Wilsonword #moonbat #pratt

Wilsonword #moonbat #pratt dailykos.com

An estimated 94 to 100 million souls lost their lives, killed by Communist regimes. The U.S.S.R. gets much focus but Communist genocides in Asia wiped out millions also. Economic and political systems are intertwined so deeply. It is too simplistic to say Communism did not really fail because it was never truly implemented as it was originally meant to be.

The two points you make are not logically connected.

a. milions died in those so called communism regimes.

b. its too simplistic to say communism did not really fail because it was never truly implemented.

You dont make any kind of connection between those two. How does A mean B is true? We could far more convincingly say the opposite: that A happened BECAUSE of B. Millions died because it was not real communism, since real communism does not have the violent coercion and murder of millions of people on the whim of one absolute ruler as an central aim or method.

ANY system that has ‘the violent coercion and murder of millions of people on the whim of one absolute ruler’ is not communism. It loses its right to call itself communism right away on just that one aspect. Since a key and unalterable aim of communism is “…the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" - Communist Manifesto, Section 2 (Marx and Engels)

Yes, quite the opposite of what we are normally told, the basic aim of communism is: FREEDOM. So, Stalin and Mao etc were state dictators, not communists. Because they deliberately suppressed the freedom of their own people, directly against basic communist principles. It seems pretty clear…

(though, actually, we cant leave it just at that - there are various things that need be taken into account when we consider what actually happened in Russia and China then).

5 comments

Not fundie at all. Even Wikipedia clearly makes a distinction between "communist society" and "communist state". Hell, the USSR, the PRC, the DPRK... didn't call themselves "communist", but used the terms "democratic" and "socialist" because it would be dishonest even by their own standards to call themselves communist (although to be honest, they weren't the things they claimed to be either).

But hey, I remember when I submitted a quote from a communist who claimed trade unions were too weak.

You know, if Every. Single. Attempt. at establishing Communism ends in an oppressive No True Communist regime consistently plagued with certain problems, you may start to consider that the ideology itself is fatally flawed.

Norway.

Your move, OP.

@Bastethotep #6649

I like how he simultaneously argues “real communism has never been tried” and “the Soviet Union and China were only repressive totalitarian regimes because of special circumstances, it wouldn’t be repressive if we installed a Dictatorship Of The Proletariat here.” The latter is a traditional apologia seen in texts like E. P. Thompson’s [i]Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski.[/i] Thompson also argues that repression in the Soviet Union shouldn’t be judged by the same standard as repression in Western countries because it’s a “new system” and a few decades is too short a time period to judge it accurately:

to a historian, fifty years is too short a time in which to judge a new social system, if such a system is arising

Kolakowski’s response to Thompson pointed out how hypocritical this is:

Your second comment is revealing, indeed. What is fifty years "to a historian"? The same day as I am writing this, I happen to have read a book by Anatol Marchenko, relating his experiences in Soviet prisons and concentration camps in the early 1960s (not 1930s). The book was published in Russian in Frankfurt in 1973. The author, a Russian worker, was caught when he tried to cross the Soviet border to Iran. He was lucky to have done it in Khrushchev's time, when the regret- table errors of J. V. Stalin were over (yes, regrettable, let us face it, even if in part accounted for by the Western powers), and so, he got only six years of hard labour in a concentration camp. One of his stories is about three Lithuanian prisoners who tried to escape from the convoy in a forest. Two of them were quickly caught, then shot many times in the legs, then ordered to get up which they could not do, then kicked and trampled by guards, then bitten and torn up by police dogs (such an amusement, survival of capitalism) and only then stabbed to death with bayonets. All this with witty remarks by the officer, of the kind "Now, free Lithuania, crawl, you'll get your independence straight off !" The third prisoner was shot and, reputed to be dead, was thrown under corpses in the cart; discovered later to be alive he was not killed (de-Stalinization!) but left for several days in a dark cell with his festering wound and he survived after his arm was cut off.
Certainly I could ask you how many years you needed to assess the merits of the new military regime in Chile or in Greece, but I know your answer: no analogy, Chile and Greece remain within capitalism (factories are privately owned) while Russia started a new "alternative society" (factories are state owned and so is land and so are all its inhabitants).

The “special circumstances in Russia and China” argument is almost as popular as Michael Parenti’s “the Soviet Union was only a repressive totalitarian state because they had so much goshdarned opposition.”

@Bastethotep #6649

That requires either understanding or admitting they're sociopaths who happen to love oppressive gov'ts.