Any commies around?

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I'd also add to Kangoogle's arguments against the US the few dictatorships that they have had encouraged at the time ^.- (Pinochet, The Shah of Iran, etc.)

You made the claim, so you total it up.

ruveyn

Really?? The Soviets made their own country a mess, so that counts for something. Vietnam isn't much of an example though, because the region was just a puppet for a Cold War proxy battle between the US and the Communists, in this case it was China. I mean, a lot of the stuff that the US did was bone-headed, and screwed many nations over, but as bad as the Soviets? No, and that's not because we are saints so much as the Soviets were devils.

As for Stalin, well.... he helped us beat Hitler because Hitler betrayed him and tried to take over the USSR. You can't exactly call him an altruist for that, especially since all of the areas that he took during the war, he ended up taking to make into Soviet satellite states, which stagnated their economic growth for decades. In any case, Stalin killed about as many of his own people as Hitler did, if not more.

A major issue is that both the US and the USSR were creating puppet states to be controlled, so the issue that has to be proved is that the US not only created more or significantly worse puppet states, but it did so to the point of being worse than the sum total of all of the USSR's actions. I can't grant the latter.

I gave you two books to read - where someone has saved me the bother

Communist.

So, you expect ruveyn to go out and read 2 obviously biased books trying to prove an idea that seems absurd to him? That sounds absurd in and of itself. Not only that, but seriously, your thesis is pretty stupid. You might as well say that the US is as bad as the Nazi regime, an outside person will have no reason to grant you that idea, as despite the US being bad, you are comparing it to a regime that seems worthy to label "evil". Thus, a high burden of proof is already on your side, and your opponents will see no reason to verify your point, just as they would see no reason to do research on Icelandic elves.

No, I expect ruveyn not to continually sprout nonsense all over the forum then signing his name as some lame version of QED. As for those books, have you read them? I take that for a no, because if you had, you would notice that they are both incredibly well referenced and those statistics are backed up fully.

Labelled "evil" by how and whom. Who are you to make such sweeping moral judgements, then use some lame version of argument by democracy to back them up?

My point is verified. It would be helpful if ruveyn would pick up some books rather than spending his days typing out his memories of Fox News et yada newsreports.

I don't trust either author, just as I don't trust the Big Black Book of Communism, as it is full of statistics too, but it is rather biased. Bias is more important than possessing statistics, as a major issue is methodology, and another issue is the worthiness of a resource as a use of time. Chomsky is questioned on ground of objectivity at times, so I do not fully trust him as a source of political knowledge.


I am not referring to morality at all, only to common conceptions. Culture matters in terms of understanding the veracity of a claim, and so I am not arguing that democracy is correct, only that culture shapes our epistemic viewpoint.


Any point is verified by some outside source. Do you realize how many books exist on each and every topic arguing for almost anything? There are apologetics for almost any idea. We don't have time to read every apologetic though, and so we have to lighten our cognitive load by rejecting things that seem implausible to our current view. Does this mean that the current view is correct? No. Does this mean that the current view could never eventually change to the implausible view? Not at all. It simply means that it is rational not to examine certain evidences due to the high cost and low expected utility. You can call this biased, but you are biased as well, as is every other person on the face of this planet. It is just that Chomsky's biases are to a point that I would not trust my knowledge base in his hands, as the man is to some extent known for defending a number of anti-US regimes that were later found to be terrible. This could just be biased information on my part, but I am not a crusader as you seem to attempt to be.

In any case, I do not have much at stake with the holy mantle of the US, I just find your claim implausible to an extent that I refuse to do much research until I am given better reason.

I'm really ignorant of communism, so please forgive what is undoubtedly a foolish question, but where is the space within communism for such human endeavours as art?

seriously tho, communism per se doesnt seem interested in art, as in, it doesnt specifically promote or forbid it.
the individual governments may or may not have an opinion about it, depending on how paranoid they are.

Depends on your communist. In the USSR though, the human endeavor of art was made a slave to the party line, where art that differed from the communist message could lead to the artist being sent away to never be heard from again. However, theoretical variants of communism usually try to leave art open to be pursued, whether they would be successful is a theoretical question.

during the 80's czech cartoons were popular in norway, and many other european countries. east european animation in general, for some reason.

some years back, i attended a animation course, and the teacher was from estonia (which used to be a soviet republic, an integral part of the actual USSR), and she told us that _everything_ they made had to go by moscow. everything. she told us they would often get away with both sexual humor and gory violence, as long as there was no anti-communism ideas in there.

As AG said, it depends on which brand of Communism. Soviet Russia had the official artistic and literary style of "Socialist Realism" which was imposed on all new works and had fairly well-defined aesthetic policies. They had a harder time pinning down music and theater, and I think they ended up making some concessions in music so that the composers could write decent stuff.

Soviet ideology also tainted science- look up Lysenko to see what they did to biology. The study of genetics was next to illegal, and got a lot of brilliant men thrown into the Gulag.

However, the general consensus both among scholars and modern advocates of Communism seems to be that the Soviet Union was not really a good embodiment of Communist or Marxist ideology, so referring to USSR policy to answer your question is probably a flawed approach.

yeah I got s lot of leftist leanings
and communist stuff in my room

Exactly although Lev was banging on about this in the early 1920's.




Marxists have a great deal of respect for the arts


To quote Joanne Laurier from her article on the World Socialist Web Site 'A comment on art and the Marxist Party' http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/comm-o11.shtml

'Art is one of the principal means by which human beings make sense of the world and through which their striving to change reality takes place. The need to translate experience, knowledge and desire into concrete imagery is not a whim or a fancy, it is clearly built into human consciousness. All of us are artists at night. Dreams, with their compressed, imagistic references to conscious experience, demonstrate many of the characteristics of works of art

and

'Why should any of this be of concern to a Marxist, a man or woman of science and objectivity? It ought to be of concern, first of all, to anyone because artistry is one of the most extraordinary and rewarding elements in life. But let's consider Marxism in particular. It is a science, but it is the science of human relations; it is objective, but guiding human subjective activity is its prime concern. Marxism is not a study of the movement of inanimate atoms and molecules. How can anyone concerned with the welfare of humanity ignore the field in which human relationships, motivations and emotions are given their most compelling and enduring expression?'

If Marxism is a science (I doubt that, it is more like a religion) then it is a wrong science. It fails to account for the essential selfishness of humans. Any system of economics that relies on a person subordinating his good or that of his family to the good of society or class or humanity is bound to fail. Egotism (love of one's self and what belongs to one) is genetically wired in. It is a survival characteristic and has evolved from the dawn of the earliest primate even unto this day.

We are hominid primate version 5.0. We are the smartest most bad-ass ape in The Monkey House.

Marx was fighting evolution. He was bound to lose. He simply was trying to overcome what Nature ordains.

ruveyn