1. I don't think we should be careful about something that has caused ten of millions of death. It's not propaganda...it's recorded deaths. It's kind of dismaying to deny those regimes happened. It's a high amount, no matter where you get the facts...
Yes, we should be careful about how we record and read history.
2. I didn't want to bring up fascism and Nazi's because their slightly different, and I didn't want there to be a compassion made...but even then communism dwarfs the fascist kill count. (*Not implying Nazi's were good in anyway.*)
Fascism is a whole other ball park. I stuck to Nazi's because they we pretty straight forward in that they, like, just built camps and killed people in them. But
Facism's death count runs into the same issue as Communism's. So much of the other things Fascism did was done during wartime, which makes it awkward. Do we count passivizing rebellions or attacking enemy civilians?
I will note though that Fascism wasn't around very long and didn't take hold in much of the world, holding on only fifty years, and thirty of those years being in the person of a Francisco Franco cowed by the western democracies to at least kinda act good. If we wanted to compile a "Which political structure killed the most people" list, monarchy would take the cake because it's been around forever and in most countries in some form.
3. They didn't have any food because they had bread lines and massive shortages. (like all of them have throughout history.) Because of the system they inherited, vs the overabundance that capitalist countries have. I wouldn't even try to compare "LACK OF EDUCATION" to REGIMES that put guns to people's head.
I'm fine with counting "Gun to head" parts, which would be political pogroms and what not. I'm pretty sure that was central to my original argument, that we should count direct murders and not indirect deaths. Hence the whole holocaust thing. I'm not saying that Stalinism is innocent. I'm saying we are padding the numbers for propaganda value and that is intellectually dishonest.
"The investigators found that approximately 245,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 were attributable to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual-level poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty. "
wsws.org/en/articles/2011/07/pove-j13... <- Basically same study and it's arguing that poverty (being poor) is the link to death. And if that's true, does making everyone poorer somehow help that?
Also bet anyone a bizillion monopoly dollars almost all of these stats are linked to gang related crimes...which this neglects to mention. And even if you try to say capitalism killed them somehow, which isn't even what this link implies. 245,000 to millions isn't the most convincing comparison.
abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/FedCrimes/story?.. 80% According to this.
breitbart.com/big-government/2014/05/0.. Half from FBI and 90% according to others.
And no gang's aren't capitalism's fault...
Exactly. That was the point I was making. Indirect deaths are too fuzzy to count. I wouldn't count "Homeless person who freezed to death for lack of housing" either.
4. Okay? We aren't a democracy, we're a constitutional republic so have no idea what you're even attempting to compare there...
You're being pedantic. You know as well as I do that by "Democracy" i mean the Liberal governments. It's been short-hand for that since forever.
"The Congo Free State was privately controlled by Leopold II, King of the Belgians through a non-governmental organization, the Association internationale africaine. Leopold was the sole shareholder and chairman, who increasingly used it for rubber, copper and other minerals in the upper Lualaba River basin (though it had been set up on the understanding that its purpose was to uplift the local people and develop the area). The state included the entire area of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo and existed from 1885 to 1908. The Congo Free State eventually earned infamy due to the increasingly brutal mistreatment of the local peoples and plunder of natural resources, leading to its abolition and annexation by the government of Belgium in 1908."
Yeah the whole "CONTROLLED BY A KING" part kind of makes me think this has absolutely nothing to do with a free market capitalist system.
Also, I feel like the video addressed this but it is a valid point. "Ignore the bad ones, name one good one that's been tried..."
The Congo Free State is interesting because he ran it like a corporation rather than a kingdom. It was put under direction of a corporate entity (the Congo Free State). It's weird case that is fun to read up in. Now, was it free market capitalism, no. It was colonial capitalism. But I didn't say free market capitalism in the first place, I just said capitalism.
5. Again, if we're trying to argue that poor people in a capitalist country (somehow means death it's responsible for.) Which I hate to use this argument because it sounds quite pessimistic, but our poor are still the best off compared to other places. So if being poor is linked to death which is the argument for a bad system...we'd have the best case against that...
pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/09/h..
mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-midd..
That second link, if you dig around their stats a bit, makes the argument that Alabama is wealthier than the United Kingdom, which is interesting, and very Austrian of them. I don't have time to dig through their methodology, but I suspect they are comparing post-tax dollars and not considering social services correctly, because some of the stats that website makes is bizarre to say the least.
Because in many cases, if you don't want to blame famine and starvation on deaths, alot of them were ignored and caused from direct actions, and not because of some by product or coincidence. A ton of people were still killed by actions personally directed by the leaders and governments of those regimes.
Yes, this is my case. Let's count the political murders and shit like that.
Marx said...
You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Apologists for Marxism contend that Marx did not intend that this statement should be taken literally. They affirm that he was referring to the gradual elimination of property owners by the transformation of the economic system which Communism would bring to pass. They cannot deny, however, that many followers of Karl Marx, including Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot have taken this affirmation literally and have proceeded to kill the "middle-class owners of property" once they have acquired power.
Taking that particular statement literally would be to suggest Marx wanted people to be moved with brooms... taking it metaphorically, which the author of this article does, is how you decide it means death. Or disenfranchisement, which is how I would take it.
The rest of the article focus on quotes by Lenin and Stalin and the like, which yeh, they liked to bloody their swords. I'm not arguing against that at all.
I feel like you believe I am arguing that the Communist states were innocent. That's not what I am going on about. I'm arguing that the really big gajillion number is bloated by shoving in tangential deaths.
An example I can pull out of my head to explain why this matters is this; in the eighties in Ethiopia while it was ruled by the Communist Derg, there was an infamous famine that became a humanitarian crisis that until this day colors what everybody imagines when they think "Ethiopia." It was exacerbated by forced collectivization of farms, and by the Derg's embarrassment at their situation and effort to keep foreign aid out of the country. We could do what I have complained of above and throw those numbers into the Communism Death toll, but it gets complicated.
Ten years prior to Derg rule, Ethiopia was an American ally ruled by an old monarchy. Feudalism was in place and limited how much land was being worked. There was a famine. This famine, incidentally, is seen as one of the main cause of the Communist revolution that took place soon afterwards.
...and now. in the modern world, Ethiopia requires foreign aid to stave off famines. It is a very corrupt Republic, but still a Republic. They are selling large swaths of arable land to Asian firms growing food.
In all three cases, droughts largely cause the famine to start, and political circumstances make it worse.
Which begs the question, how do you create a number from any of them that can be blamed souly on the political structure of that society? If a famine happens, how do we differentiate between natural deaths and death by mismanagement? Any way you try to do it will be arbitrary.
@Dinh AaronMk This is a roleplay website.
he is roleplaying a tankie
Alright, commies. What are your thoughts on reeducation camp, reeducating those that do not follow the communist rule book? And what if they refuse to adopt communist ideas and values? What then?
If you have to build camps, you already lost. Revolution of this sort has to be organic and supported by the people. If it doesn't, then it doesn't. That's why I'm working overtime and spending my day off shitposting instead of in the streets with a rifle in hand.
Chapatrap,
Timemaster
