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 ulgurstasta wrote:

Spoiler:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 ulgurstasta wrote:



Also many people in this thread seem a bit dishonest in their arguments. If communism is responsible for famine deaths (even though famines stopped happening under it), why isn't capitalism responsible for the millions of people who have died under famines and lack of drinking water and continues to every year in capitalism?

Dishonest? Hardly, there is a difference in famines. A good one to compare the Soviet or Chinese famine to is the Bengal famine in 1943 iirc. They were all exacerbated by the governments at the time. Famines happen in every system because it tends to be unavoidable in countries that aren't wealthy enough to import. Communism in the case of the SU and the PRC is responsible because the SU kept exporting grain abroad while a significant portion of the population was starving. Not only that, farmers were accused of lying and sabotaging and any scrap of grain they had left was forcibly requisitioned. In the case of the PRC everyone involved in government was basically lying about crop yields and the actual effectiveness of agrarian policies. So again the government forcibly requisitioned food from starving regions because actual production being lower than recorded production equals lying farmers. The harsh truth is that while capitalism is often uncaring about famine, the SU and the PRC actually had a hand in creating and exacerbating their famines. The UK and the Bengal famine is one of those famines that you can actually hold up to the one in the SU (2-3 million deaths versus 3-5)and realize that imperialist countries also engaged in it, key difference being imperialist versus capitalist. But nothing comes close to the horrific Great Famine in pure numbers. Were not blaming communism for natural famines here, its dishonest to argue that.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
The harsh truth is that while capitalism is often uncaring about famine, the SU and the PRC actually had a hand in creating and exacerbating their famines.

Disregarding that capitalism definitely creates and exacerbates famines, if you dont care that people starve to death in your system, thats okay, but if you try to alleviate it and fail it's not okay?

Sigh, again there is a difference between famine in a communist and capitalist world, and deliberate famine in a communist country (or capitalist)... If capitalism gets blamed for not caring people starving to death than communism doesn't get a free pass either, what did the communist system do for China during the Great famine? I'm not criticizing communism as a system for causing famine, I'm criticizing communist governments (SU and PRC) for engineering them.

 ulgurstasta wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Communism in the case of the SU and the PRC is responsible because the SU kept exporting grain abroad while a significant portion of the population was starving

This happens all the time in capitalism too. No modern famine has been because lack of food it's because of the uneven access to food, which is due food being grown for profit rather then for use.

Again, you're taking about the whole system versus a single government. Its an important distinction, food aid is also a program driven by a capitalist system. Yes the capitalist world doesn't do enough to help prevent starvation, but its not deliberately engineering them either. I gave an example of an empire deliberately not shipping food to a starving population, the Bengal famine. Do you have any examples of capitalist countries that deliberately engineered a famine in their own country while exporting food?

 ulgurstasta wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
key difference being imperialist versus capitalist.

Imperialist isn't in contradiction to capitalism, quite the opposite actually.

This is the dishonesty I'm talking about, you are holding up these two system to two totally different standards. If people starve under capitalism it's just "nature" and doesn't count for capitalism death count, but if the same happens under "communism" then suddenly it's not nature and it's added to the communist death count

There is a significant difference in the academic world. Its why they have developed terms such as neo-colonialism.

Quit talking about dishonesty. I'm not forgiving crimes of any system, you are. People shouldn't starve period! But there is a difference between starvation in a system and a state, between deliberate and caused by outside factors and not solved by outside actors.

Summed up in one word Communism= Failure.

I always wanted to see St. Petersberg.

 Cothonian wrote:
Why communism isn't treated the same as fascism is a mystery to me. Russia and China have killed 20 times the amount of civilians that the nazis did, and enslaved Eastern Europe. (40 million Russian casualties, over 100 million in China.) Any other ideology would be torn apart if it resulted in such a catastrophe.

Its quite simple, communism/socialism at the core theory is entirely different from fascism. Many countries have adopted socialist or 'communist' aspects, while fascism has a toxic mix of nationalism and authoritarianism at its core that is less appealing. Now the communism of the second world is of course an obvious deviation that is really bad, worse than many fascist countries in practice, but then fascism isn't also wholeheartedly condemned either. It still exist and plenty of Western countries have and do support regimes with fascist tendencies. Now Nazism and communism as practiced in the second world isn't entirely comparable either, because it took so many forms. Was Cuba as bad as Nazism? Certainly not. Now Leninism was bad but perhaps not as bad, Stalinism and Maoism approach the level of death of Nazism, regardless of motivation. Yet 20 times is vastly overstating the amount of deaths. Even if we take 70 million (100 million for China is far to many) for the PRC and SU combined, this was over decades and a much larger population. Nazism in comparison existed for about a decade during which it and its allies dragged the world into a war in which 60 million people died. The three big -isms of the leaders of Nazi Germany, the SU and the PRC were terrible, but not all communist countries were as bad.

Yet after all the atrocities and death of the 20th century, socialism as a political concept has brought Western nations invaluable (to the population) policies, while Nazism has contributed absolutely nothing beyond senseless racial theories. That is why communism/socialism as a whole concept isn't treated the same, because it has an inherent appeal in its message of equality and providing for society that still resonates and has actually delivered good policies in Western countries (Scandinavia being the prime example). Yes there have been terrible consequences to real life communist states, but not many people still argue to go full on communist, they wouldn't be significantly more numerous than people who support more fascist regimes.

 Cothonian wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 Freakazoitt wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Its like a thread celebrating the birth of Nazism, except of course the slaughter is a magnitude greater.

No, Nazi is an ideology based on eliminating all the people, not belongs to some fiction "aryans". Communism is an ideology of people's equality.

Hey if that makes you sleep better at night. Just be sure to skip over the parts about the dictatorship thing to re-order society, and what the Bolsheviks actually did.

Like bringing electricity and education to the poor?

Aye, the Bolsheviks did many things that were bad. But you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, and they did far more good than they ever did bad. Nobody in history is completely good. Virtually every government has committed atrocities (you as American should know that better than most), but overall, despite the atrocities they committed, the Bolsheviks were a force for good. Their good acts outweigh their bad ones.

"Can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs"

40 million eggs, who died for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Why communism isn't treated the same as fascism is a mystery to me. Russia and China have killed 20 times the amount of civilians that the nazis did, and enslaved Eastern Europe. (40 million Russian casualties, over 100 million in China.) Any other ideology would be torn apart if it resulted in such a catastrophe.

40 million is a myth. The actual number is more like a few million. About 15-20 million if you also count civil war atrocities and famines for which the degree that communism or the Bolsheviks were actually responsible is debatable. And that includes Stalin's murderous policies, for which Bolshevik responsibility is also debatable. And even then. 20 million deaths to bring prosperity to hundreds of millions? Seems like a fair sacrifice to me. In the situation that Russia found itself in in 1917, many of these deaths were simply unavoidable. In hindsight it is easy to criticise the mistakes the Bolsheviks made that led to famines and Stalin's rise to power. But the Bolsheviks had good intentions, and achieved amazing successes. Like virtually all Russians, I therefore find it easy to forgive their mistakes.

I think I am done with this thread. There is only a few reasonable people in here interested in an actual discussion (like Disciple of Fate, thanks for the good arguments). It seems most of you just want to wallow in your own little Western echo chamber. Well, you can do that as much as you like, echoing anti-communist and fascist propaganda without care for truth or critical self-examination. "Communism is bad!" "60 million deaths!" "Stalin was worse than Hitler!". I do not care. Russia does not care. Russia won't forget the heroes who turned our country into the spacefaring superpower it is today. The heroes who gave us our great achievements in education, art, healthcare and science. To whom we thank almost everything we have achieved as a nation. Slava velikaya oktyabrskaya sotsialicheskaya revolutsii! Slava!

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs...it was only a few million who died...that’s not exactly presenting it in a very positive light if I’m honest.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs...it was only a few million who died...that’s not exactly presenting it in a very positive light if I’m honest.

Given the circumstances, given the stakes, given how capitalist countries have done worse at higher costs...

People seem to be confusing or conflating the Marxist principles of communism with the practical development of Soviet Union under international invasion by supporters of White Russian forces, followed by Stalinism.

Rosebuddy wrote:

 kronk wrote:
I am thinking Rosebuddy was joking and knows that Frazz is not a Nazi sympathizer...

I hope?

He doesn't need to have nazi sympathies to parrot, that is unwittingly repeat, their propaganda. It happens quite often that someone who has no personal interest in nazism repeats one of their talking points with regards to communism without knowing, because the West has spent many decades lying about communism. After all, communism is a bigger threat to the capitalist order than nazism is.

And this is the perfect example of the modern West making excuses for communism, ignoring documented history as "propaganda".



Democide claimed over 250 million people in the 20th Century. And communist regimes caused a respectable chunk of those deaths. Mao and Stalin were the biggest offenders, each with a body count that would've made Hitler green with envy.


Communism, in practice, was never about bettering people's lives. It was about the power over people's lives. Remember, the Germany under the Nazis also experienced major recovery after the dark days of the Great Depression and crushing Versailles Treaty. Does that excuse their crimes? If not, then the communist regimes throughout history cannot be excused.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
People seem to be confusing or conflating the Marxist principles of communism with the practical development of Soviet Union under international invasion by supporters of White Russian forces, followed by Stalinism.

Lenin was a bloody handed thug, and his top people were just hatchetmen. That's another historical inaccuracy propagated in the West, that Lenin and his revolution were heroes of the people and benign, and that mean ol' Stalin moved in and "twisted" it into something evil. Which is complete BS.



As for Marx, he was an interesting philosopher. But as a political commentator, he sucked. And his understanding of economics and Human nature was barely above stick figures. His is an ideology that should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

To this day, I don't understand why adherents to communism isn't as reviled as nazism.

To anyone still holding the view that intentions matter:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C.S. Lewis

OgreOnAStick wrote:
To anyone still holding the view that intentions matter:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C.S. Lewis

"Dude, there's like a whole magic world with a talking lion and everything at the back of my closet, totally"

- Also CS Lewis

OgreOnAStick wrote:
To anyone still holding the view that intentions matter:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C.S. Lewis

Or this oldie:

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism—by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

“Foreign Policy Drains U.S. of Main Weapon,”
The Los Angeles times, Sept. 9, 1962, G2

 Kilkrazy wrote:
People seem to be confusing or conflating the Marxist principles of communism with the practical development of Soviet Union under international invasion by supporters of White Russian forces, followed by Stalinism.

Again, which communist state existed without a repressive dictatorship?

 Frazzled wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
People seem to be confusing or conflating the Marxist principles of communism with the practical development of Soviet Union under international invasion by supporters of White Russian forces, followed by Stalinism.

Again, which communist state existed without a repressive dictatorship?

A few African communist countries did ok-ish without going overboard with repression, but they really weren't equipped to survive economically.

 ulgurstasta wrote:

Spoiler:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 ulgurstasta wrote:



Also many people in this thread seem a bit dishonest in their arguments. If communism is responsible for famine deaths (even though famines stopped happening under it), why isn't capitalism responsible for the millions of people who have died under famines and lack of drinking water and continues to every year in capitalism?

Dishonest? Hardly, there is a difference in famines. A good one to compare the Soviet or Chinese famine to is the Bengal famine in 1943 iirc. They were all exacerbated by the governments at the time. Famines happen in every system because it tends to be unavoidable in countries that aren't wealthy enough to import. Communism in the case of the SU and the PRC is responsible because the SU kept exporting grain abroad while a significant portion of the population was starving. Not only that, farmers were accused of lying and sabotaging and any scrap of grain they had left was forcibly requisitioned. In the case of the PRC everyone involved in government was basically lying about crop yields and the actual effectiveness of agrarian policies. So again the government forcibly requisitioned food from starving regions because actual production being lower than recorded production equals lying farmers. The harsh truth is that while capitalism is often uncaring about famine, the SU and the PRC actually had a hand in creating and exacerbating their famines. The UK and the Bengal famine is one of those famines that you can actually hold up to the one in the SU (2-3 million deaths versus 3-5)and realize that imperialist countries also engaged in it, key difference being imperialist versus capitalist. But nothing comes close to the horrific Great Famine in pure numbers. Were not blaming communism for natural famines here, its dishonest to argue that.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
The harsh truth is that while capitalism is often uncaring about famine, the SU and the PRC actually had a hand in creating and exacerbating their famines.

Disregarding that capitalism definitely creates and exacerbates famines, if you dont care that people starve to death in your system, thats okay, but if you try to alleviate it and fail it's not okay?

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Communism in the case of the SU and the PRC is responsible because the SU kept exporting grain abroad while a significant portion of the population was starving

This happens all the time in capitalism too. No modern famine has been because lack of food it's because of the uneven access to food, which is due food being grown for profit rather then for use.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
key difference being imperialist versus capitalist.

Imperialist isn't in contradiction to capitalism, quite the opposite actually.

This is the dishonesty I'm talking about, you are holding up these two system to two totally different standards. If people starve under capitalism it's just "nature" and doesn't count for capitalism death count, but if the same happens under "communism" then suddenly it's not nature and it's added to the communist death count

Capitalism isn't a political ideology that deliberately runs on murder and genocide. It's an economic system that is chained to a free market that can be fickle in the best of times, and one that has a tendency to attract people whose view is too narrowly focused on "the bottom line"

Private enterprise does not make a habit of planning out genocide, famines, and mass murder on an epic scale. Communist regimes, on the other hand, have done so.

Your comparison of a profit driven economic system with a totalitarian and murderous ideology is dishonest at best, plain ignorant at worst.

 whembly wrote:

Or this oldie:

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism—by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

“Foreign Policy Drains U.S. of Main Weapon,”
The Los Angeles times, Sept. 9, 1962, G2

This quote just sums up the completely simplistic and pointless argument that socialism is evil. Plenty of countries are social democracies without them ending up as hellholes. In a decent world there should always be an element of socialism mixed in, its unavoidable in running states. Sign of the times I guess.

 whembly wrote:
To this day, I don't understand why adherents to communism isn't as reviled as nazism.

Post-war revisionism and the fact that Marx (and communism) was the "hip thing" among academics, the bohemian wealthy, and people who didn't know any better, in the West.


Even today, knowing what we know, people continue to admire Che and other communist historical personages, and LARP as commies in groups such as Antifa. And communism is (for good or ill) considered to be "less evil" than Hitler and the NSDAP, with people making excuses for the crimes committed under the legacy of Karl Marx BS social and economic theories (i.e. "Real communism has never been tried" or "Lenin's revolution was twisted by Stalin")

Indeed.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

Capitalism isn't a political ideology that deliberately runs on murder and genocide. It's an economic system that is chained to a free market that can be fickle in the best of times, and one that has a tendency to attract people whose view is too narrowly focused on "the bottom line"

Private enterprise does not make a habit of planning out genocide, famines, and mass murder on an epic scale. Communist regimes, on the other hand, have done so.

Your comparison of a profit driven economic system with a totalitarian and murderous ideology is dishonest at best, plain ignorant at worst.

Belgian Congo. Colonialism. The Holocaust was carried out in buildings and with machinery built by private enterprise. IBM says "hello".

A profit-driven economic system is in and of itself a terror. Not just because it can only be established and perpetuated by force, but because its fundamental operation is violence in the form of depriving people of stability unless they agree to work as profit creation units.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

 whembly wrote:
To this day, I don't understand why adherents to communism isn't as reviled as nazism.

Post-war revisionism and the fact that Marx (and communism) was the "hip thing" among academics, the bohemian wealthy, and people who didn't know any better, in the West.


Even today, knowing what we know, people continue to admire Che and other communist historical personages, and LARP as commies in groups such as Antifa. And communism is (for good or ill) considered to be "less evil" than Hitler and the NSDAP, with people making excuses for the crimes committed under the legacy of Karl Marx BS social and economic theories (i.e. "Real communism has never been tried" or "Lenin's revolution was twisted by Stalin")

Communism isn't as reviled as nazism because the poor and downtrodden of the world understand the difference between the systems. They understand the difference between wanting to free humanity from the shackles of capitalism and wanting to enslave and exterminate the so-called lesser races. People view communism more favourably because it speaks to them.

To attribute it to "post-war revisionism" and uphold capitalism is hilarious because Western capitalists immediately set to work on rehabilitating nazis so they could use them as agents against communism.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
People seem to be confusing or conflating the Marxist principles of communism with the practical development of Soviet Union under international invasion by supporters of White Russian forces, followed by Stalinism.

This. FFS, Lysenkoism and communism are not the same thing.

PS: communism, or something very similar to it, is likely inevitable. Enjoy the last days of capitalism while you can.

If nothing else, and whether one agrees with the ideas espoused with Lenin or not, he got us all to see things a bit differently. And I never see that as a bad thing. He was a pioneer of thought, and just like Freud or Newton, one can disregard his views later, but one can't disregard that he changed views. And for that, I say, huzzah!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
People seem to be confusing or conflating the Marxist principles of communism with the practical development of Soviet Union under international invasion by supporters of White Russian forces, followed by Stalinism.

This. FFS, Lysenkoism and communism are not the same thing.

PS: communism, or something very similar to it, is likely inevitable. Enjoy the last days of capitalism while you can.

It's either going to be a Star Trek utopia or a blade runner dystopia? Those are are only options? I thought us liberals only saw things in grey scale. It's going to be a slow and bloody process. But maybe someday? If we are still around.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

This quote just sums up the completely simplistic and pointless argument that socialism is evil. Plenty of countries are social democracies without them ending up as hellholes. In a decent world there should always be an element of socialism mixed in, its unavoidable in running states. Sign of the times I guess.

Social democracies aren't actually socialist. They're capitalistic systems that have cherrypicked the good and realistic parts of socialism and discarded the rest, which manifest in heavy investment in social programs.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
People seem to be confusing or conflating the Marxist principles of communism with the practical development of Soviet Union under international invasion by supporters of White Russian forces, followed by Stalinism.

This. FFS, Lysenkoism and communism are not the same thing.

PS: communism, or something very similar to it, is likely inevitable. Enjoy the last days of capitalism while you can.

Funnily enough, the only viable version of socialism is borne out of capitalism by advancing so far in technology that human labour of any kind is redundant.

OgreOnAStick wrote:
Funnily enough, the only viable version of socialism is borne out of capitalism by advancing so far in technology that human labour of any kind is redundant.

Which is kind of the principle of Marxism.

 Peregrine wrote:

OgreOnAStick wrote:
Funnily enough, the only viable version of socialism is borne out of capitalism by advancing so far in technology that human labour of any kind is redundant.

Which is kind of the principle of Marxism.

So the ideology that was borne out of and exists to advocate for the benefit of the worker and to setup the worker as the ruling class advocates for the abolition of the workers?

Rosebuddy wrote:

Communism isn't as reviled as nazism because the poor and downtrodden of the world understand the difference between the systems.

I blame the education system because in many, many ways... Communism is just as abhorrent as Nazism.

They understand the difference between wanting to free humanity from the shackles of capitalism and wanting to enslave and exterminate the so-called lesser races.

"Shackle of capitalism"... wut?

People view communism more favourably because it speaks to them.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need???

To attribute it to "post-war revisionism" and uphold capitalism is hilarious because Western capitalists immediately set to work on rehabilitating nazis so they could use them as agents against communism.

What the holy hell is this? Is this a european thing?

 Gordon Shumway wrote:

It's either going to be a Star Trek utopia or a blade runner dystopia? Those are are only options? I thought us liberals only saw things in grey scale. It's going to be a slow and bloody process. But maybe someday? If we are still around.

Fun fact, the Federation is actually a fascist government.

https://youtu.be/P4KBPaS-1PU

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Did you ever actually read a history book? The Bolsheviks massively improved the living standards of the average person. Like really really massively.

You've missed the point completely. The Bolshevik revolutionaries weren't idealists who happened to also be utterly ruthless. They were from the start motivated primarily by an absolute will to power, to which everything else was secondary. Once they reached office then sure alongside the ruthless persecution of their enemies they also expanded material wealth, but if you look at the nature of that increase it you see a focus on industrial production, cement, steel etc. Things that make a nation powerful that happen to improve living standards as well. What you don't see is any focus consumer goods, because the Bolsheviks didn't care about that. They wanted to control Russia, and once they did that they wanted to control a powerful Russia.

All of which were stable and wealthy democracies, not feudal states that were ruled by a despotic autocrat.

They wren't stable and wealthy democracies when they started. They became stable and wealthy by delivering material improvements to people's lives while at the same time not murdering lots of them.

That's kind of the point of all this.

Thanks for once again just pulling numbers out of your ass.

You'll note I later gave the source of my numbers, and when I was told that later revisions are lower I accepted the correction.

Even taking the new figures, you're still describing 10 million deaths as 'many things that are bad'. Which is some amazing bs.

(before it then got forced through under Stalin, but at that point you can't blame the Bolsheviks anymore because Stalin killed almost all of them).

Yeah, it'd be crazy to blame the Bolsheviks for the actions of a Bolshevik.

Russians don't need an American to tell them what is to be celebrated or not.

That's true. As grown adults you should be capable of knowing for yourself that you shouldn't celebrate tyrants coming to power, without anyone else having to explain that to you.

The big difference is that the crimes of Lenin and Trotsky were committed as part of the civil war. Wars, especially civil wars aren't clean. Sometimes things must be done to win the war. Stalin is different because he had no such excuse. He killed people in peacetime, and not just political and ideological opponents either.

Oh well I guess political death squads were okay then.

Will you be celebrating Thanksgiving in a few weeks?

I'm Australian, so no. And yeah, Thanksgiving it pretty messed up. The excuse Americans will use, and it's okay for the most part, is that Thanksgiving is almost entirely divorced from its origin. It's a day that is now about family, turkey and football, with only a passing reference to its origin.

A better example would be Australia Day, which is on the day settlers first arrived, and is still explicitly tied to what we then did to the indigenous people.

And India is still far from being a developed modern country. A significant portion of its people still live in slums and have to scavenge their food from garbage dumps. It also was a part of Great Britain, so not really useful for comparisons.

India wasn't part of Great Britain, it was part of the Commonwealth. The difference is huge.

Also, if high poverty means a country isn't developed, well India's poverty rate is 22%, while Russia's is 13%. There are significant differences in calculation, but India's rate is dropping, Russia's is on a decade long increase.

what few Russians there are are celebrating and defending the Soviet Union

What Russians other than you are defending the USSR?

Rosebuddy wrote:

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

Capitalism isn't a political ideology that deliberately runs on murder and genocide. It's an economic system that is chained to a free market that can be fickle in the best of times, and one that has a tendency to attract people whose view is too narrowly focused on "the bottom line"

Private enterprise does not make a habit of planning out genocide, famines, and mass murder on an epic scale. Communist regimes, on the other hand, have done so.

Your comparison of a profit driven economic system with a totalitarian and murderous ideology is dishonest at best, plain ignorant at worst.

Belgian Congo. Colonialism. The Holocaust was carried out in buildings and with machinery built by private enterprise. IBM says "hello".

A profit-driven economic system is in and of itself a terror. Not just because it can only be established and perpetuated by force, but because its fundamental operation is violence in the form of depriving people of stability unless they agree to work as profit creation units.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

 whembly wrote:
To this day, I don't understand why adherents to communism isn't as reviled as nazism.

Post-war revisionism and the fact that Marx (and communism) was the "hip thing" among academics, the bohemian wealthy, and people who didn't know any better, in the West.


Even today, knowing what we know, people continue to admire Che and other communist historical personages, and LARP as commies in groups such as Antifa. And communism is (for good or ill) considered to be "less evil" than Hitler and the NSDAP, with people making excuses for the crimes committed under the legacy of Karl Marx BS social and economic theories (i.e. "Real communism has never been tried" or "Lenin's revolution was twisted by Stalin")

Communism isn't as reviled as nazism because the poor and downtrodden of the world understand the difference between the systems. They understand the difference between wanting to free humanity from the shackles of capitalism and wanting to enslave and exterminate the so-called lesser races. People view communism more favourably because it speaks to them.

To attribute it to "post-war revisionism" and uphold capitalism is hilarious because Western capitalists immediately set to work on rehabilitating nazis so they could use them as agents against communism.

No, the actions of Leopold II were a prime example of corrupt government and/or head of state with little to no accountability. If anything, it's a good case against statist regimes, including communist ones.

Colonialism didn't necessarily involve deliberate genocide. In fact, many modern countries that were European colonies have benefited from the seeds planted during the colonial era.

In the Third Reich, private enterprise existed on paper only. The captains of industry were beholden to the whims of the National Socialist state, and kept on a tight lease via Albert Speer. That's not capitalism or free enterprise. If anything, Germany during that time was a corporatist state, just minus the economic sector participating in making national policy.

If you are referring to IBM's German subsidiary Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen, they were in the same boat as other German companies. And the firm was seized by the state after Hitler's declaration of war against the United States. I don't buy into the weak case presented by Edwin Black that IBM was an ethusiastic supporter of Nazi Germany before Pearl Harbor, and funneled wealth through Swiss banks back to the States. That smacks of tinfoil conspiracy theories. And if IBM America did get a cut from any profits made by Dehomag, then so what? The United States wasn't in a state of war with the Reich prior to December 1941.

There were other U.S. companies that operated in the Third Reich and U.S.S.R. before their assets were seized. I guess that makes those companies ethusiastic supporters of national socialist and communism, huh?

As for the last part, that's a load of nonsense. Capitalism and free market economics are based of the principles of "make it or break it on your own", or voluntary participation. And cut the nonsense about workers being virtual slaves of the system working out of fear. People get jobs and work for the other guy to make a living, and get a paycheck. But there are options. You can A: Start your own business or B: Become a leech living off of the taxpayers.


The poor and downtrodden buy into Marxist nonsense because the ones selling it are snake oil salesmen preying on people's fears of the future or ignorance. While the lower classes are the "foot soldiers" of the revolution, it's the self-styled "intellectuals" that run the show. In the end, the poor get suckered into continual repression, and the intellectuals run the country slowly into the ground.

It doesn't matter what encompasses an ideology, Nazi or communist. What matters is that both are tyrannical philosophies that leads to mass death and oppression of the masses. They are no different.

And finally, it wasn't the "capitalists" that made use of former nazis. It was the governments of the allied powers, including the U.S.S.R. Mostly those in the technical and scientific fields. although there were some in the military and politics that were instrumental in forming the post-war West German Federal Republic and German Armed Forces. Private enterprise had very little to do with it.

No offense, but most of what you are posting is just the usual commie BS that you see edgelords, bohemian wannabes, and college kids spouting off every other generation or so.

 ulgurstasta wrote:
Well not that odd considering most people still base their view of the USSR on cold war propaganda, as we have seen displayed in this very thread. Dont get me wrong, the USSR was a failure, but it was not Mordor.

Post Stalin the Soviet Union was more or less like most other authoritarian states. Before then, from Lenin to Stalin it was about as close to Mordor as the real world is going to get. I mean what was worse? Cambodia was, Nazi Germany was, Maoist China for a few years, anything else?

Also many people in this thread seem a bit dishonest in their arguments. If communism is responsible for famine deaths (even though famines stopped happening under it), why isn't capitalism responsible for the millions of people who have died under famines and lack of drinking water and continues to every year in capitalism?

This has come up a bunch of times on dakka. And yeah, there have been some really awful things done by other countries. For instance Britain directly caused the Indian famine, and then did as little as possible to minimise its impact. 10m people died as a result of that.

But that is a reason to condemn colonialism. It is not a reason to absolve the USSR of the appalling things it did.

And yes, modern capitalist societies also have failings. But scale matters here, societies with small problems that kill a very small number of people are not the same as countries with very large problems that kill millions.


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 Kilkrazy wrote:
People seem to be confusing or conflating the Marxist principles of communism with the practical development of Soviet Union under international invasion by supporters of White Russian forces, followed by Stalinism.

I think distancing communism from Stalinism is false. There'd be something to the argument if communism had been attempted in some places and didn't produce authoritarian rule, but that hasn't happened. Sure, not every instance has been as murderous as Stalin's, but a few have, and not one communist regime has been anything near decent.

There is, ultimately, something at the core of communism that is about control first and foremost, and that control is enforced with whatever means necessary. People will happily point out that there is exploitation at the core of capitalism, this is widely accepted and barely argued against. But the thing is that over time many countries have found ways of mitigating the exploitation of capitalism.

And yet people deny that the core of communism isn't that desire to control. Perhaps because of that there's never been an instance where that desire has been mitigated or reduced in any way.


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 oldravenman3025 wrote:
Communism, in practice, was never about bettering people's lives. It was about the power over people's lives. Remember, the Germany under the Nazis also experienced major recovery after the dark days of the Great Depression and crushing Versailles Treaty. Does that excuse their crimes? If not, then the communist regimes throughout history cannot be excused.

I agree with a lot of your post, but this is part is fairly misleading. Hitler came to power at a time when a lot of initiatives of the Weimar Republic were beginning to bear fruit. All Hitler did was redirect some of the economic aims towards military ones, and reduce the overall rate of recovery.

As for Marx, he was an interesting philosopher. But as a political commentator, he sucked. And his understanding of economics and Human nature was barely above stick figures. His is an ideology that should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

This is also not quite true. Marx insight that economics was not a series of static, abstract rules, but was in fact a process in which the rules of one economic system produced changes that drove to its replacement by a new economic system was profound.

He was wrong about what the next step would be, but oh well, everyone else has been wrong about that stuff too. Keynes was wrong. Hayek was at least as wrong as Marx. Freidman turned out to be not just wrong about what came next, but it turned out he was wrong about most of the present as well. They're all still greats.


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 whembly wrote:
To this day, I don't understand why adherents to communism isn't as reviled as nazism.

We could ask the same question of colonialism. That also had an obscene death toll but you never see it mentioned in threads like this.

Part of the issue is that communism's victims are people in countries we really don't give a gak about, while Nazi Germany killed people in countries we do care about. I mean lets be honest here, 1,000 people die in an earthquake in Europe, or 1,000 people die in an earthquake in China - which one gets nightly news coverage for a week, and which one gets maybe one brief description one time?

But there is also a second reason - because while communism at its core is really awful, it still isn't as awful as Nazism. My post above I talk about how the real core of communism is control, and that's a horrible thing. But the core of Nazism is the pure worship of power through the subjugation and victimization of other people purely for the sake of subjugating and victimizing. That is worse.


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 oldravenman3025 wrote:
Colonialism didn't necessarily involve deliberate genocide. In fact, many modern countries that were European colonies have benefited from the seeds planted during the colonial era.

Dismissing the genocide of colonialism as something that didn't happen in every instance, and saying some good did come out of it... is functionally the exact same defense that Iron Captain attempted for communism.

And if IBM America did get a cut from any profits made by Dehomag, then so what? The United States wasn't in a state of war with the Reich prior to December 1941.

Most people would consider it bad for a company to provide services that help a fascist state oppress and murder its people, even when their own country isn't at war with the fascist state.