Communism or Fascism - which is the lesser of two evils?

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WWII had relatively low death rates compared to other conflicts, actually. Wars have grown less brutal over mankind's history. I mean, we didn't burn all of Germany to the ground, kill everyone and their housepets, and salt the fields. You are suffering from what is known as the availability heuristic, and the same goes for any historian who claims WWII was the worst war ever.


Referring to all of these as "imperialist wars" is presuming the Marxist perspective. The same goes for your comments about the SDP "betrayal." WWII was fought to determine the future of fascism, and luckily for us fascism was defeated. WWI you could call "imperialist" but again I would say that is an oversimplification of the issues at stake.


You don't seriously believe that revolution would have followed if unemployment benefits were denied? You mentioned several nations implementing austerity measures; have any of them seen revolution as a result? We did have one senator delay the expansion of unemployment insurance, and while he was denounced on the evening news, most Americans probably don't even know his name and none of the people who got kicked off unemployment because of him are calling for his blood.


It's not teetering on the brink, we're well on our way to recovery. Employment is lagging behind a bit, but even that should be resolved in due time.


According to the numbers, it actually is over already.

You dont seriously think WW2 started as an attempt to prevent Fascism, if you truly believe that then I really cannot take a thing you say on history with much credibility. Many of the English ruling elite including Churchill were admirers of fascism. What they were opposed to was Germain Imperialism not the regime per se. By saying it was a war against the expansion of Fascism you are completely and utterly ignoring the economic forces that were at play, and taking an incredibly naive and worse still populist approach to the issue. Call my reference to these wars as imperialist a 'marxist perspective' if you like, I say that with careful analysis of the objective causes of the war, any thinking person, regardless of their political orientation would come to the same conclusion, ie It was a war fought by imperialist powers to protect their interests. The idea that it was somehow a war of good against evil, democracy fighting against fascism, is a fallacy.

Dont twist my words, I said it was something they had to do to "in an attempt to hold back the growing disquite" no where did I mention to prevent revolution, I have already stated that I do not think we are in a revolutionary period, but that we are at the beginning of a new era of class antagonism

BS, read your own press on the issue, it is not just a 'marxist viewpoint'

Germany started the war, did they not? The "Imperialist" British didn't exactly have much say in the matter. I don't ascribe noble intentions to the Allied Powers (they certainly didn't fight out of concern for the Jews) but that does not negate the fact that WWII was a war to defeat German and Italian fascism. You can blame German imperialism for starting the war, and that is more or less acceptable, but again you are ignoring a lot of other important factors.


I don't really see that there would have been serious effects. I already stated that a senator who held up those measures is mostly escaping unscathed, and there is enough conflicting information from different agendas that we do not have anything approaching a unified class consciousness that would stir the proletariat against the upper classes.

And you at least implied that there was threat of a revolution.


I didn't refer to that point as a Marxist viewpoint, I simply remarked that it was wrong (I know it is hard sometimes to distinguish Marxism from just plain wrong, so your confusion is understandable). The numbers are on my side here. You can't seriously argue against the data, although you could potentially dispute the definition of recession or place higher emphasis on full employment than I do.

Ooooooooo such astute and deadly repartie

No, Orwell, the Red Terror (and the Red Terror in the Spanish civil war also) and the Jacobin Terror were brutal, dark periods- but campaigns of terror are features of all revolutions, their ferocity follows directly form the intensity of the struggle in general and they make revolutions both quicker and less bloody - what you want, in the words of Robespierre, is a revolution without a revolution; and without revolution we would stille be living under monarchs scratching out a living as serfs.

Now, the fundamental, and irreducible difference between the Stalinists against both the Jacobins and Bolsheviks was that the latter two were absolutely open about the terror, they openly declared what they were doing (hell, Trotsky comes close to bragging about how effective it was, though remember that was written in the midst of the civil war), it was not a secret whereas the Stalinists snatched people off the street and never returned them, never said what for etc etc. The Bolsheviks would print the acts of the Red Terror in Pravda - how many totalitarian regimes make a habit of openly stating these acts? This is because, for the Jacobins and Bolsheviks, it was a temporary measure, not the normal state of affairs - hence the name Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya - the Extraordinary Comission - meaning that this was not the normal state of affairs, but an extraordinary response to an extraordinary situation - if you have no counter-revolutionary violence however, then you have no revolutionary terror. More than this the acts of terror were not started by the Cheka but by seperate groups of workers and peasants, going back before the October revoultion even, when peasants would burn and loot the estates of the Russian landlords and hang those who didn't have the sense to run as far and as fast as possible. The Cheka was established as a means of placing these acts under the limitation and control of the party - such was the pitch of hatred toward the aristocracy and bourgeoisie in Russia in the day that it could have been much worse, hell, one of the Kronstadt sailors had to be told not to shoot a member of the Menshevik party at the Constituent Assembly they hated them for supporting the bourgeoisie so much.

The Stalinists on the other hand did it quietly, secretively, over the course of nearly 70 years in order to consolidate the power of the bureaucratic layer of the USSR, and used it as a permanent feature of the Stalinist state.

This is the difference, the Bolsheviks - like the Jacobins before them and the Spanish Left after them - used revolutinoary terror as a temporary measure in the defence of democracy - the Stalinists used it to secure their own rule, their own narrow privileges.



and you have no idea just how completely underwhelmed I am by your application of falsifiability. Come on, falsifiability has been falsified (see Feyrebrand's Against Method). Furthermore Dent has already addressed this point.