news Victims of Communism memorial: more than half of the names were linked to Nazis

[Communion]

12 minutes ago, Vermouth said:

So…. How much money in a person's bank account justifies execution?

 

Is there some sort of scale or is it a cliff edge?  

Oh, now China's economic model is suddenly something you don't agree with? I thought you just said they were plainly no different than any other capitalist nation?

 

Would someone as corrupt like Elon Musk be tolerated in Chinese society the way American society has tolerated his efforts to disrupt and dismantle government institutions? What would China do if a Chinese billionaire tried to buy the largest Chinese social media network and flood it with content that worked to undermine the government like Elon does in the US?

 

Is America's lack of action against Musk for trying to disrupt political stability not a point against liberal democracy? Does authoritarianism not then have some benefits?

Edited October 9 by Communion

[Letters From Adi]

Nazis and the Soviets were in the alliance. Had Hitler not decided to invaded Soviet lands, they likely would've kept supporting the Nazis. Two bad doesn't make a right.

The Nazis did genocide, and so did the Soviets. One of them being Goloshchyokin's, where so many Muslim Kazakhs were starved that the demography of Kazakhstan got changed.

[Letters From Adi]

2 hours ago, Mean Trees said:

Question is, does China need its government changed in the manner of ''liberal democracies'' because all I see this system is one group of elites getting swapped for another and will complain and cry about the other group when things go bad; see Democrats vs Republicans. China saw a big change in its governing philosophy in the late 70s without an election but in its government's desire to see growth for its populations' needs so it made the change. India has had 80 years of being able to swap governments and hasn't had any of its politicians uplift its citizens in the speed and level China has.

China has always been authoritarian throughout history. The CCP is merely a continuation of the long line of monarchy that preceded it.

[réveuse]

21 hours ago, Bosque said:

Sounds like communists and Nazis are both bad, more news at 12 

 

20 hours ago, Trent W said:

The conversation of who is more trash communists vs nazis is redundant 

 

Both are the scum of this planet

 

Some of the world's worst moments

 

13 hours ago, NewStanner said:

There are freaking communists on ATRL? How low we have fallen 

 

Here is the correct answer 

The propaganda on this thread is wild. Red Scare still lingers on your minds, huh? Comparing Communists to N@z!s is so disingenuous. Communism, which might not always work in practice, works in theory due to its ideology about helping the underprivileged and helping the worker. It's an economic ideology. N@z!sm, on the other hand, is a racist, disgusting, and evil ideology about white supremacy and dominance. It was never good in practice, nor in theory.

 

Also, did you actually read the article? The communists defeated the Nazis. That is a nice thing. Why are we calling Communists filth for eliminating the N@z!s? If ATRLers think this is awful, wait till they see the depth of the crimes that be N@z!s committed.

 

Finally, did you guys know that the N@z!s persecuted actual Communists while pretending to be so with their "National Socialist" party name?

[Vermouth]

1 hour ago, Communion said:

Oh, now China's economic model is suddenly something you don't agree with? I thought you just said they were plainly no different than any other capitalist nation?

 

Would someone as corrupt like Elon Musk be tolerated in Chinese society the way American society has tolerated his efforts to disrupt and dismantle government institutions? What would China do if a Chinese billionaire tried to buy the largest Chinese social media network and flood it with content that worked to undermine the government like Elon does in the US?

 

Is America's lack of action against Musk for trying to disrupt political stability not a point against liberal democracy? Does authoritarianism not then have some benefits?

I doubt you caught the irony in my reply, because, well you know, bumping off people because they've made a few dollars is clearly nuts.  You might draw the line at a billion, others 100 million, then 100,000 soon we're down to $100.

 

Musk is someone I disagree with just about every time he opens his mouth by the way, and I utterly dislike his support for Trump.  And the main reason is, if Trump is elected, I fear that the US will find if increasingly difficult to get rid of its leaders, and that is the road to hell.

 

Authoritarianism is fine right up to the point you disagree with it about something.

 

 

Edited October 9 by Vermouth

[Harrier]

Authoritarianism is fundamentally immoral and any system that requires it in order to survive should be discarded. Just because Communism is not as inherently evil and destructive as Nazism does not mean it deserves any respect. It is a failed system that did not deliver on its promises to bring better outcomes for poor people than capitalism,  and that survived decades only through ruling with an iron fist.  It is best left in the dustbin of history where it currently resides, and any proponents of it should be openly mocked as the unserious loons that they are. 

[Mean Trees]

3 hours ago, Vermouth said:

Tony Benn a beacon of the British left for decades was hot on this: one of the questions he always had of people on power was "how can I get rid of you?". If you can't answer that question via the ballot box you are in deep trouble.

 

( Incidentally that question was also one of the reasons why he was also very anti EU - but let's not go there!)

Why not? You mean to tell me that large Western orgs have democracy deficits?? Oh wow oh wow! 

 

And it seems like Western "democracies" have always been in deep trouble since we can only get varying flavors of elites into high positions!

[wastedpotential]

ddd are y'all really in here re-litigating the Cold War again 

 

I know the ivory tower allure (or rather, the grimy basement allure) of communism is strong, but basically every attempt has ended in a calamitous civic trainwreck and the few regimes that have hung on are probably not all that long for this world  

 

 

Edited October 9 by wastedpotential

[velocity]

2 hours ago, réveuse said:

 

 

The propaganda on this thread is wild. Red Scare still lingers on your minds, huh? Comparing Communists to N@z!s is so disingenuous. Communism, which might not always work in practice, works in theory due to its ideology about helping the underprivileged and helping the worker. It's an economic ideology. N@z!sm, on the other hand, is a racist, disgusting, and evil ideology about white supremacy and dominance. It was never good in practice, nor in theory.

 

Also, did you actually read the article? The communists defeated the Nazis. That is a nice thing. Why are we calling Communists filth for eliminating the N@z!s? If ATRLers think this is awful, wait till they see the depth of the crimes that be N@z!s committed.

 

Finally, did you guys know that the N@z!s persecuted actual Communists while pretending to be so with their "National Socialist" party name?

classic 'whoopsie my ideolgy killed 100 million people but at least it's good in theory' strikes again

[Vermouth]

31 minutes ago, Mean Trees said:

Why not? You mean to tell me that large Western orgs have democracy deficits?? Oh wow oh wow! 

 

And it seems like Western "democracies" have always been in deep trouble since we can only get varying flavors of elites into high positions!

I meant "not go there" because this entire thread is fairly animated as it is without adding in the EU and Brexit to it (!).

 

But yes, that was one of Tony Benn's  main objections to the EU was its democratic deficit as he saw it.  He was unusual in that he was seen as a very left wing UK figure, but had this stance, which oddly chimed with a strand of the debate during the Brexit vote.

 

By the way, last time I checked in western countries you can get anybody you like into office, it's just they need people to vote for them.

[family.guy123]

6 hours ago, Virgos Groove said:

???

 

Who said anything about killing drug addicts? 

You did. 

[Virgos Groove]

3 minutes ago, family.guy123 said:

You did. 

No, I didn't. I said there were many drug addicts before 1949, which is true. It's what the Opium Wars were all about.

 

Quote

Henry Rosemont, Jr. notes that when the communists liberated Shanghai from the U.S.-supported reactionary Kuomintang regime in 1949, about 20 percent of that city's population, an estimated 1.2 million, were drug addicts. Every morning there were special street crews "whose sole task was to gather up the corpses of the children, adults, and the elderly who had been murdered during the night, or had been abandoned, and died
of disease, cold, and/or starvation" (Z Magazine, October 1995).

 

Michael Parenti - Blackshirts and Reds (page 84).

You're the one who started talking about killing them. Did Gavin Newsom hack your account or something?

 

[Virgos Groove]

Anywho, this discussion has strayed faaaarr from the original topic, but I just feel like adding one extra thing. Liberal democracy as we know it (universal suffrage, parliamentary system and freedom of the press) is an extremely rare thing that has only existed for what, 100 years? If that.

 

Countries like China don't have Western liberal democratic traditions because those traditions are, get this, influenced by Western history.

 

There's this fantastic essay on why the Chinese people are okay with the government they have, even if it's authoritarian, and why they don't just revolt and adopt our system. The whole thing is worth a read, but I'm just gonna drop these two quotes, which I love:

 

Quote

I'm going to grossly oversimplify here, in this grand backward tour of European history, but the political philosophy that gave rise to modern American political ideals, as even a fairly casual student of history should know, emerged during the 18th century in the Enlightenment—an intellectual movement of tremendous consequence but one that would not have been possible save for the groundwork laid by 17th century naturalists who, taken together, gave us an "Age of Reason" (think Newton and all the natural philosophers of the Royal Academy). Their great work could be pursued because already the intellectual climate had changed in crucial ways—chiefly, that the stultifying effects of rigid, dogmatic theology had been pushed aside enough for the growth of scientific inquiry. That itself owes much to the Protestant Reformation, of course, which people tend to date from 1517 but which actually reaches back over a century earlier with John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, arguably Erasmus, and the other pre-Lutheran reformers.

 

And would the Reformation have been possible without the rediscovery of classical learning that was the animating spirit of the Renaissance? Would the Renaissance have been possible without the late medieval thinkers, such as Abelard, who sought out to subject theology to the rigors of Aristotelian logic and reason? Would all this have been possible, if not for the continuous struggles between Emperor and Pope, between Guelph and Ghibelline factions—partisans for the temporal power of the Vatican and Holy Roman Emperor? The fact is that this series of historical movements, eventually carving out politics that was quite separate from—indeed, explicitly separate from—theocratic control, was only really happening in this small, jagged peninsula on the far western end of the great Eurasian landmass. And in the rest of the world—the whole rest of the world—none of this was happening. Political theology remained the rule with rare, rare exceptions.

 

What we've now taken as the norm and the correct form for the whole world—liberal, secular, democratic, capitalistic—is truly exceptional, recent, rare, fragile, and quite contingent.

Quote

The fear of the liberty-loving American, he implied, is of a surfeit of authoritarianism. That of the Chinese? The Chinese nightmare is of chaos—of an absence of authority.

No one - not even the Chinese! - is saying we should implement Chinese socialism in the Western world. If we ever become socialist (which I doubt), it will naturally be influenced by Western history. So why do we expect the whole world to implement our system?

Edited October 9 by Virgos Groove

[réveuse]

4 hours ago, velocity said:

classic 'whoopsie my ideolgy killed 100 million people but at least it's good in theory' strikes again

How many people were killed during Capitalism?

[velocity]

17 minutes ago, réveuse said:

How many people were killed during Capitalism?

Idk you tell me how many people died of starvation, in gulags and because of political persecution in purely capitalistic countries

[Communion]

1 minute ago, velocity said:

Idk you tell me how many people died of starvation, in gulags and because of political persecution in purely capitalistic countries

You're going to hate to find out what nation has the greatest portion of its population locked up in prisons out of the entire world. 

 

 

 

[AMIT]

6 hours ago, Harrier said:

Authoritarianism is fundamentally immoral and any system that requires it in order to survive should be discarded. Just because Communism is not as inherently evil and destructive as Nazism does not mean it deserves any respect. It is a failed system that did not deliver on its promises to bring better outcomes for poor people than capitalism,  and that survived decades only through ruling with an iron fist.  It is best left in the dustbin of history where it currently resides, and any proponents of it should be openly mocked as the unserious loons that they are. 

Are you suggesting Capitalism isn't authoritatian by nature? 

[Movimento Perpétuo]

[Letters From Adi]

18 hours ago, réveuse said:

 

 

The propaganda on this thread is wild. Red Scare still lingers on your minds, huh? Comparing Communists to N@z!s is so disingenuous. Communism, which might not always work in practice, works in theory due to its ideology about helping the underprivileged and helping the worker. It's an economic ideology. N@z!sm, on the other hand, is a racist, disgusting, and evil ideology about white supremacy and dominance. It was never good in practice, nor in theory.

 

Also, did you actually read the article? The communists defeated the Nazis. That is a nice thing. Why are we calling Communists filth for eliminating the N@z!s? If ATRLers think this is awful, wait till they see the depth of the crimes that be N@z!s committed.

 

Finally, did you guys know that the N@z!s persecuted actual Communists while pretending to be so with their "National Socialist" party name?

Just a difference being that Soviets opposing Nazis didn't come from a genuine place of opposition to their vile ideology but them getting worried of Nazis invading into their land.

Both of them were hands in gloves with one another and doing the same **** (Nazis on Jews/Romas and Soviets on Kazakhs/Caucasians) until that point.

You can argue on semantics of the ideology, but it's the administration at the end that disseminates that ideology. So, they should be held accountable for their actions.

Soviets were responsible for deaths of millions, this is something you cannot deny.



And this doesn't mean I'm excusing capitalists either. Read up on how Americans were praising moustache man until they realized that he intended to annex parts of the US as well.

[family.guy123]

20 hours ago, Virgos Groove said:

No, I didn't. I said there were many drug addicts before 1949, which is true. It's what the Opium Wars were all about.

 

You're the one who started talking about killing them. Did Gavin Newsom hack your account or something?

 

No, he didn't. 
 

you didn't say "before 1949" you said before the Great Leap Forward. 
 

Are you going to continue to deflect and play/be dumb or do you have enough info to answer my question yet? 

[family.guy123]

Just pretend I didn't mention the drug addicts you brought up, if you must. 

[Virgos Groove]

20 minutes ago, family.guy123 said:

No, he didn't. 
 

you didn't say "before 1949" you said before the Great Leap Forward. 
 

Are you going to continue to deflect and play/be dumb or do you have enough info to answer my question yet? 

??? 

 

The context of the post was about countries before and after communist/socialist revolutions. So yes, before and after 1949 in the case of China. That's what the drug addict part was all about. Before 1949, when China was ruled by warlords or the Kuomintang, opium addiction was a common thing.

 

The Great Leap Forward part was about how famine was a usual occurrence in Chinese history, including the early years of the PRC. It no longer is.

 

YOU are the one who tried to link the two by claiming the GLF was about killing drug addicts or that I wanted to do so (when I'm literally pro-decriminalization of drug consumption ).

Edited October 10 by Virgos Groove

[Aethereal]

I am all for less poverty but Communism simply does not work.

[Mr.X]

A fascist propaganda memorial including nazi rememberance propaganda?

 

Colour me surprised

[family.guy123]

12 hours ago, Virgos Groove said:

??? 

 

The context of the post was about countries before and after communist/socialist revolutions. So yes, before and after 1949 in the case of China. That's what the drug addict part was all about. Before 1949, when China was ruled by warlords or the Kuomintang, opium addiction was a common thing.

 

The Great Leap Forward part was about how famine was a usual occurrence in Chinese history, including the early years of the PRC. It no longer is.

 

YOU are the one who tried to link the two by claiming the GLF was about killing drug addicts or that I wanted to do so (when I'm literally pro-decriminalization of drug consumption ).

Oh my god. Are you saying the Great Leap Forward was a good thing or a bad thing? Your ability to not answer my question is astounding. I'm not trying to gotcha. I'm trying to understand your point of view.