thomas81 wrote:
1- Its debateable at best that what Stalin or Mao did constituted 'genocide'.
Enormous numbers of death =/= genocide. Moreover what seperates the Nazi atrocities was that it was a deliberate, mechanised effort to systematically erase ethnic-religious identities. The same cannot be said for the Holodomor or the Cultural Revolution.
Stalin deliberately shut of any aid going to Ukraine and deliberately starved the people. It's essentially like the genocide of jews, except that he didn't have to pay for transportation, Zyklon-B and bullets. This is why everyone except the communist party of Ukraine willingly acknowledges this. Furthermore, both Stalin and Mao viciously persecuted religious people, homosexuals and supporterts of rivaling communist dictators.
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2- This is an appeal to emotion rater than matter of fact.
No, it's not. The 110 million people is a widely accepted number by professional historians.
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That it suffered more than the USA as a result of the cold war was not an ideological indictment but reasons pertaining to past conditioning.
It suffered because of a malfunctioning economical model, but also because the politicians would rather shoot a dog into orbit around the earth or wreck havock in Africa and the Middle East than to actually serve the people.
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All capitalism did was take slavery and change the rules. Curtailing access to the wealth creating apparatus, and forcing people to make a meaningless choice of selling their own physical labour or starving to death, as the article says.
If you do not wish to work, you can always find food from the garbage cans and shelter under the bridges. If someone doesn't want to work, I shouldn't have to feed them.
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This is analogous to the 'No true Scotsman' arguments that many defenders of capitalism charge communists with when they state that the Soviet Union or China are not reliable models of communism.
No, it's not. The USSR based it's economy and politics on
The Capital and
The Communist Manifesto, but updated it so that it would be easier to enslave people in the 20th century. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and does not need batteries, then it probably is a duck.
If a person isn't born in Scotland, has never been to Europe, has no Scottish ancestors, and does not even speak English, he sure as Hell is no true Scotsman. Since neither China nor Russia has a free market (both are closer to planned economy than to a market economy), they lack what makes capitalism what it is--and thus, they're not capitalistic.
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The early years of the Soviet union were engendered by a series of brutal wars.
And what part of that justifies the Cossack genocide, where 500,000 cossacks were killed? What about when Lenin denied all foreign aid and sold all the grain to the foreign market so that 8 million people starved to death? The largest famine ever recorded during the czar, killed 450,000 people by comparison.
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What happened in Russia would not necessarilly happen in the United States because both Russia and China were backward, serfdoms that lacked the infrastructure to support a centralised economy. Its for this reason that Russia and China would most certainly NOT be among the 30 top countries in terms of HDI had the Tsardom or Emperor been left in charge.
If the czar and the emperor were left in place, their dynasties would have died out at the same time as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet met their demise. The worst case scenario is that they would have been authoritarian, but peaceful welfare states like Qatar and Kuwait.
04 Feb 2014, 7:24 pm
