Red Death - The Horrors Of Communism

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Psychoanalysis? Where? That's just logical analysis. I agree it is a lousy form of psychoanlysis the same way dancing is a lousy way to play trumpet. It never was intended to even come close at psychoanlysis. It's like I said your observation is a bad cooking recipe. [Insert condescending sarcasm because God!, autists love condescending sarcasm] eyeroll eyeroll lookatmeiambetterthanyoulolkthxbye

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand here we go, the old "true scotsman" argument there. It was literally 0 posts since that argument was referred to and you insist to use it. So let's get the facts straight.

1) Every single attempt at communism has ended up with a crazy dictatorial government killing political disidents, and other dying because of lousy living conditions induced by that very same government which was instated in order to assure a communist state.

2) Every single one of those attempts ended up diverting from "true communism" and turning into an aberration that threats thousands of innocent people.

Given this background information there's one of two possibilities:

1) Communism is impossible to take into practice without it turning into some sort of totalitarian tyranic government that ends up making things way worse than they once were.

2) Communism is attainable, but it is also very risky to try, and if incorrectly applied will lead to a totalitarian tyranic government that ends up making thing way worse than they once were.

In the first case, it is obvious that any attempt at communism should be stopped. In the second, some questions rise?

Exactly how much people is it ok to sacrifice in order to get communism right? How many attempts further before the costs are considered to outweigh the benefits? Are you willing to put your neck and the one of people you love on the line?

In the end, it is always a class struggle. In communism it is not bourgeoisie and proletariat. It is "intellectual" snobs at the party and government officials against those who aren't. And as always, it is the oppressor vs the oppressed.

Nonsense, villages during the spanish revolution for example. Communism there ended, not because of "human nature" or some sort of internal issue, but becuase of the combined efforts of facists and western "democracies." Deception and ideoogy are the main driving forces of anti-communism.

Anything can be risky to try with a moronic aproach.

Believe it or not, there were multiple factions during the russian revolution. Not everyone believed in using a one party state to cease the means of production. The bolsheviks were the "communists" with more guns. If too many people still believe in the state when the next revolution happens, I will flee the country.

Minds are more valuable than swords.

Bad attempts. Anarchist communists have always fought against brute ideology.

Last edited by RushKing on 20 Feb 2014, 12:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

Should have called the site 'SovietPlanet'.

Why's that? I don't see anyone showing any kind of support for the Soviet Union

Since the USSR based their politics on the writings of Karl Marx, the no true Scotsman fallacy still applies. Karl Marx even admitted that tyranny might be unavoidable in the first phase of communism. Even if communism originally meant the second phase, definitions change over time, and it now applies to both phases.

Regardless of whether communism "never existed", 110 million people died in it's name, it has been used to justify countless atrocities, and it has created regimes that were just like the Third Reich. These mass-killings were still caused by communists, whether you like or not and whether communism existed or not. Full Sharia laws "never existed" either; does that mean that Saudi-Arabia is not a theocracy?

Liam says to Duncan, "No communist kills people." To which Duncan replies, "My friend Boris kills, rapes, and tortures people and he's a communist." Liam retorts, "Ah, but no true communist kills, rapes, and tortures people."

Last edited by Kurgan on 20 Feb 2014, 12:40 am, edited 2 times in total.

Apple I applaud you for bolding

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hYkq7XGNhE[/youtube]

So your only example of working communism is small isolated villages? Do you really think an entire country or the world can work on that? Other small indigienous communities in my country function as dictatorships where a single man decides unilaterally about everything that happens on his village and it works ok. So I guess my impression on dictatorial governmets was also a mistake.



Hang on a second... I need to reset the " X posts since the last time someone used the 'True scotsman' argument to defend communism"....

holy crap! It is already at 0.

Believe me, I do know there were several groups within the communist revolution. I even was a trotskian myself once and really hated leninists.

My country even played host to part of that conflict. Trotsky came here as a refugee being persecuted by stalinists. There was even an attempt to murder him lead by David Alfaro Siqueiros (A notorious mexican painter) but he failed. Trotsky was later killed by some guy with a hammer which is ironic, because... you know... hammer and sickle... And this one just one of the different conflicts of the different factions that have existed only in the soviet union.

So yeah, not only I believe it, I know it. No need to be patronizing, it's kind of rude, you know. For you to assume that people that don't agree with you are ignorant.

*gasps for air*

anyhoo

You know this guy Noam Chumsky (I know it is misspelled, i just like it better that way). Leftists looooooooove Noam Chomsky. Not all of them, and I am not saying you do. But I will do something that is completely against political arguments etiquette. I'll go ahead and admit that, despite having a fundamentally opposite view of what I think, Noam Chomsky is not an idiot. Even more I'll admit he is kind of smart.. very smart

Yeah I know. It is kind of an unwritten rule to assume people that don't share your political views are idiots, but bear with me.

This guy, Noam Chumsky (This word really looks better when you write it this way) has defended different socialist regimes. And in a lot of cases he was wrong about them. He said he had a good feeling about Venezuela and look, they are already killing and incarcerating civilians for no good reason while dealing with a huge impending crisis they insist to blame on others.

So, we have a guy who is -according to wikipedia- "considered to be a key intellectual figure with the left wing of US politics" who was not really able to tell the difference between communism that would or wouldn't work.

And I really have no doubts about this guy's mental capacities because

a) I am not an a-hole that assumes that people who disagree with me are idiots
b) I really think there's nothing wrong about him other than me disagreeing with him.
c) He expresses himself, acts, and conducts himself as an intelligent rational human being.

And not even he was able to tell the difference between a healthy attempt at communism. So it points to me that the distinction is, quite opposite to your claims, nontrivial.



So there has been almost a century since the russian revolution and a good and successful implementation of communism on a large country is yet to be seen. Which explanation is more likely.

1) That "true communism" (or whatever you want to call it) is not really that magical, simple, easy-to-implement, all-fixing, solution that people think it to be; and is in fact, a complex system that may lead to many pitfalls and whic is very hard to make work on large scales without running a non-reasonable risk ending up with a totalitarian government which hasn't been succesfuly implemented for reasons other than people simply not getting it right?

or

2)For all these years no one has ever gotten communism right and you happen to know the true functioning way to communism. Not Che Guevara, Not Fidel Castro, Not Lev Davidovich Bronstein, not Vladimir Lenin, not Joseph Stalin, not Hugo Chàvez not Pol Pot, not Nicolae Ceaucescu, not Ho Chi Mihn, but you. And you get all that because some villages in Spain seemed to be doing Ok until those damn fascists came along.

I'm sorry if I'm skeptical of your vision of communism, but somehow I'd rather not risk having some party officers take me into custody for not liking the people's government enough in the search of an idyllic life.

Guys, can we just agree that the conclusion of every human civilization is corruption and oppression and that we're ultimately all doomed by our own nature? Nihilism is fun for everyone!

Communism can work on a small scale, that much has been proven in history...so its not an entirely flawed concept now is it.

See that is the problem with Marx, he more or less calls for violent revolution which much of the time does result in tyranny....perhaps peaceful revolution would work better. Also Stalin was in charge of the Soviet Union and well he wasn't a communist that much is for sure...so with that example speficially how where the mass killings done in the name of communism? seems more like done in the name of tyranny if Stalin was a communist why wasn't he sharing his wealth and just letting his own people starve?

It sure seems that way much of the time.

The Kibbutz in Israel broke down of natural causes, collectivization was used as an interesting starting off measure within their economy but people then developed greater expectations (as they should). The Spanish Civil War was a mess of ideology, that gave everyone the sense that they were a part of something larger, the only part of that which was true, was they were a part of a clash of broader ideologies. Much like conflict in Syria, the sheer number of different ideas at work on the ground makes developing a single narrative of the conflict impossible. I suspect that ideologues will be mining the Syrian example in much the same way for decades to come.

Collective farms are rubbish, I have been to them and the people on them really wanted to be somewhere else. Most spend every spare moment they have working on the underground economy.

And as long as it stays in a small scale with voluntary participation and not on a huge state-enforced entity I'm perfectly ok with that form of communism.

Yes, let's look at Venezuela, shall we?
http://www.pri.org/stories/2011-07-05/h ... -venezuela
Maybe the oil money could be used more efficiently, but the people of Venezuela wouldn't be seeing a cent of it if Chavez hadn't nationalized the petroleum industry.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-0 ... havez.html

http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7513

Yes, they have problems, but you have to ignore more than half of what Chavez did to pretend that he was bad for the country as a whole.

Last edited by LKL on 20 Feb 2014, 2:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

Nope

If by country you mean nation state, no. If by country we mean confederacy, yes.

What do you mean by "works"? The most simple human societies were egalitarian. Hierarchies didn't appear till the dawn of agrarian society.

Venezuala is a market economy. While I do consider Venezuala to be the most socialist country on earth due to having the most firms under workers' self managment, a market economy is a market economy. Communism is a type of socialism but socialism isn't always communism.

Every state has a tendancy to incarcerate people for no good reason.

Centuries are grains of sand in terms of human history. Capitalism is 200 years old. Feudalism lasted, 400?


Big names don't matter, its the peasants that do. The people who can get communism right are the communities.