously hiding their produce and sabotaging collectivization, yet that meant that next year would bring no harvest at all (combined that sounds pretty 'malicious' don't you think?').

And that is the other part of Soviet stupidity. Soviet leaders (especially the Stalinist bunch) believed so much in their own ideas, it was like a religion to them. To them, it was absolutely inconceivable that their plans and ideas didn't work and caused problems. So they started to look for causes, and recalling the Civil War, and many farmer's opposition to communism, this must have seemed logical to them. They were not malicious, just stupid and blinded by their own self-righteousness.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Stalin even privately admitted there was a famine going on, but crucially did not implement food aid, even telling Kaganovich that "it is imperative to export without fail immediately", continuing the requisitioning during the famine (Snyder, 35). Stalin knew what his orders meant, he did not care, in his mind the famine was the work of sabotage. Watchtowers were set up to control the movement of peasants and communist youth organizations were mobilized to go door to door to confiscate anything they could find (Snyder, 39). Ukrainians in Poland collected money as famine relief, but their offers were rejected, no outside help was accepted.

Food aid was actually implemented, and on a very large scale. The Soviet archives (a lot of relevant documents are public, you can look them up online. You would need to speak Russian though.) show large quantities of grain being transported to the area destined for aid. But due to the horrible failures of the Soviet system, the aid never was very effective. For the most part it never actually reached the starving people. All those big shipments just disappear, probably a lot of it was simply wasting away in storehouses in the cities. Besides the records of aid shipments to the region there is also a vast amount of legislative and legal documents of Soviet authorities on different levels that show that they were doing their best to fight the famine. Unfortunately their attempts to do so were misguided and generally failed miserably, especially outside of the cities. If you can't read Russian, Davies and Wheatcroft also write a bit on aid attempts in their book.
Polish aid was not accepted given the fact that Poland was an enemy of the Soviet Union. With how paranoid the Soviets were that is kinda obvious.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Stalin could have ended the famine by just temporarily stopping food exports or even releasing grain reserves of three million tons, but he did none of that. I could go on for a while (with more sources), but I have made my point sufficiently clear, it was malice, not stupidity that fed the 1932-1933 famine in the Soviet Union. There was plenty of food available in-country. Yet the Soviet government deliberately withheld it. This was no ordinary famine, it was the result of deliberate policies of the Soviet government even after the consequences were becoming horribly obvious. It was a malicious and deliberately driven famine by the Soviet government.

To stress again before others, not you Iron Captain, criticizing me again for blaming all of communism for famines: I'm criticizing the communist governments that did this, not the actual political theories behind communism/socialism.

Soviet food exports dropped enormously during the famine. The relatively small amounts that still were exported would not have made any difference, given the large amount of food aid that had already gone to waste. Surrounding regions in the Soviet Union also weren't really abundant with food, as famines in other parts of the Soviet Union throughout the early 20th century attest. There was only a very limited amount of food surplus, and that either was too far away to be transported to the famine area or it was already being send and mostly wasted as food aid. The Soviet leaders wanted to tackle the real cause of the famine (or what they believed to be the cause at least). Halting even the last exports to send even more food to the region must have seemed like throwing it away in a bottomless well to them. That is not malicious, on the contrary they tried their best to solve the famine. But due to being blinded by their own self-righteousness they failed or accidentally made the problems even worse.

Show where the bias of the authors is. You can't just yell "bias!" all the time without backing it up.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Show where the bias of the authors is. You can't just yell "bias!" all the time without backing it up.

I already told you where the bias is. Both authors show a consistent negative attitude towards Russia and the Soviet Union in all of their writings. Doesn't matter whether it is the Empire, the Soviet Union or the Federation, if it is Russian it is bad.
In their writings, Russia is this big bad bogeyman trying to oppress and murder all the poor people in Eastern Europe, and it is constantly being equated to Nazi Germany. And when something happens? Russia is undoubtedly behind it, it is all part of their grand plan to dominate Eastern Europe and oppress the Ukrainians/Poles/Estonians/Other Eastern European people. Famine of 1930? Orchestrated by Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians. Stalinist purges? Aimed at exterminating non-Russians. Nazi Germany? Russia was working together with them to exterminate Eastern European peoples and dominate the area. GULAG? A tool to oppress non-Russians. Trump gets elected? Orchestrated by Russia to destabilise the US and thus gain the opportunity to dominate and oppress Eastern Europe again. By contrast, there are loads of people out there writing books that are much less biased. But their writings don't tend to be as sensationalist and therefore get not as well sold.

Academic authors set out with a question and then write a paper or book to analyse data to explore whether they can find an answer to that question. In contrast, these authors set out from a preconceived (and sensational) story, and then arrange the data in such a way that it supports their story. That is a great way to write a commercial book for the general population, but it has zero academic merit.

 Peregrine wrote:
But really, the absurdity of your argument should be obvious: do you sincerely believe that people choose to live in poverty because they like it? Of course not.

Ah, the other leg of the pernicious meme that is the Protestant work ethic. A person's worth is judged by their deeds. Which becomes the idea that everyone should work. and thus anyone who isn't working is therefore worth less than those of us that are. Conveniently ignoring the reasons why they can't work.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Show where the bias of the authors is. You can't just yell "bias!" all the time without backing it up.

I already told you where the bias is. Both authors show a consistent negative attitude towards Russia and the Soviet Union in all of their writings. Doesn't matter whether it is the Empire, the Soviet Union or the Federation, if it is Russian it is bad.
In their writings, Russia is this big bad bogeyman trying to oppress and murder all the poor people in Eastern Europe, and it is constantly being equated to Nazi Germany. And when something happens? Russia is undoubtedly behind it, it is all part of their grand plan to dominate Eastern Europe and oppress the Ukrainians/Poles/Estonians/Other Eastern European people. Famine of 1930? Orchestrated by Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians. Stalinist purges? Aimed at exterminating non-Russians. Nazi Germany? Russia was working together with them to exterminate Eastern European peoples and dominate the area. GULAG? A tool to oppress non-Russians. Trump gets elected? Orchestrated by Russia to destabilise the US and thus gain the opportunity to dominate and oppress Eastern Europe again. By contrast, there are loads of people out there writing books that are much less biased. But their writings don't tend to be as sensationalist and therefore get not as well sold.

Academic authors set out with a question and then write a paper or book to analyse data to explore whether they can find an answer to that question. In contrast, these authors set out from a preconceived (and sensational) story, and then arrange the data in such a way that it supports their story. That is a great way to write a commercial book for the general population, but it has zero academic merit.

You're insisting on academic standards but not following them yourself. All you're doing is reiterating your accusations of bias, you're not giving any concrete examples, you're not giving any sources, and you're not actually giving us any reason beyond your own word to believe you.

It's entirely possible that there is bias involved, but we can't tell wether there is or not from what you've said so far.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
The deliberate part of the famines is something that is often stressed in anti-communist propaganda, but something for which in reality, there is barely any evidence. In my opinion, you should not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. After all, famines were frequent before the Soviets ever got to power, as they are in every pre-industrial society (which Russia in 1917, and even in 1930 still was in many places). The famine was caused by a combination of natural causes, the lingering effects of war and above all horrible agricultural mismanagement. It was not a deliberate policy of the Soviet Union, though once it began, they did little to provide relief and in fact their attempts to intervene in some cases only made it worse. Still, there is no evidence they did that out of malice. If you read the documents of that time, it seems much more that they did try to help but were horribly misguided in their views as to what was the cause of the famines, causing their attempts to fail. But it was not that they didn't care, or even worse that they had actually somehow engineered all of it. If that had been the case they would never have sent food aid on such massive scale as they did. If only they hadn't then so grossly mismanaged that aid...
So yeah, did the Soviets cause the 1930 famine? Definitely yes. But did they do it on purpose? No. I have heard this story many many times, but never have I heard or seen a single shred of evidence for that.

You've heard the story, you just haven't looked hard enough. Its not just propaganda, many influential historians have worked on this topic in the last two decades, free of Cold War bias.

You say that as if the Cold War is over, and all the bias has suddenly disappeared.

Problem is that you said "anti-communist propaganda". These are works written decades after the end of the Soviet Union and communist Russia. Its hard to see how factual works on events that were almost 90 years ago about a now defunct state would need to include propaganda to smear it. The Soviet Union is not the Russian Federation, not a big fan putting the sins of the father on the successor states

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
You know what the most curious part of the 1933 famine was? That peasants/farmers tried to get into cities to get food as it was made available there, which is completely contrary to normal famines where urban populations go to the countryside as farmers usually are the ones that posses any remaining food.

That is not curious at all, since that is where the authorities sent all the food. It is a communist economy after all. The authorities took the food provided by the farms and redistributed to everyone according to their need. That was the theory at least. The cities were the centers from where stuff was supposed to be redistributed. However, in practice a lot of things often went wrong with this process, so the food stayed in the cities and never actually got redistributed back to the needy peasants.

Really, they: "redistributed to everyone according to their need. That was the theory at least. The cities were the centers from where stuff was supposed to be redistributed." So they took away the food from starving peasants when hundreds of thousands were already dying? You're telling me you take all their food first, then give it to the farmers if anything is left, you know the people producing next year's food? That's a nice way to ensure everybody dies the next year, 1933. That wasn't stupidity, it was just uncaring at the least, and plain murder at worst.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Not only did Stalin ordered the region sealed off, you even needed special passports to get into the cities in the area, the only place food was available, and which peasants weren't able to acquire. Hell, by 1933 the Soviets had forcibly sent back around 190.000 peasants into the starvation zone (T. Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London 2010) 45). People in the Gulags such as at Belomor were given terrible food rations, about 1300 calories a day, yet they were better rations than the people in the starvation areas in 1933 could get. Not just better, about two to three times as much as the peasants on collective farms in areas such as Soviet Ukraine got in 1933 (A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York 2003) 64-65). Just the fact that the Soviets fed Gulag inmates in some of the most inhospitable areas in the world better than the actual starving population says something.

Yes. And you know why they were forced back? Because these were mostly farmers, working (or supposed to be working) in one of the Soviet Union's most important agricultural areas. When the famine hit, a lot of people abandoned the farms to get into the cities. This of course had the effect of reducing production even further, making the famine even worse and thus causing even more people to abandon their farms, reducing production ad inf.. These measures were introduced by the Soviets in an attempt to break the vicious cycle. The other reason to confine people was to prevent a flood of refugees into neighbouring regions. While not being in a state of famine, food still wasn't exactly plentiful in surrounding areas either. They would have been unable to feed (or house) the refugees.
And that people in the Belomor camp got more food is kinda obvious. The White Sea region is very far away from Ukraine and Southwestern Russia, the areas where the famine was. There was no famine in Northern Russia, so why should they've led the people in the camps there there starve?

Yes, sending back starving farmers back into starvation areas is illogical. If those farmers were producing food why would they need to escape the starvation area in the first place. No, the famine was made worse by Soviet requisitioning amounts and stealing the seed grain, that's how it got worse. Those farmers had nothing to grow anymore in the first place. "Saboteurs" was the favorite criticism against the people that were starving in the first place. You're shifting blame to the first victims of starvation. Those people were sent back to die, plain and simple.
No, the distance part is not an excuse. It was a Gulag, food was shipped there. How come the Soviet authorities were able to send food to Gulag inmates but not to starving farmers?

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
(T. Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London 2010) 45).
(A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York 2003) 64-65).

I admire the fact that you properly refer to your sources, even though this is a forum discussion and not an academic paper.
But the sources you cite do bring up some problems. I do not know if this is your idea of reputable historians or reputable sources, but it is not. Both are not proper academic sources, and are written with a clear bias, written by people who have clearly displayed an anti-Soviet and anti-Russian bias throughout their lives.
I would recommend getting information from authors who maintain a somewhat more neutral tone in their writing. Academic papers have to remain free of bias, and are therefore an excellent source of information. I recommend reading them instead of non-academic literature which is primarily interested in selling copies (and thus often writing in a sensationalist manner) or impressing upon people the views of the author. Wheatcroft, to who you also have referred, is a good example of a much more neutral and therefore much better source. I definitely recommend his articles on the subject.

I have, I've read many more books from a list of authors. I just gave Snyder and Applebaum as they are more widely available outside of academic circles. Plus Snyder is a respected academic professor from Yale (nice guy btw). Applebaum's book is praised by plenty of academic professors too, my Soviet history professor still makes his students read parts as far as I'm aware. They are well researched works and plenty of other work backs them up. Beyond them being more popular or mainstream books, what is your problem with them? They are properly referenced in the academic fashion, they back everything up with references.

I'd like to hear about the anti-Soviet biases of Syder and Applebaum "throughout their lives" beyond just saying their books are biased.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Of course the collectivization to feed industrialisation did its part. Meaning that 'kulaks' or the most successful farmers were deported as enemies of the state. Collective farms were allowed to take the seed grain (required to have a harvest the following years) from independent farmers, so taking that was basically a death sentence as those farmers could no longer grow food (R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1932-1933 (London 2004) 8-11, 24-37). Not only that, the Soviet government set the harvest of 1931 as the baseline for what should be supplied each year. But this was critically a harvest that had not been affected yet by deportations and collectivization, meaning that the baseline was entirely unobtainable in 1932 to 1933. The effects of collectivization were devastating on output because of the upheavals it brought.

Aye, that is typical Soviet stupidity. Those independent farmers were then supposed to go to the collective farms, but the Soviets vastly overestimated the willingness of people to join these collective farms (there were pretty good reasons people didn't want to join those, but that is another story). So now they had eliminated independent farmers as planned, but this did not translate in a growth of the collective farms as expected. The Soviets had really high hopes and expectations for the collective farms, and they based their policies on that. When those collective farms then failed to perform, they got in trouble.

Typical stupidity? No, they literally took away what these people needed to survive, that's not stupidity, that's murder. "High hopes" and "got in trouble"? You mean wildly unrealistic expectations and when those weren't met all their food was taken and they were left to starve? Why use euphemisms, the Soviets even took the seed grain. Again, not 'trouble', plain murder. That's what it is when you steal someone's food and then force them to stay.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
When the Ukrainian party leader Stanislaw Kosior reported in 1931 that the baseline was unobtainable, Lazar Kaganovich told him that "the real problem was theft and concealment" (Davies, 72-95). So with that line of approach the Soviet government started requisitioning seed grain from even the collective farms, because they were obviously hiding their produce and sabotaging collectivization, yet that meant that next year would bring no harvest at all (combined that sounds pretty 'malicious' don't you think?').

And that is the other part of Soviet stupidity. Soviet leaders (especially the Stalinist bunch) believed so much in their own ideas, it was like a religion to them. To them, it was absolutely inconceivable that their plans and ideas didn't work and caused problems. So they started to look for causes, and recalling the Civil War, and many farmer's opposition to communism, this must have seemed logical to them. They were not malicious, just stupid and blinded by their own self-righteousness.

Yet Stalin himself admitted in private their was a famine going on. They knew. It doesn't matter what kinds of 'justifications' they made up to let those people starve, they let them starve and took any scraps they had left foor good measure. Just because they were misguided does not mean you can't be evil. You could call Hitler "stupid and blinded by [his] own self-righteousness" in the same manner, doesn't change that at heart what he did was just pure evil. Misguided reasoning does not exclude maliciousness.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Stalin even privately admitted there was a famine going on, but crucially did not implement food aid, even telling Kaganovich that "it is imperative to export without fail immediately", continuing the requisitioning during the famine (Snyder, 35). Stalin knew what his orders meant, he did not care, in his mind the famine was the work of sabotage. Watchtowers were set up to control the movement of peasants and communist youth organizations were mobilized to go door to door to confiscate anything they could find (Snyder, 39). Ukrainians in Poland collected money as famine relief, but their offers were rejected, no outside help was accepted.

Food aid was actually implemented, and on a very large scale. The Soviet archives (a lot of relevant documents are public, you can look them up online. You would need to speak Russian though.) show large quantities of grain being transported to the area destined for aid. But due to the horrible failures of the Soviet system, the aid never was very effective. For the most part it never actually reached the starving people. All those big shipments just disappear, probably a lot of it was simply wasting away in storehouses in the cities. Besides the records of aid shipments to the region there is also a vast amount of legislative and legal documents of Soviet authorities on different levels that show that they were doing their best to fight the famine. Unfortunately their attempts to do so were misguided and generally failed miserably, especially outside of the cities. If you can't read Russian, Davies and Wheatcroft also write a bit on aid attempts in their book.
Polish aid was not accepted given the fact that Poland was an enemy of the Soviet Union. With how paranoid the Soviets were that is kinda obvious.

That's kind of a joke isn't it? Saying you're sending food aid but nothing ever shows up. Something about empty promises and all that. The Soviet Union was a tightly controlled authoritarian police state with 3 million tons of grain reserves that still managed to ship 2 million tons of grain abroad in the middle of a terrible famine. Now why would they be so effective in building those reserves and exporting it when they couldn't even provide proper food aid inside their own country? The dots just don't connect. They still kept taking food away from starving peasants too. So not only were they competent enough to scour the farmlands for every scrap of food, being able to ship 2 million tons abroad and feed Gulag inmates, but they weren't competent enough to provide food to starving civilians? That's not just mismanagement, Stalin insisted they keep exporting as much as possible.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Stalin could have ended the famine by just temporarily stopping food exports or even releasing grain reserves of three million tons, but he did none of that. I could go on for a while (with more sources), but I have made my point sufficiently clear, it was malice, not stupidity that fed the 1932-1933 famine in the Soviet Union. There was plenty of food available in-country. Yet the Soviet government deliberately withheld it. This was no ordinary famine, it was the result of deliberate policies of the Soviet government even after the consequences were becoming horribly obvious. It was a malicious and deliberately driven famine by the Soviet government.

To stress again before others, not you Iron Captain, criticizing me again for blaming all of communism for famines: I'm criticizing the communist governments that did this, not the actual political theories behind communism/socialism.

Soviet food exports dropped enormously during the famine. The relatively small amounts that still were exported would not have made any difference, given the large amount of food aid that had already gone to waste. Surrounding regions in the Soviet Union also weren't really abundant with food, as famines in other parts of the Soviet Union throughout the early 20th century attest. There was only a very limited amount of food surplus, and that either was too far away to be transported to the famine area or it was already being send and mostly wasted as food aid. The Soviet leaders wanted to tackle the real cause of the famine (or what they believed to be the cause at least). Halting even the last exports to send even more food to the region must have seemed like throwing it away in a bottomless well to them. That is not malicious, on the contrary they tried their best to solve the famine. But due to being blinded by their own self-righteousness they failed or accidentally made the problems even worse.

Yes they did, but not enormously, that's misleading. 1925-1927 had similar levels of food exports as 1932, the first year of famine. Critically they shipped out as much food during a famine as during a normal year, in 1932 they exported 2 million tons. That was just short of half their best year, 1931, while in 1928-1929 they exported half as much as in famine year 1932. Take into account that the starvation area was one of the breadbaskets of the Soviet Union and that just shows the enormity of what is ongoing. The Soviets maintained their food exports at an average level while their prime agricultural regions were starving to death. How were they maintaining average exports during a famine? You can easily connect those dots.

The famine of 1932-1933 was malicious. These weren't 6 year old children running the Soviet Union. Neither "stupidity" or "being blinded by their own self-righteousness" excuses the incredible tragedy they let and helped happen.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Show where the bias of the authors is. You can't just yell "bias!" all the time without backing it up.

I already told you where the bias is. Both authors show a consistent negative attitude towards Russia and the Soviet Union in all of their writings. Doesn't matter whether it is the Empire, the Soviet Union or the Federation, if it is Russian it is bad.
In their writings, Russia is this big bad bogeyman trying to oppress and murder all the poor people in Eastern Europe, and it is constantly being equated to Nazi Germany. And when something happens? Russia is undoubtedly behind it, it is all part of their grand plan to dominate Eastern Europe and oppress the Ukrainians/Poles/Estonians/Other Eastern European people. Famine of 1930? Orchestrated by Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians. Stalinist purges? Aimed at exterminating non-Russians. Nazi Germany? Russia was working together with them to exterminate Eastern European peoples and dominate the area. GULAG? A tool to oppress non-Russians. Trump gets elected? Orchestrated by Russia to destabilise the US and thus gain the opportunity to dominate and oppress Eastern Europe again. By contrast, there are loads of people out there writing books that are much less biased. But their writings don't tend to be as sensationalist and therefore get not as well sold.

Academic authors set out with a question and then write a paper or book to analyse data to explore whether they can find an answer to that question. In contrast, these authors set out from a preconceived (and sensational) story, and then arrange the data in such a way that it supports their story. That is a great way to write a commercial book for the general population, but it has zero academic merit.

I'll take this apart:

Both authors show a consistent negative attitude towards Russia and the Soviet Union in all of their writings.

How?

Russia is this big bad bogeyman trying to oppress and murder all the poor people in Eastern Europe, and it is constantly being equated to Nazi Germany.

Actually no, that isn't at all what either Snyder or Applebaum write. Snyder even gives the reason for including Hitler, because he is writing a history of Central/Eastern Europe during the 1930's and 1950's through the actions of Hitler and Stalin. He doesn't say that Hitler equals Stalin. He barely mentions the Gulags, because he is focused on a specific area. He could have split it up into two books if that would have helped? And Applebaum? She writes about the Gulags, not Nazi Germany.

Plus oppressing is pretty accurate, seeing as how the Soviet Union was a massive police state especially under Stalin.

Famine of 1930? Orchestrated by Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians.

While their is a lot of debate on if it was purposefully done to Ukrainians, it is pretty clear they represented an incredibly disproportionate amount of the famine victims. Combined with what I stated above, it was pretty clearly orchestrated to be that bad. Now if it was against a specific group? I'm not making a judgement on that.

Aimed at exterminating non-Russians.

Snyder references his numbers of purge victims. Non-Russians are victims in a disproportionate percentage compared to the total population, saying Stalin targeted non-Russians more is just looking at statistics. What's the problem with that? He never says it wasn't bad for Russians either, he just states it was disproportionately worse for non-Russians.

Russia was working together with them to exterminate Eastern European peoples and dominate the area.

Exterminating them is never brought up, its hyperbole. But Stalin did team up with Hitler to regain the lost territories of Russia, the Baltics and Eastern Poland amongst other. So yes, dominate is definitely true. And there definitely was an air of extermination/domination with Katyn, you don't just murder the intelligentsia of a nation for the fun of it.

GULAG? A tool to oppress non-Russians.

Again, statistical data backs up the disproportionate amounts. They still don't say it was just against non-Russians.

You criticize these people with one hand, then with the other write what you want people to see as hyperbolic stories that actually have cores of truth to them. You're purposefully misleading in that sense, which doesn't help your argument

Any form of government that requires killing off hordes of the people it rules over to make them go along with it, is evil. And so are the guys running the show. The vast majority of Russia is still backwater today, regardless how nice Moscow and St. Petersburg look during Christmas.

Its nice that these russian trolls write off the lives of their own people taken in the act of modernizing Russia, but the reality is the system was doomed from the start, as Communism is flawed to begin with. Its a shame it took so long for people to come to their senses about it. Its amazing to me that you would have anyone sign up for eliminating free thought, freedom of speech, or political debate. The fact that a government has to ban opposition parties is absolute proof that it is weak, as it cannot expect to last long when its short-comings are challenged.

And whatever advances were made under 'Soviet' leadership, far more advances across far more sectors were produced under free societies in the US and Western Europe.

Keep viewing the history through those rose-colored glasses. They do look ridiculous.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Show where the bias of the authors is. You can't just yell "bias!" all the time without backing it up.

I already told you where the bias is. Both authors show a consistent negative attitude towards Russia and the Soviet Union in all of their writings. Doesn't matter whether it is the Empire, the Soviet Union or the Federation, if it is Russian it is bad.
In their writings, Russia is this big bad bogeyman trying to oppress and murder all the poor people in Eastern Europe, and it is constantly being equated to Nazi Germany. And when something happens? Russia is undoubtedly behind it, it is all part of their grand plan to dominate Eastern Europe and oppress the Ukrainians/Poles/Estonians/Other Eastern European people. Famine of 1930? Orchestrated by Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians. Stalinist purges? Aimed at exterminating non-Russians. Nazi Germany? Russia was working together with them to exterminate Eastern European peoples and dominate the area. GULAG? A tool to oppress non-Russians. Trump gets elected? Orchestrated by Russia to destabilise the US and thus gain the opportunity to dominate and oppress Eastern Europe again. By contrast, there are loads of people out there writing books that are much less biased. But their writings don't tend to be as sensationalist and therefore get not as well sold.

Academic authors set out with a question and then write a paper or book to analyse data to explore whether they can find an answer to that question. In contrast, these authors set out from a preconceived (and sensational) story, and then arrange the data in such a way that it supports their story. That is a great way to write a commercial book for the general population, but it has zero academic merit.

Sounds like you need to read "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning", it pretty much shows that a lot of the local populations that collaborated (that more often than not helped kill as many Jews as Nazis) were former NKVD or had training from them and were looking to whitewash their past and help them survive Nazi occupation.

KTG17 wrote:
Any form of government that requires killing off hordes of the people it rules over to make them go along with it, is evil. And so are the guys running the show. The vast majority of Russia is still backwater today, regardless how nice Moscow and St. Petersburg look during Christmas.

Its nice that these russian trolls write off the lives of their own people taken in the act of modernizing Russia, but the reality is the system was doomed from the start, as Communism is flawed to begin with. Its a shame it took so long for people to come to their senses about it. Its amazing to me that you would have anyone sign up for eliminating free thought, freedom of speech, or political debate. The fact that a government has to ban opposition parties is absolute proof that it is weak, as it cannot expect to last long when its short-comings are challenged.

And whatever advances were made under 'Soviet' leadership, far more advances across far more sectors were produced under free societies in the US and Western Europe.

Keep viewing the history through those rose-colored glasses. They do look ridiculous.

Communism isn't necessarily flawed to begin with in theory, it is in practice as of now. The popularisation of the term by Marx and the term people often refer to is of communism that eventually reaches enough support, a critical mass of discontent, for a communist or progressive revolution. Communism in practice has always been the violent seizure of power by (a small group) men who had to hold on to it at any cost, popular support was never at the critical mass. They were top to bottom approaches to communism instead of the bottom up approach Marx saw. But Marx envisioned his form of communism to ally with social democrats, as both were working for a better world for the proletariat. It never was about "eliminating free thought, freedom of speech, or political debate" in the first place. That's just the consequence of the violent aspects of seizing power of a small group that can't be secure in its survival without repression, any authoritarian government really. Plus communism as envisioned by Marx would never happen in poor countries like 1917 Russia or 1949 China first, the social conditions not being right. Of course Lenin, Stalin and Mao recognized that, but they really didn't care, they wanted it and wanted it now.

Socialist democrats and communists could work together to achieve their utopia together and in many Western European countries they did. Western Europe is free and democratic, with significant socialist elements having been worked into the states. Its the more benign way of taking care of inequality (but only to an extent). Plus like many have mentioned, the labor shift due to robotics might make a shift towards socialism/communism inevitable, people need something to survive. Currently, massive wealth inequality causes discontent, but most people in the West still make enough to live pretty ok, so there is a grudging tolerance for the most part. That discontent will rapidly explode if a great deal of people lose their jobs and the state does nothing while the rich get richer.

Don't write off the political theory just yet because of historical 20th century communism.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ustrello wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Show where the bias of the authors is. You can't just yell "bias!" all the time without backing it up.

I already told you where the bias is. Both authors show a consistent negative attitude towards Russia and the Soviet Union in all of their writings. Doesn't matter whether it is the Empire, the Soviet Union or the Federation, if it is Russian it is bad.
In their writings, Russia is this big bad bogeyman trying to oppress and murder all the poor people in Eastern Europe, and it is constantly being equated to Nazi Germany. And when something happens? Russia is undoubtedly behind it, it is all part of their grand plan to dominate Eastern Europe and oppress the Ukrainians/Poles/Estonians/Other Eastern European people. Famine of 1930? Orchestrated by Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians. Stalinist purges? Aimed at exterminating non-Russians. Nazi Germany? Russia was working together with them to exterminate Eastern European peoples and dominate the area. GULAG? A tool to oppress non-Russians. Trump gets elected? Orchestrated by Russia to destabilise the US and thus gain the opportunity to dominate and oppress Eastern Europe again. By contrast, there are loads of people out there writing books that are much less biased. But their writings don't tend to be as sensationalist and therefore get not as well sold.

Academic authors set out with a question and then write a paper or book to analyse data to explore whether they can find an answer to that question. In contrast, these authors set out from a preconceived (and sensational) story, and then arrange the data in such a way that it supports their story. That is a great way to write a commercial book for the general population, but it has zero academic merit.

Sounds like you need to read "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning", it pretty much shows that a lot of the local populations that collaborated (that more often than not helped kill as many Jews as Nazis) were former NKVD or had training from them and were looking to whitewash their past and help them survive Nazi occupation.

Uhm how do I put this... That book was also written by T. Snyder, the exact person he is criticizing heavily here for his 'anti-Russian bias'

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

KTG17 wrote:
Any form of government that requires killing off hordes of the people it rules over to make them go along with it, is evil. And so are the guys running the show. The vast majority of Russia is still backwater today, regardless how nice Moscow and St. Petersburg look during Christmas.

Its nice that these russian trolls write off the lives of their own people taken in the act of modernizing Russia, but the reality is the system was doomed from the start, as Communism is flawed to begin with. Its a shame it took so long for people to come to their senses about it. Its amazing to me that you would have anyone sign up for eliminating free thought, freedom of speech, or political debate. The fact that a government has to ban opposition parties is absolute proof that it is weak, as it cannot expect to last long when its short-comings are challenged.

And whatever advances were made under 'Soviet' leadership, far more advances across far more sectors were produced under free societies in the US and Western Europe.

Keep viewing the history through those rose-colored glasses. They do look ridiculous.

Communism isn't necessarily flawed to begin with in theory, it is in practice as of now. The popularisation of the term by Marx and the term people often refer to is of communism that eventually reaches enough support, a critical mass of discontent, for a communist or progressive revolution. Communism in practice has always been the violent seizure of power by (a small group) men who had to hold on to it at any cost, popular support was never at the critical mass. They were top to bottom approaches to communism instead of the bottom up approach Marx saw. But Marx envisioned his form of communism to ally with social democrats, as both were working for a better world for the proletariat. It never was about "eliminating free thought, freedom of speech, or political debate" in the first place. That's just the consequence of the violent aspects of seizing power of a small group that can't be secure in its survival without repression, any authoritarian government really. Plus communism as envisioned by Marx would never happen in poor countries like 1917 Russia or 1949 China first, the social conditions not being right. Of course Lenin, Stalin and Mao recognized that, but they really didn't care, they wanted it and wanted it now.

Socialist democrats and communists could work together to achieve their utopia together and in many Western European countries they did. Western Europe is free and democratic, with significant socialist elements having been worked into the states. Its the more benign way of taking care of inequality (but only to an extent). Plus like many have mentioned, the labor shift due to robotics might make a shift towards socialism/communism inevitable, people need something to survive. Currently, massive wealth inequality causes discontent, but most people in the West still make enough to live pretty ok, so there is a grudging tolerance for the most part. That discontent will rapidly explode if a great deal of people lose their jobs and the state does nothing while the rich get richer.

Don't write off the political theory just yet because of historical 20th century communism.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ustrello wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Show where the bias of the authors is. You can't just yell "bias!" all the time without backing it up.

I already told you where the bias is. Both authors show a consistent negative attitude towards Russia and the Soviet Union in all of their writings. Doesn't matter whether it is the Empire, the Soviet Union or the Federation, if it is Russian it is bad.
In their writings, Russia is this big bad bogeyman trying to oppress and murder all the poor people in Eastern Europe, and it is constantly being equated to Nazi Germany. And when something happens? Russia is undoubtedly behind it, it is all part of their grand plan to dominate Eastern Europe and oppress the Ukrainians/Poles/Estonians/Other Eastern European people. Famine of 1930? Orchestrated by Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians. Stalinist purges? Aimed at exterminating non-Russians. Nazi Germany? Russia was working together with them to exterminate Eastern European peoples and dominate the area. GULAG? A tool to oppress non-Russians. Trump gets elected? Orchestrated by Russia to destabilise the US and thus gain the opportunity to dominate and oppress Eastern Europe again. By contrast, there are loads of people out there writing books that are much less biased. But their writings don't tend to be as sensationalist and therefore get not as well sold.

Academic authors set out with a question and then write a paper or book to analyse data to explore whether they can find an answer to that question. In contrast, these authors set out from a preconceived (and sensational) story, and then arrange the data in such a way that it supports their story. That is a great way to write a commercial book for the general population, but it has zero academic merit.

Sounds like you need to read "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning", it pretty much shows that a lot of the local populations that collaborated (that more often than not helped kill as many Jews as Nazis) were former NKVD or had training from them and were looking to whitewash their past and help them survive Nazi occupation.

Uhm how do I put this... That book was also written by T. Snyder, the exact person he is criticizing heavily here for his 'anti-Russian bias'

Well lets put it this way, I am going to trust a man who actually can speak a decent amount of eastern european languages and can do primary research over there rather than some random Russian guy on the internet

 Ustrello wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Ustrello wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Show where the bias of the authors is. You can't just yell "bias!" all the time without backing it up.

I already told you where the bias is. Both authors show a consistent negative attitude towards Russia and the Soviet Union in all of their writings. Doesn't matter whether it is the Empire, the Soviet Union or the Federation, if it is Russian it is bad.
In their writings, Russia is this big bad bogeyman trying to oppress and murder all the poor people in Eastern Europe, and it is constantly being equated to Nazi Germany. And when something happens? Russia is undoubtedly behind it, it is all part of their grand plan to dominate Eastern Europe and oppress the Ukrainians/Poles/Estonians/Other Eastern European people. Famine of 1930? Orchestrated by Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians. Stalinist purges? Aimed at exterminating non-Russians. Nazi Germany? Russia was working together with them to exterminate Eastern European peoples and dominate the area. GULAG? A tool to oppress non-Russians. Trump gets elected? Orchestrated by Russia to destabilise the US and thus gain the opportunity to dominate and oppress Eastern Europe again. By contrast, there are loads of people out there writing books that are much less biased. But their writings don't tend to be as sensationalist and therefore get not as well sold.

Academic authors set out with a question and then write a paper or book to analyse data to explore whether they can find an answer to that question. In contrast, these authors set out from a preconceived (and sensational) story, and then arrange the data in such a way that it supports their story. That is a great way to write a commercial book for the general population, but it has zero academic merit.

Sounds like you need to read "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning", it pretty much shows that a lot of the local populations that collaborated (that more often than not helped kill as many Jews as Nazis) were former NKVD or had training from them and were looking to whitewash their past and help them survive Nazi occupation.

Uhm how do I put this... That book was also written by T. Snyder, the exact person he is criticizing heavily here for his 'anti-Russian bias'

Well lets put it this way, I am going to trust a man who actually can speak a decent amount of eastern european languages and can do primary research over there rather than some random Russian guy on the internet

Touché good sir. Just saying that bringing up that he has to read a book by the guy he just heavily criticized might not convince him.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Ustrello wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Ustrello wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Show where the bias of the authors is. You can't just yell "bias!" all the time without backing it up.

I already told you where the bias is. Both authors show a consistent negative attitude towards Russia and the Soviet Union in all of their writings. Doesn't matter whether it is the Empire, the Soviet Union or the Federation, if it is Russian it is bad.
In their writings, Russia is this big bad bogeyman trying to oppress and murder all the poor people in Eastern Europe, and it is constantly being equated to Nazi Germany. And when something happens? Russia is undoubtedly behind it, it is all part of their grand plan to dominate Eastern Europe and oppress the Ukrainians/Poles/Estonians/Other Eastern European people. Famine of 1930? Orchestrated by Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians. Stalinist purges? Aimed at exterminating non-Russians. Nazi Germany? Russia was working together with them to exterminate Eastern European peoples and dominate the area. GULAG? A tool to oppress non-Russians. Trump gets elected? Orchestrated by Russia to destabilise the US and thus gain the opportunity to dominate and oppress Eastern Europe again. By contrast, there are loads of people out there writing books that are much less biased. But their writings don't tend to be as sensationalist and therefore get not as well sold.

Academic authors set out with a question and then write a paper or book to analyse data to explore whether they can find an answer to that question. In contrast, these authors set out from a preconceived (and sensational) story, and then arrange the data in such a way that it supports their story. That is a great way to write a commercial book for the general population, but it has zero academic merit.

Sounds like you need to read "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning", it pretty much shows that a lot of the local populations that collaborated (that more often than not helped kill as many Jews as Nazis) were former NKVD or had training from them and were looking to whitewash their past and help them survive Nazi occupation.

Uhm how do I put this... That book was also written by T. Snyder, the exact person he is criticizing heavily here for his 'anti-Russian bias'

Well lets put it this way, I am going to trust a man who actually can speak a decent amount of eastern european languages and can do primary research over there rather than some random Russian guy on the internet

Touché good sir. Just saying that bringing up that he has to read a book by the guy he just heavily criticized might not convince him.

Oh I know, I just want to hit home the point that these people are much more intelligent than any of us on this board and can actually do the research because they speak more than english and russian.

A bad attitude towards communism is the result of McCarthyism, pr. Trumen and the appearance of an atomic bomb in USA. Evolutionary, communism is a development from capitalism that will inevitably happen. In Russia there were special conditions that triggered the revolutionary method of the emergence of a pro-communist regime.Initially, there was a plan to continue the revolution, making it world-wide. But this plan was stopped by Stalin, like many utopic ideas of early Bolshevism.
Unfortunately, the leaders of the USSR distorted the original ideas of communism in the 1960s. They decided that communism is external signs of well-being (apartment, car, sausage). This gave rise to capitalist thinking in people. At the same time, the work of enterprises was transferred in part to capitalist methods of regulation. The enterprise manufacturing the products should have made it "profitable". In non-capitalist conditions, this led to a drop in the quality of products, a reduction in the variety of goods. In combination with capitalistic values, this led to dissatisfaction among people, which increased due to the fact that "in the West there was anything and it's better.". And, finally, the Gorbachev's perestroika finally destroyed the system that aspired to build communism. All this was by loss of understanding among people. we are building communism, and what is communism?
If you look at how successful mega corporations are, then you will see inside them a partial communism. Let's assume, there is part A, that makes raw material and part B that makes some prodution from it. This does not happen capitalist way, where A sells material to B. It does by communist scheme, where "A" has a plan with quantity, quality and delivery time of production. And hey, USA is full of Socialism -. trade unions, workers' rights, women's rights, insurance, benefits, social housing

 Freakazoitt wrote:
A bad attitude towards communism is the result of McCarthyism, the trumpet and the appearance of an atomic bomb in USA. Evolutionary is a development from capitalism that will inevitably happen. In Russia there were special conditions that triggered the revolutionary method of the emergence of a pro-communist regime.Initially, there was a plan to continue the revolution, making it world-wide. But this plan was stopped by Stalin, like many utopic ideas of early Bolshevism.

No not really, fear of communism is what enabled McCarthyism in the first place, not the other way around. The atomic bomb has very little to do with it either, as it was developed during a time when the SU and US were still allies in WW2.
Russia did not have special conditions that triggered a communist revolution, just special conditions to trigger a revolution. Support for the Bolsheviks was initially not very high, but some skilled and ruthless political manoeuvring by Lenin enabled the Bolsheviks to seize power. If looking at the theoretical requirements for revolutionary communism Tsarist Russia would be one of the last candidates. Something Lenin and Stalin were both aware of. Also Stalin did not stop the world revolution. He rightly assessed that after Germany failed to become communist in the late 1910's/early 1920's and the invasion of Poland failed to link up to Germany that world revolution wasn't going to happen anytime soon, which is why he instituted "socialism in one country". As for 'utopic' ideas of early Bolshevism? Lenin saw repression and a strong secret police as vital from the start, not so much utopic as downright cynical.

No not really, fear of communism is what enabled McCarthyism in the first place, not the other way around.

It was hyped up hysteria, as witch hunting in the Middle Ages, Jewish pogroms and, for example, the statement that Putin is responsible for all the problems of Ukraine. Actually, there are many similarities with what's going on in post-maidan Ukraine.

The atomic bomb has very little to do with it either, as it was developed during a time when the SU and US were still allies in WW2.

The Bomb ruined US SU relations in a moment. There is an opinion that the attack on Hiroshima was by the need to frighten Stalin, and not by military necessity.

Russia did not have special conditions that triggered a communist revolution, just special conditions to trigger a revolution.

Yeah, and it happen in February. But according to Lenin, February revolution was lack of very important thing - a party that will lead the country and transform it. Democrats has no ability to control anything. Social-revolutionrees were to terroristic in their methods and bolsheviks were most suited for that. They just filled the vacuum in the government.

 Freakazoitt wrote:

No not really, fear of communism is what enabled McCarthyism in the first place, not the other way around.

It was hyped up hysteria, as witch hunting in the Middle Ages, Jewish pogroms and, for example, the statement that Putin is responsible for all the problems of Ukraine. Actually, there are many similarities with what's going on in post-maidan Ukraine.

Yes, McCarthyism was a witch hunt, one driven by fear of communism, not driving that fear itself. An important distinction, communism was already feared before.
Its not that relatable to Ukraine. Seeing as the US didn't have part of its territory taken by Soviet Russian troops or those troops driving a civil war as happened to Ukraine.

 Freakazoitt wrote:

The atomic bomb has very little to do with it either, as it was developed during a time when the SU and US were still allies in WW2.

The Bomb ruined US SU relations in a moment. There is an opinion that the attack on Hiroshima was by the need to frighten Stalin, and not by military necessity.

No it didn't . The atomic bomb wasn't that important in relations. They were already going south beforehand. Which is exactly why the US could also use it as a demonstration, because the Cold War was already starting. It showed the US had a deterrent against the much more powerful Soviet ground army. The demonstration part of the nuclear bomb was a signal of worsening relations, not the start.

 Freakazoitt wrote:

Russia did not have special conditions that triggered a communist revolution, just special conditions to trigger a revolution.

Yeah, and it happen in February. But according to Lenin, February revolution was lack of very important thing - a party that will lead the country and transform it. Democrats has no ability to control anything. Social-revolutionrees were to terroristic in their methods and bolsheviks were most suited for that. They just filled the vacuum in the government.

They filled the 'vacuum' with a coup d'etat. Hardly showing a natural inclination towards communist revolution. It just turned out the Bolsheviks were best organized to seize power. Plus its not like the Bolsheviks were averse to violence and terror themselves.

Under communism, it will no need to produce a huge amount of unnecessary things that we are forced to buy now. But communism is more thinking way than technical. Now people have capitalist thinking. People want to have status things that will raise from above others. For example, some people buy full-frame cameras with huge lenses to be proud of owning it. Need such camera? Rent it and shoot what you need. Nooo. Do you want to ride a cool car? Rent it or go to some car hobby club. Under communism (yes, maybe cars will not be cool, but that's for another topic). But now it's not interesting for anyone to just ride a cool car. They need to OWN this car. Sometimes many of it. Perhaps now the human being is not yet ready for communism. I do not regret that it failed. So people did not want it. "Putin why we soo poor, do something" pff...

 Freakazoitt wrote:
Under communism, it will no need to produce a huge amount of unnecessary things that we are forced to buy now. But communism is more thinking way than technical. Now people have capitalist thinking. People want to have status things that will raise from above others. For example, some people buy full-frame cameras with huge lenses to be proud of owning it. Need such camera? Rent it and shoot what you need. Nooo. Do you want to ride a cool car? Rent it or go to some car hobby club. Under communism (yes, maybe cars will not be cool, but that's for another topic). But now it's not interesting for anyone to just ride a cool car. They need to OWN this car. Sometimes many of it. Perhaps now the human being is not yet ready for communism. I do not regret that it failed. So people did not want it. "Putin why we soo poor, do something" pff...

No, even under a more communist system the population will expect a certain standard of living. Its an important reason for the collapse of communist countries, they can't provide or finance a standard of living the population wants, so either the people leave or the economy goes under. Communism has to be able to provide that certain level, people should't expect less, else it will never work. Either the whole world goes at once or people will always be envious.

No, even under a more communist system the population will expect a certain standard of living.

Correctly. And in the beginning they got it. Moved from the dugouts to the commune housing and then to apartments. Not immediately, but hunger won. Have the right, if desired, to educate and make any career. There are no restrictions due to nationality or because you are not an aristocrat. In the 50s, the standard of living was restored after the attack of fascist Europe and their leader (idol of some young morons today). But in this very goal there was a defeat. Communism is not an apartment, it's not a sausage, not jeans, not a car and not tanks with rockets. the Party pursued the improvement of the quality of life and so infected people's thoughts with capitalism. And trying to build communism with the capitalism things they destroyed the economy, found themselves in everything that lagged behind the USA, lost the meaning of the slogan "to build communism". People felt deprived and of the inferior to "holy western paradise" . this idea is simple and old. "I want to live better than others." even if I am a slave owner or will suffer for a low salary 10 others. but I deserve it, and they not yet. People even support war and die like the Germans, who were promised estates and slav slaves. Hence people are still at a low stage of thinking development, since they are so easily confused. Why did people take to the streets against the USSR regime? For the phantom idea that they will be rich. And they were right, cause Party became oligarchy. the majority of the population has not lived better since. And in the 90's the majority lived worse. What has changed? Rich became much richer. And now the West simply does not respect Russia. And the oligarchy does not care about this - their capital in Switzerland, and the children in London.

Its an important reason for the collapse of communist countries

cause in the greed of people and base desires to rise up and gak on the head to others. For example socialism would improve the quality of life of the population of countries such as South America,. but they are willing to tolerate the existing system because of the illusory chance to someday become a rich man and manage a plantation where other "losers" work or at the very least escape to the US

 Freakazoitt wrote:

No, even under a more communist system the population will expect a certain standard of living.

Correctly. And in the beginning they got it. Moved from the dugouts to the commune housing and then to apartments. Not immediately, but hunger won. Have the right, if desired, to educate and make any career. There are no restrictions due to nationality or because you are not an aristocrat. In the 50s, the standard of living was restored after the attack of fascist Europe and their leader (idol of some young morons today). But in this very goal there was a defeat. Communism is not an apartment, it's not a sausage, not jeans, not a car and not tanks with rockets. the Party pursued the improvement of the quality of life and so infected people's thoughts with capitalism. And trying to build communism with the capitalism things they destroyed the economy, found themselves in everything that lagged behind the USA, lost the meaning of the slogan "to build communism". People felt deprived and of the inferior to "holy western paradise" . this idea is simple and old. "I want to live better than others." even if I am a slave owner or will suffer for a low salary 10 others. but I deserve it, and they not yet. People even support war and die like the Germans, who were promised estates and slav slaves. Hence people are still at a low stage of thinking development, since they are so easily confused. Why did people take to the streets against the USSR regime? For the phantom idea that they will be rich. And they were right, cause Party became oligarchy. the majority of the population has not lived better since. And in the 90's the majority lived worse. What has changed? Rich became much richer. And now the West simply does not respect Russia. And the oligarchy does not care about this - their capital in Switzerland, and the children in London.

Its an important reason for the collapse of communist countries

cause in the greed of people and base desires to rise up and gak on the head to others. For example socialism would improve the quality of life of the population of countries such as South America,. but they are willing to tolerate the existing system because of the illusory chance to someday become a rich man and manage a plantation where other "losers" work or at the very least escape to the US

"Facist Europe"? You mean Nazi Germany and some of its European allies? Socialism/communism is inherently about being able to provide a better life, that's not just capitalism. A better life also means having a thing like a car or an appartment. In the end what killed the Soviet Union was its inability to keep improving people's lives while facing severe economic problems combined with an authoritarian government. China shows most people can accept an authoritarian state, as long as it keeps providing better.

The West never 'respected' Russia or the Soviet Union in a geopolitical opponent sense. They have opposing goals that haven't changed because of 91. Politically the situation hasn't changed much since 91 either. Just a slightly different group of corrupt self enriching oligarchs. Those things lead to inherent dislike. Russia is respected as a player, just disliked because of how it plays the game,the same went for the SU.

Real life theoretical socialism would be great for the world. But like you said people tend to ruin it with greed. Give people power to change and they change the amount in their bank account. Communist countries that existed for decades never managed to make enough progress to stop having poor people. Political socialism is seemingly a pipedream, maybe technology will find a way. Even the true 'believers' failed.

Yes, the Soviets became popular because they provided a better life for people. When they no longer were able to do so (while Western countries were) they lost a lot of their popularity. Which meant that people started looking to other ideologies such as ethnic nationalism and people like Yeltsin instead.
You can call that capitalist thinking and that is right, but I also think, that to some degree 'capitalist thinking' is natural for human beings. We always want more. All people are greedy, and politicians are especially greedy. Even the "communists".

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Yes, the Soviets became popular because they provided a better life for people. When they no longer were able to do so (while Western countries were) they lost a lot of their popularity. Which meant that people started looking to other ideologies such as ethnic nationalism and people like Yeltsin instead.
You can call that capitalist thinking and that is right, but I also think, that to some degree 'capitalist thinking' is natural for human beings. We always want more. All people are greedy, and politicians are especially greedy. Even the "communists".

Well wanting a better life is inherent to people. A better metric for how 'greedy' or 'capitalist' people are is how much is enough. When do they feel others should be looked after/provided for. After getting a decent house? A mansion? Never enough? Most people aren't dead set against some part of socialism, they have problems with socialism/communism if it seemingly can't provide better. Of course some people never want to share because they feel like in capitalism everybody should "be able to make it". And a lot of people are fine with socialist inspired policies as long as they themselves don't have to pay more/lessen their standards for it. People are on a sliding scale of 'capitalist', but wanting better is inherently human, from socialist to libertarian on the political spectrum.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Well wanting a better life is inherent to people. A better metric for how 'greedy' or 'capitalist' people are is how much is enough. When do they feel others should be looked after/provided for. After getting a decent house? A mansion? Never enough? Most people aren't dead set against some part of socialism, they have problems with socialism/communism if it seemingly can't provide better. Of course some people never want to share because they feel like in capitalism everybody should "be able to make it". And a lot of people are fine with socialist inspired policies as long as they themselves don't have to pay more/lessen their standards for it. People are on a sliding scale of 'capitalist', but wanting better is inherently human, from socialist to libertarian on the political spectrum.

True, the difference is in a communist system the failure to provide the comforts of everyday life are blamed on the system while in a system that's driven by capitalism we find ways to blame people for their misfortune instead. They are lazy, didn't work hard enough, are parasites, and so on.

If somebody can't find a job it's their fault and not the system that has huge incentives to reduce the workforce as much as possible and squeeze the ones who work for you while increasing automation and driving cost down as much as possible (because that's how you amass more capital). A growing percentage of millennials can't afford to move out of their parents home or start families but somebody will find a way to write a nonsensical article about how they are the ones destroying this or that industry (real estate, diamonds, restaurants,…) instead of blaming the comparatively ridiculously more powerful economic forces that are shaping the world around millennials (and the rest of us humans).

The poverty rate is blamed on the poor and not on the ones who actually have the money and power to change things. As if the poor who have no means to change their situation or a few people "abusing" social services a bit (to survive or live better lives) can have the same economic impact as a company weaselling its way into getting millions in subsidies and draining your tax €s/$s. The company is seen as smart for bending the system to its needs yet the poor as seen as abusing it.

There were recently articles about some people in their twenties who couldn't afford insulin (I think both were not eligible to be included in their parents healthcare plan anymore) and died in the USA. They died because of capitalism and its inherent incentives. In other developed countries healthcare services are heavily regulated because those don't work in an capitalistic open market. If you need insulin to live then it's literary priceless to you. And if somebody's allowed to abuse that situation you end up with people dying of easily preventable diseases because instead of focusing on cheap medicine the priority was profit and thus on new patentable/protectable variations of already existing and affordable compounds. Is there a limit of how much of your wealth you would be willing to spend if it meant you wouldn't die?

It's important to remember when people mention how many millions died under communist regimes that people die under the influence of capitalism too, also due to the system's failings. The difference is who gets the blame (system vs individual). Take the 2012 Dhaka fire (it was just the first google result): "At least 117 people were confirmed dead in the fire, and over 200 were injured" because we need cheap stuff no matter the cost but nobody adds up all those dead bodies and points at the systemic failures of capitalism. It was the workers' fault for not finding better and safer jobs or the factory owner's fault for being greedy, it was the US/European companies' (who import the product) fault because of their need for profit maximisation, and so on. It's everybody but the underlying system.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

"Facist Europe"? You mean Nazi Germany and some of its European allies?

Germany, which wanted to fight. To avenge the defeat in the WW1. And the WW1 they also started. This is fascism. And hey - Spain is fascist, Italy is fascist, Germany is fascist, Vici France is pro-fascist and lesser countries were happy "good! with German's help we will make Our Little Great Countryname from Baltic to Black Sea!". Do you think only the personality of Hitler and the Nazi party are responsible for this? No, this is where the crowd corporately motivates that they can become some kind of "nobles" and that they are better than others just because they are of some nationality, which is characteristic not only of the nazis. See that Europeans are saying now: "I am proud being German nationality" under some Wehrmacht videos. Who are you to be proud of it? What did you personally do to be proud of? And what are you trying to be proud of? The fact that your country twice arranged a world war, committed war crimes and finally lost that wars? What is so good about it? Or quotes like "I'm nostalgic about the good old days when we had eggs." You did not have any eggs, you were brainwashed you have it to send you fight war and die. There was imperialism, which sent crowds of people to fight with each other for the benefit of the elites. And the fools were happy to die for the sake of the wealth of their masters, because they were motivated by these nationalistic values "I am proud to die for my king/emperor/fuhrer"

China shows most people can accept an authoritarian state, as long as it keeps providing better.

politically, the difference is not large with the rest of the countries. Illusion of free elections. Candidates are pre-selected and approved by the establishment. And if there are incidents like Trump, then they can correct his decisions. We will see how many promises he will make. Well, or ours free election between Putin and Putin? Haha.

The West never 'respected' Russia or the Soviet Union in a geopolitical opponent sense.

But now they respect much less. The country has no principles, no ideology, no unifying idea, no slogan, it can not be of any interest to other countries to cooperate with it, except for accusations against "evil America."

Real life theoretical socialism would be great for the world. But like you said people tend to ruin it with greed.

The fact is that there will not be enough resources for all people. It is impossible to make everyone go to Bentley. but you can do to go on Ford or Fiat. and here people for the sake of a miserable chance to get a Bentley refuse to evenly distribute the benefits. and now they can take anything else on credit, becoming a slave of bank owner.

Mario wrote:


There were recently articles about some people in their twenties who couldn't afford insulin (I think both were not eligible to be included in their parents healthcare plan anymore) and died in the USA. They died because of capitalism and its inherent incentives. In other developed countries healthcare services are heavily regulated because those don't work in an capitalistic open market. If you need insulin to live then it's literary priceless to you. And if somebody's allowed to abuse that situation you end up with people dying of easily preventable diseases because instead of focusing on cheap medicine the priority was profit and thus on new patentable/protectable variations of already existing and affordable compounds. Is there a limit of how much of your wealth you would be willing to spend if it meant you wouldn't die?

.

There are "motivational" articles saying "everyone has the opportunity (under capitalism) to earn money and become a patron, helping others and its motivate you to become successful/rich". but hey, when you give something for free to someone else who does not have it - this is communism

Mario wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Well wanting a better life is inherent to people. A better metric for how 'greedy' or 'capitalist' people are is how much is enough. When do they feel others should be looked after/provided for. After getting a decent house? A mansion? Never enough? Most people aren't dead set against some part of socialism, they have problems with socialism/communism if it seemingly can't provide better. Of course some people never want to share because they feel like in capitalism everybody should "be able to make it". And a lot of people are fine with socialist inspired policies as long as they themselves don't have to pay more/lessen their standards for it. People are on a sliding scale of 'capitalist', but wanting better is inherently human, from socialist to libertarian on the political spectrum.

True, the difference is in a communist system the failure to provide the comforts of everyday life are blamed on the system while in a system that's driven by capitalism we find ways to blame people for their misfortune instead. They are lazy, didn't work hard enough, are parasites, and so on.

If somebody can't find a job it's their fault and not the system that has huge incentives to reduce the workforce as much as possible and squeeze the ones who work for you while increasing automation and driving cost down as much as possible (because that's how you amass more capital). A growing percentage of millennials can't afford to move out of their parents home or start families but somebody will find a way to write a nonsensical article about how they are the ones destroying this or that industry (real estate, diamonds, restaurants,…) instead of blaming the comparatively ridiculously more powerful economic forces that are shaping the world around millennials (and the rest of us humans).

The poverty rate is blamed on the poor and not on the ones who actually have the money and power to change things. As if the poor who have no means to change their situation or a few people "abusing" social services a bit (to survive or live better lives) can have the same economic impact as a company weaselling its way into getting millions in subsidies and draining your tax €s/$s. The company is seen as smart for bending the system to its needs yet the poor as seen as abusing it.

There were recently articles about some people in their twenties who couldn't afford insulin (I think both were not eligible to be included in their parents healthcare plan anymore) and died in the USA. They died because of capitalism and its inherent incentives. In other developed countries healthcare services are heavily regulated because those don't work in an capitalistic open market. If you need insulin to live then it's literary priceless to you. And if somebody's allowed to abuse that situation you end up with people dying of easily preventable diseases because instead of focusing on cheap medicine the priority was profit and thus on new patentable/protectable variations of already existing and affordable compounds. Is there a limit of how much of your wealth you would be willing to spend if it meant you wouldn't die?

It's important to remember when people mention how many millions died under communist regimes that people die under the influence of capitalism too, also due to the system's failings. The difference is who gets the blame (system vs individual). Take the 2012 Dhaka fire (it was just the first google result): "At least 117 people were confirmed dead in the fire, and over 200 were injured" because we need cheap stuff no matter the cost but nobody adds up all those dead bodies and points at the systemic failures of capitalism. It was the workers' fault for not finding better and safer jobs or the factory owner's fault for being greedy, it was the US/European companies' (who import the product) fault because of their need for profit maximisation, and so on. It's everybody but the underlying system.

Agreed overall, good points. On the last part about deaths, its different parts of system failure. In capitalism it is frequently corrupt or weak governments that are held to economic ransom like Bangladesh. That argument doesn't really work for the kind of authoritarian communist states we have seen. Deaths in a capitalist system are failures of weaker government and also significant disinterest about how stuff is made for us in the West. That's the difference between the failures, one is more economic thriving off weak government and consumer apathy, the other is powerful delusional government. In capitalism it is a symptom of the underlying system on how power and money works, for communism it didn't have to be that way, but in real life those governments chose to do it that way.
Ironically the very thing that caused a lot of death in communist countries (i.e. strong government) is exactly what 'capitalist' countries need to combat the excesses of capitalism, by passing and enforcing things like labor laws. Of course even certain Western countries still suffer from 'weaker' governments who have decided it falls to the individual to take care of themselves and let the market control vital aspects with no supply-demand pressure like medicine. Sadly that in part seems to be the 'democratic' choice that people in poorer countries don't get.

 Freakazoitt wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

"Facist Europe"? You mean Nazi Germany and some of its European allies?

Germany, which wanted to fight. To avenge the defeat in the WW1. And the WW1 they also started. This is fascism. And hey - Spain is fascist, Italy is fascist, Germany is fascist, Vici France is pro-fascist and lesser countries were happy "good! with German's help we will make Our Little Great Countryname from Baltic to Black Sea!". Do you think only the personality of Hitler and the Nazi party are responsible for this? No, this is where the crowd corporately motivates that they can become some kind of "nobles" and that they are better than others just because they are of some nationality, which is characteristic not only of the nazis. See that Europeans are saying now: "I am proud being German nationality" under some Wehrmacht videos. Who are you to be proud of it? What did you personally do to be proud of? And what are you trying to be proud of? The fact that your country twice arranged a world war, committed war crimes and finally lost that wars? What is so good about it? Or quotes like "I'm nostalgic about the good old days when we had eggs." You did not have any eggs, you were brainwashed you have it to send you fight war and die. There was imperialism, which sent crowds of people to fight with each other for the benefit of the elites. And the fools were happy to die for the sake of the wealth of their masters, because they were motivated by these nationalistic values "I am proud to die for my king/emperor/fuhrer"

The way you said Fascist Europe sounded strange. Because plenty of Europe was occupied thanks in part to the Soviet deal with Nazi Germany to cover its flank and provide critical resources for the war. Lets not pretend the SU was very innocent in WW2 after having made a deal with Hitler to conquer Poland and acquiring the Baltics and go to war with Finland. Vichy France was an odd German ally as Free France also existed, but Vichy France never actually helped out Germany with troops on the Eastern Front like Italy, Hungary, Romania and others did.

The feeling better part is just what we call nationalism with or without racism mixed in, its horrible, but lets not pretend its just European. Even Russia went through that phase before the SU toned it down a bit. Also the comments under Wehrmacht videos are disgusting, but those people exist, but those comments are nothing compared to the German AFD party actually being ran by people who say they should be proud of the Wehrmacht again, which is an insane can of worms. Yet downplaying your own atrocities is not inherently European either, both further from the center right and left politics involve a good deal of whitewashing crimes. The PRC does it, the AfD wants to do it, communist hold outs in Russia do, just as some parties in the Netherlands think we should be proud of our past (which the represent through images of our colonial past which was plenty bloody).

Communism had plenty of fighting and dying for the elites too. The problem is that every country with an army will likely eventually end up in a war with the young dying for the elite. Communism had their own ideals to die for in war, instead of nationalism it was for example dying for the world revolution i.e. the war between the SU and Poland in the 1920's.

 Freakazoitt wrote:

China shows most people can accept an authoritarian state, as long as it keeps providing better.

politically, the difference is not large with the rest of the countries. Illusion of free elections. Candidates are pre-selected and approved by the establishment. And if there are incidents like Trump, then they can correct his decisions. We will see how many promises he will make. Well, or ours free election between Putin and Putin? Haha.

The difference could be large, it mainly depends on the extent and invasiveness of a police state. If leaving aside the police state you could say no elections, but in exchange you get long term planning and so on. China uses Trump as an example of why elections are bad (because he's making the US look stupid they say) and a stable long term government is better, of course it suits their narrative but it helps he kinda makes it for them. The problem as you point out is that authoritarian governments can also not care about improving the situation of its population. Overall people would prefer to live in democracies, as they tend to have more benefits both individually and for society on the whole.

 Freakazoitt wrote:

The West never 'respected' Russia or the Soviet Union in a geopolitical opponent sense.

But now they respect much less. The country has no principles, no ideology, no unifying idea, no slogan, it can not be of any interest to other countries to cooperate with it, except for accusations against "evil America."

Well that's not because of the collapse of the SU, at first there was great hope that ties between Russia-US-Europe would become better and that perhaps together they might become the new West (very optimistic). Yet the oligarchy that moved in kind of blocked and destroyed that idea. Russia is still interesting to cooperate with for many countries. Russia together with China counterbalance the West in the UN and often find common ground there. Plus Russia has a very pragmatic (some would say cynical) approach to international politics which makes it a usefull partner or independent third party to some countries. Yes it might not carry the same sort of weight the SU did, but its still pretty important.

 Freakazoitt wrote:

Real life theoretical socialism would be great for the world. But like you said people tend to ruin it with greed.

The fact is that there will not be enough resources for all people. It is impossible to make everyone go to Bentley. but you can do to go on Ford or Fiat. and here people for the sake of a miserable chance to get a Bentley refuse to evenly distribute the benefits. and now they can take anything else on credit, becoming a slave of bank owner.

Exactly, people have to settle for a good life instead of one of incredible luxury. Better and more responsible division of resources means we could all have a pretty good life. And having a ford and a decent house sounds pretty good to most of us, but not to those who already have more.

Tht the system has managed to trick people through things like the "American Dream" is pretty impressive. But even in Europe there are plenty of voters who don't want to pay a single cent more so that others can have it better, even if they already have a good life themselves. In the Netherlands for example the government is trying to reduce benefits for older people that are retired. The older people are dominating politics (because there are just more of them in general) and are fighting tooth and nail to stop it. Yet the cold hard truth is that those same old people are the wealthiest demographic group, with benefits that were paid for by their parents and will be paid for over the backs of my generation (their children). Everything for my generation is facing cuts and when we get old the government won't be able to afford the 'generosity' old people get now. Frankly its ridiculous, the economic outlook as Mario pointed out for our generation is getting worse, just because the wealthiest group can't settle for a little less for the benefit of their own children.

Socialism can be great, but one group can also domineer and exploit it like in the Dutch example. That isn't a failure of socialism though. The government could have seen this problem from a mile away with declining birth rates. They put short term political gain over the long term health of the system.