SalvatoreQuattro

June 10th, 2023 at 4:30 PM ^

Communism/socialism is responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Hostility to communism/socialism is right and proper. May not in terms of justifying bad foreign policy, but it is definitely warranted.

Stalin and Mao killed far more people than all of the Latin American despots combined. 

Link? It’s in history books.

 

 

 

MgoBlaze

June 10th, 2023 at 5:01 PM ^

Oh! Well. We all know that history books are an infallible source of information, especially the ones in the 1950's when you were growing up. They definitely weren't full of anticommunist propaganda that you lapped up uncritically and have been regurgitating or anything.

Dude, you just said that capitalism has also killed millions of people. You can't pretend that communism is inherently more violent or imperialistic than the ideology that ran the slave trade or the spice trade before that. Especially if you're just going to argue from a place of emotion, hate in your case, instead of logic.

I think your irrational hatred of communists is coming through again.

SalvatoreQuattro

June 10th, 2023 at 7:40 PM ^

You have a greater love of Communism than you do of humans. You defend it to the point of absurdity.

Point of fact mass murder and oppression are found all throughout recorded history(and  beyond) which tells us that arguing about systems is really kind of pointless. Until human behavior changes people will continue to do terrible things to each other because reasons.

MgoBlaze

June 10th, 2023 at 8:35 PM ^

You're projecting again.

Literally three hours ago I described communism as being inherently idelogically flawed. I don't "love" communism. I acknowledge socialism as part of every single successful society on earth, just like capitalism.

You just hate communism and communists too much to think about this objectively.

MgoBlaze

June 10th, 2023 at 8:56 PM ^

Good and evil are imaginary ideas made up to keep people without critical thinking skills subservient. They don't exist any more than the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.

It's cute that you think anyone else's "evil" is any different than your seething hatred of communism. You hate communists so much you're not even listening to what people are saying to you. I have no doubt that you'd be fine killing a bunch of people, maybe torturing them in the process, if you were told they were communists by an authority figure. I bet you drink Coca-cola just so that you can fantasize about the labor organizers that they killed while drinking it.

Please, tell me what's so evil about a community pooling their resources together to take care of their less fortunate? What's evil about everyone being able to afford healthcare? What's evil about giving children a real education? What's evil about making sure people aren't hoarding resources like food and shelter while others are starving and homeless? What's evil about breaking up corporate monopolies that are exploiting the working class?

Gosh, I certainly am an evil person for wanting to make sure that everyone on earth is housed, fed, clothed, educated, has a job in which they contribute meaningfully to society, and has access to healthcare that won't bankrupt them.

Definitely on the same level as the genocides that you don't care about because they were done in the name of capitalism. Definitely. Spectacular argument. Very logically sound.

Killing tens of thousands of people to install a puppet government is exactly the same as wanting to make sure that all people in society have access to the necessities of survival! You're very smart and a paragon of morality.

JacquesStrappe

June 11th, 2023 at 1:27 AM ^

TL;DR

Violence is by definition woven into the fabric of totalitarian ideologies like Nazism/Commumism and is an explicit tool to achieve the aims of the movement to eliminate enemies whether "racial" or "class" enemies.

Capitalism also engenders violence but is a byproduct and not and end in itself. 

Stop excusing the crimes of leftist totalitarian regimes simply because the aims they profess outwardly appear noble when they are in fact every bit as intentionally immoral and horrendous as right wing totalitarian regimes.

The Full Version
 

I’ll explain the difference. Various forms of totalitarianism, whether of the left or right, almost  invariably used violence as a direct end to eliminate "undesirables/resistance" as part of the in-built envy/hatred/revenge driven programs of their collectivist mass mobilization schemes.  Whether you are discussing Nazism or Stalinist/Maoist Communism, you will find that the semantics driving the justification for brutality are different but in substance equate to the same thing. Nazism espoused perpetual war as a social Darwinism ideal to purify and improve the the race. Mao promoted continuous revolution to ensure that counter-revolutionaries and class enemies would never be able to stop the "progress" of the revolution toward true communism. The language is different but the obvious enthusiasm for brutality against enemies of the regime is the same. The main differences are that right-wing fanatics do their damage quickly, make no attempt to conceal their crimes out of a contempt for existing moral norms, and tend to implode quickly. Left wing fanaticism tends to persist for a longer time and with more legitimacy because their propagandized message of "progress" conceals the rotten core and is amplified by useful idiots, fellow travelers, and duplicitous accomplices. This is why today we continue to have defenders of totalitarian far left agendas from respectable elements of society while virtually no one with a hint of sense would endorse totalitarian far right ideology. They are both horrendous but the left wing nuts are much better at marketing. Look no further than Putin‘s invocation of Soviet-era talking points about how the Ukraine invasion is about battling Nazis and the colonial West

I am not really talking about Chavez and Trump here because they are more of the authoritarian variety.  They are merely strongmen not interested in completely transforming society but simply getting it to bend to their will.
 

Capitalistic societies by contrast are really liberal societies with a focus on economic growth. Violence and the complete upheaval of society is not their direct aim, though it often ends up that way as a byproduct especially when the countries in question are the hegemons of their time and are trying to preserve that preeminence. But if you look at smaller liberal capitalist representative democracies like Switzerland you won’t find violence in the fabric of their DNA. The same cannot be said of any states that embrace some form of National Socialism, Communism, or theocracy.

Ernis

June 12th, 2023 at 2:19 PM ^

"Capitalistic societies by contrast are really liberal societies with a focus on economic growth. Violence and the complete upheaval of society is not their direct aim, though it often ends up that way as a byproduct especially when the countries in question are the hegemons of their time and are trying to preserve that preeminence."

I think you're overlooking a couple things here, first that capitalist societies reorganize morality to give absolute primacy to profit/capital. That's significant in and of itself. Also, you are discounting the violence and coercion necessary to establish these societies in the first place. In Europe, you had the era of Enclosure where common lands were violently seized to force people into the system. This same approach was exported in the form of colonialism, where land, resources, and people were violently seized and through existential threats or forced deprivation made to participate in the system of converting all public/common assets (and ultimately every aspect of our daily and personal lives) into privately monetized commodities. Switzerland may not have a history of violence within its borders, but its banks financed brutal plantation, slave trading, and industrial entities all over the world, and share in responsibility for the resultant suffering, which, when you consider the burden of misery created through colonialism, chattel slavery, and manifold harms inflicted upon the indigenous populations of the Americas, Europe, and elsewhere, is mighty mighty.

To be fair, capitalism has shown itself to be the best driver of growth since the advent of agriculture, and can at least claim a major positive impact on improving global standards of living overall (setting aside survivorship bias). However, it's naive to discount the fact that capitalist societies genocided an entire continent, among other things; although, clearly, assuming you're one of the "in group" --one of the people who weren't excluded from participating in the system due to racial, ethnic, or other factors-- it's easy to say it's done a lot of good or almost entirely good on the whole. But what we're seeing now is that the "out groups" are disappearing -- no longer do our captains of industry enjoy such low-hanging fruit of stealing from people derided as "savages" within its ever-expanding borders, and vast swaths of undeveloped land to encroach upon -- and the result is the system, to maintain accelerating growth rates, has turned to cannibalize itself (as we see in the US, wages, standard of living, and even life expectancy are dropping to fuel the all-important increases in equity gains, despite the fact that workers are more productive and work longer hours per capita now than they did during the postwar period of unprecedented growth). Time will tell how much this system can actually create growth versus maximizing efficiency of inequitable value extraction, since historically these two phenomena have occurred codependently.

On the whole, I think Quattro was right to note that comparison of systems themselves is not terribly productive (despite the fact that he contradicted himself on that point more than once), since these deleterious outcomes are driven more by raw power dynamics than they are unique to any particular system. But it is also counterproductive to jingoistically launder a system. Simply said, we can see capitalism has done a lot of wrong, but arguably far more good; taking that as a given, the question remains: when the material conditions that created the era of unprecedented growth since the industrial revolution by way of resource extraction and state-sanctioned piracy give way to greater levels of objective scarcity in the face of finite resource availability, will this system of "growth uber alles" continue to provide net material gains for the population as it historically has? Or will market forces increasingly promote fraudulent transactions (that is, depending on exploiting asymmetries for profit instead of creating tangible value) to create the appearance of growth in a purely abstract financial sense while failing to improve the objective conditions of the people serving them? If we can't honestly answer these questions, opting to credulously believe that one system or another is going to save us, then we are simply opening the door for the worst abuses to be perpetrated, regardless of the prevailing economic system's moniker.

pdgoblue25

June 11th, 2023 at 9:35 AM ^

"irrational hatred of communists" 

Holy fucking shit people like you exist.  You apparently have never heard of Pitesti prison, or what happened to the Kulaks, or the endless examples of mass torture and murder at the hands of communism.  There is no such thing as an irrational hatred of communists because they are sub human filth.  It's nothing but a religion.  It's a religious cult of domination and destruction.

But no, you're right, it's just never been done correctly, it will work this time. 

MgoBlaze

June 11th, 2023 at 1:21 PM ^

Rational adults can disagree with a philosophy without attacking the people that believe in it. You should try it sometime if your heart isn't too full of hate for people that disagree with you. Can't you people be less divisive?

Also, no. Literally nobody is advocating for communism here. Learn to read.

JacquesStrappe

June 11th, 2023 at 1:15 PM ^

No, they are social democracies.  There is a difference.  And every modern welfare state in the world is some form of mixed economy with elements of social democracy.  It's why we have a tax-payer funded and gov't run pension plan (social security), health insurance for the elderly and poor (Medicare & Medicaid), and unemployment insurance to name but a few programs supported by a welfare state.  That's not the same thing as democratic socialism.  Virtually every socialist dictatorship (East Germany's official name was the German Democratic Republic and North Korea's official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) claims to be democratic because their definition of democratic is different than what someone who is a citizen of constitutional representative democracy would consider democratic and has nothing to do with voting.  Again, as I mentioned in my previous post, left wing totalitarian dictatorships go a long way toward justifying their bona fide 'democratic' credentials to obscure the reality of their workings in a way that right wing totalitarian dictatorships make no pretense about.  It is part of the revolutionary subversive nature of such movements.

Further you can socialist with a small 's' to denote any kind of collectivised society that disregards individual welfare to some measure or another in preference to an abstracted notion of 'society', 'the people', 'the volk', etc.  In the generic sense it is neither left wing nor right wing.  It is only when you add qualifiers that you know if the character of the system is left or right wing e.g. Fabian Socialism, Marxist-Leninist Socialism, Mussolini's syndicalism, etc.

mgoja

June 10th, 2023 at 4:36 PM ^

BTW can someone clarify for me what the "no politics" rule is for this site? I think refers primarily (or exclusively?) to posts about elected officials and people seeking elected office, but maybe I'm missing something.

I'm here mostly for the football, but I have no issues with illuminating posts about things that have happened, might happen, or should happen in the world around us.

MGlobules

June 10th, 2023 at 6:35 PM ^

This is dumb. Far right sources, like the AEI, suggest ca. 11. And people want to forget that it was a Mafia dictator that his popular nationalist revolution overthrew. Estimates--by conventional historians--circle around 20,000 people that Batista killed. The U.S. preferred Batista, however, because we had greater control over Cuba with a dictator in charge. Castro didn't even think of himself as a socialist at the time, but as a nationalist, like a lot of other people who sought independence for their colonized countries (some now seen as heroes, some as villains, often according to the very contradictory whims of a highly self-interested state department). Of course the people who worked for the dictator, who oversaw the near-slave labor on plantations, etc. opposed being overthrown; and--yes--Castro won a war. People like to forget how a whole country rejoiced, or the fact that the people who left were. . . pals, often corrupt, of a Mafia dictator. "It's in history books. . ." Yuh. You don't serve yourself or your arguments when you resort to bullshit. 

I've been to Cuba and have no brief for the Castros--they failed to turn the revolution over to the people. I drove around for two weeks, picked up people all over, talked (yes, I speak Spanish) to critics, admirers--met no one who wanted to overthrow the government, to give up their health care, etc. Also met no one who didn't want to end a blockade that has killed far more than 11,000, and--yes--to re-enter the world. But you're--routinely--so exaggerated in your little commentaries here that you have no credibility whatever. (Getting so jazzed to write these diatribes on a football blog?)

You want to build a catalog of mass murders of the 20th c.? It's going to need to include a lot of killing on all sides of the equation. And blaming Stalin on Marx or his -ism is like blaming Hitler on Milton Friedman; little more complicated than that. I'd suggest cold showers. 

 

SalvatoreQuattro

June 10th, 2023 at 7:35 PM ^

You questioning anyone’s credibility is like Stalin questioning someone’s humanity.🙄

Castro defeated bad people. He himself was a bad person. Such is true of the American,French and Russian Revolutions also. Che was undeniably a socialist. He was in fact a murderer.

You dismiss accusers of Castro as being “far right” because your ideological affinity for socialism overrides whatever  moral and intellectual foundation you may have. You provide for us an excellent example of how belief distorts the morality of people. People who under other circumstances can see clearly right and wrong develop a level of blindness when the people being scrutinized hold beliefs t similar to their own.

As for the number of deaths he has caused. The 11k is what can most likely can be proven. How many actually died can never really be know. The same is true for the number of deaths caused by Batista and in most, if not all, historical mass killing events. Except for the Holocaust no one was counting the bodies being piled up. What we have are guesstimates.

But keep making excuses for psychopaths because you have an affinity for their ideas. A real paragon of morality you are. 👍 

MgoBlaze

June 10th, 2023 at 8:38 PM ^

"But keep making excuses for psychopaths because you have an affinity for their ideas. A real paragon of morality you are"

Pot, meet kettle. Nothing personal, but you need to do some serious reflection on the tremendous amount of hate that you have against communists. It's disturbing how easily you dehumanize and attack people that disagree with your politics.

MgoBlaze

June 10th, 2023 at 9:03 PM ^

Communists are not communism. Just like capitalists are not capitalism. Get a grip. Literally every sane adult should be able to recognize that all successful societies are a combination of both, but the level of hatred that you've got is not sane.

I've been critical of communist regimes since my initial post today, but the combination of your blazing hatred of communists and your lack of reading comprehension hasn't allowed you to see that.

SalvatoreQuattro

June 10th, 2023 at 4:26 PM ^

While doing that read up on Marxists actions in the USSR, Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Latin America, and Africa. They too engaged in destabilization, mass killing, and imperialist wars. Most infamously in Finland and Poland of 1939.

Stalin murdered so many of his officers that when the Nazis invaded the Soviet army was completely unprepared. The Red Army losing 120,000 KIA in four months in Finland in four months in 1939-40 was a harbinger of what was to come versus the Nazis.The result was 27 million Soviet deaths. Apocalyptic.

Also Mao’s China and Pol Pot.

There is tendency for people to fixate on the sins of an ideology they oppose while ignoring the ones of an ideology they support. These are unserious people.

The reality is that capitalism has a horrific human rights record. So does socialism. So do pre-modern economies. So do tribes and nation states. 

We argue over the superiority of this or that system because we refuse to grasp that the core of the problem is Us. We are and always have been the source of our many ills.
 

 

MgoBlaze

June 10th, 2023 at 4:56 PM ^

This is true. You remember I mentioned Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot in my original post, right? :-)

I think the main problem is a government's inherent centralization of power and the human urge to be disinclined to give up that power. Dictatorships aren't confined to the right or the left, but they're always propped up by people who are given power by the dictator.

Any time a government gets to be a certain size in terms of people ruled by it, like the US, China, or Russia, there is bound to be repression of cultures that don't approve of what the government is doing. China has its mass kidnappings, "re-education," and genocide of the Uyghyur people in Xinjiang literally right now. Russia has been oppressing LGBTQ people for decades similarly. America has ICE camps, the vestiges of segregation and slavery, the failed war on drugs, and CIA propaganda efforts like Reefer Madness.

Any society, and literally all of them in the world that exist now, have some combination of capitalism and socialism that more or less fits with the culture there. To vilify one over the other instead of looking for mutually beneficial middle ground is pointless. Some societies need more aspects of capitalism like freeing trade (Canada) by issuing business licenses for things like the the dairy industry, which is essentially a monopoly that's propped up by the government by stifling competition. Some societies need more aspects of socialism like educating people, infrastructure work, police reform, and healthcare (here). It all depends on context.

America has been killing communists and community activists for centuries- like since before the Battle of Blair Mountain, because the government here has historically been propped up by the powerful people of the day, be they robber barons or modern-day billionaires, and the police here have always been eager to be violent against striking workers.

That's been the history of Russia since, like, forever. Even before Stalin, Czar Nicholas was an autocratic despot that sent his soldiers to die in stupid, futile wars, attacking Jewish people with pogroms, etc.

China's whole history has been breaking up and reforming in a slightly different way. Literally since 2070 years BC.

I do think that Communism's death toll in Russia and China has as much to do with the cultural histories of those countries as the repressive, inherent flaws in the ideology.

DennisFranklinDaMan

June 10th, 2023 at 6:05 PM ^

Not to mention, I'm not sure that "communism/socialism" or "capitalism" are any more responsible for those deaths than "the Russian language" (for instance) is. Authoritarian dictatorships, maybe, but to suggest that all socialist (or capitalist) governments are the same as Stalinist Russia (or Pinochet's Chile) -- that collecting a tax to provide universal health care, for example, inevitably leads to gulags -- is silly.

SalvatoreQuattro

June 10th, 2023 at 7:52 PM ^

Humans have died in huge numbers all across the globe in a wide array of sociopolitical systems throughout humanity’s time on earth. Human corruption and wickedness very clearly isn’t a product of a system. Systems at most accentuate the problem, but they aren’t the cause.

Bismarckian Germany embraced certain socialistic policies while emancipating Jews in the 1870’s. Germany had a robust socialist party at the outbreak of WWI. So strong that after the war ended the Social Democrats were the dominant party in Weimar Germany. 

At that time even far right parties embraced socialism. The German Socialist Party and some group called the German Workers Party which would be renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party. The initial 25 point party program had socialist elements to it. Elements that would be anathema to the American Right.

Socialism doesn’t cause authoritarianism, but it doesn’t prevent  it either. Often dictators will use it as  carrot to the stick of the police and military. The same for capitalism.

 

 

MgoBlaze

June 10th, 2023 at 9:17 PM ^

"We argue over the superiority of this or that system because we refuse to grasp that the core of the problem is Us. We are and always have been the source of our many ills."

"Communism is pure evil."

Do you see the contradiction here between the points that you've made, or is the cognitive dissonance too great?

MgoBlaze

June 11th, 2023 at 12:35 AM ^

You're right, I misread that. The date is accurate, but that didn't happen under Duvalier, that particular atrocity was done on the orders of Pierre Nord Alexis.

Papa Doc's crimes against humanity started in 1957. Though really, it seems like it was a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/massacres-perpetrated-20th-century-haiti.html

"François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, was elected president with the army’s support in 1957 and ruled Haiti until his death in 1971. Papa Doc’s regime, the more brutal of the two, is said to be responsible for 30,000 to 50,000 assassinations and executions"