this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Happy without the horrors of the western world's education, sanitation, medicine, science, technology, liberalism, or democracy?
Sounds great! I'm sure you'll really enjoy sustenance farming. If you're lucky, you can get married at a young age and experience the joys of as many children as you (or your wife's) body will bear.
Capitalism isn't a magic antidote. Nor are all iterations of it successful. It really depends on the government keeping corruption under control, keeping monopolies from forming, keeping regulatory capture from occurring. Also, capitalism is just an economic system. There's also political systems, legal systems, financial systems, military systems, all sorts of other government functions.
Capitalism is actually working pretty well in Asia. China is doing tremendously better since they introduced some capitalism into their socialist system, creating a mixed economy. Their growth has lifted a lot of people out of poverty. Other Asian economies have performed very well. Look at Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and (at least prior to Chinese takeover) Hong Kong.
Latin America and Africa have a lot of complex problems, many stemming from years - or even centuries - of colonialism, military conflicts, social issues, endemic corruption, bad economic policy like "printing money" and trying to spend their way out of inflation, thereby creating hyperinflation, etc. Expecting an economic system to magically fix all the incredibly complex and even seemingly intractable issues in a society is quite unrealistic.
Great? Maybe not. The best we've found for economic development and continued economic growth? So far, yes.
All systems have strengths and weaknesses. All economic systems require intervention to prevent bad actors from exploiting them. If you think communism doesn't, it's because you aren't actually familiar with it.
Again, I highly recommend that you read about twentieth century USSR and China, especially the early days of Mao, Lenin, and Stalin. Because you don't seem very familiar with communism for someone named after Karl Marx.
Actually most of my knowledge comes from primary sources. People who lived it and wrote or talked about what it was really like. Since you got your hands on something describing "incredible successes" in the USSR and China than obviously you were the one reading propaganda. Or perhaps you consider starving millions of people in the Holodomer and Great Famine to be an incredible success? Killing the kulaks? Incredible success. Book burnings? Incredible success. Cultural revolution? Believe it or not, also incredible success.
Wow, you are full of nonsense. If you have to resort to comparing someone to the Nazis to show they're not too bad, you're already up shit creek without a paddle.
Funny, you mention Nazis multiple times in your apologia of Soviet democide, but what you fail to mention is that, rather than murdering "Nazi collaborators" during the de-kulakization period, Soviet leaders were not opposed to Nazism at any point until 1941, when the Nazi betrayed their non-aggression pact and invaded the USSR. Prior to that, they had been on rather cordial terms, dividing up their respective "spheres of influence" (ie deciding who got to raid which countries). The partition, invasion, and occupation of Poland by Nazis and Soviets is a perfect example of this, but there are many others.
No, the Kulaks did not deserve it, you filthy chekist. No more than the US middle class deserves to be brutally murdered. Or US farmers deserve to be brutally murdered (since they are land rich and cash poor). Nobody deserved that. That was not justice, that was an out of control murderous mob. Frequently the locals didn't even support the murdering of their local landlords and farmers, but outsiders roaming the countryside pressured them to anyways. When even the outsiders wouldn't murder enough people, the secret police took over and did a fantastic job committing democide.
The Soviets burned a lot more than antisemetic books. You seriously think they killed capitalists, but left the pro-capitalism books intact? That doesn't even make sense. The USSR burned loads of books, started with "decadent" western authors, but quickly spreading to anyone critical of the regime. Funnily enough, one of the first people to organize book burnings in Soviet libraries later found his own writing was include in the list of works to be destroyed.
This isn't a Gish gallop. You were welcome to respond with actual examples of the "incredible successes" of the communist countries. But instead you are godwining the thread, and bringing up the war on drugs, which is a wattabooutism - a deflection technique designed to derail the argument. I don't consider the war on drugs to be an incredible success, so I'm not really sure how it's relevant.
The reason I didn't take your examples of "Communist countries tremendous success" seriously is because you were comparing apples to oranges. Seriously, comparing starvation to food insecurity is ludicrous. It is possible to actually compare deaths from starvation per 100,000 people, but that's not what you did. Because to do that, you'd have to A) rely on something other than propaganda and B) Recognize that China hasn't entirely eliminated hunger, much less deaths from starvation. Although they have made great progress in reducing the numbers since their series of famines. You also ignored that the Soviet Union didn't experience famine because they relied on foreign aid - food aid - for a number of years. So that helped keep their people fed: Food given freely by capitalist pigs who deserve to be murdered for their mere existence in a more successful economy.
As for the great purge, it was followed by years of lesser purges.
The idea that the west does not change courses or look at past programs as a mistake is obviously quite invalid, so there was no point in even mentioning it. But since you cling to that idea, great. Obviously we've changed our minds on some things, as the Trail of Tears is now seen as wrong, as is the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Slavery and Jim Crow fall into those categories as well. The War on Drugs is also seen as a failure, despite the fact that it totters on for now.
I don't watch John Oliver, moron. There is no nuance in this discussion because you are clearly incapable of it.
You are right about one thing: My horror over the deaths caused by communism, including the killing of kulaks, is why I am not a communist. Your gleeful appreciation of the righteousness of democide under communism doesn't make you a communist. It makes you deeply disturbed individual who is incapable of empathy. It likely points to sociopathy, or some other element of the dark triad, with the political beliefs adopted as a fig leaf to cover your antisocial tendencies.
I don't expect a response.