Victims of Communism

[Wind_of_Change]

No free pass for the atrocities, MP, but I don't agree that mass violence and genocide are essential. Look at Nicaragua, for example.

I don't know much about their history but I just checked them up. Sure enough they're standing at 1900$ pib per capita
People living in 55k pib per capita don't always understand how it is to live in 2k pib per capita. Communism makes people equal (except for the rulling communist classs) but it makes them equal in poverty...

[The Thinker]

Dan,

The reason it's not fatally flawed is because the implementation of communism requires mass violence and genocide. I've asked many, many times here how to create a communist system without mass violence and genocide and noone was able to give an answer. Because there isn't one.

The point is that communism is a sweet lie with as awful a truth behind it as nazism. The results were the same. Actually this is not correct. The "only" thing Hitler did worse than communist regimes was systematic extermination of people based on race and disabilities. That is why Hitler's crimes are more shocking. But I don't understand why regimes who killed even more people than Hitler get a free pass and people who support them have the nerve to demand respect. This is obscene!

I can understand your point of view, I think sometimes we should reflect on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, we all like to dismiss this and justify it by saying it ended the longevity of a further period of war, but an atrocity it remains.

[The Thinker]

My point is not to develop, argument, I have made a statement on different topics on this forum about how mundane life really is, We sleep, we awake, we go to work, we eat and we travel. it doesn't matter who wins a war or who loses a war, the same mundane routine is adopted prior, during and after that war, it doesn't matter if you are rich or poor, the same mundane routine is prevalent in your daily life. So I speculate that our opinions on various subjects are caused in a large part by boredom, we create problems because we do not acknowledge the truth, we create causes, religions etc, and then blame those creations of the mind without considering the ignorance in our thinking.

Keep it simple, love, learn to love and look after your children and theirs by not participating in wars, do we need to cause sufferings for future generations? nature will take care of that, without any orders or concepts. THINK PEACE.

[robertk]

“The obvious differences apart, Karl Marx was no more a reliable prophet than was the Reverend Jim Jones. Karl Marx was a genius, an uncannily resourceful manipulator of world history who shoved everything he knew, thought, and devised into a Ouija board from whose movements he decocted universal laws. He had his following, during the late phases of the Industrial Revolution. But he was discredited by historical experience longer ago than the Wizard of Oz"
― William F. Buckley Jr.

[Pumo]

Well, we should take in account that Marx also wrote The Capital, and it's a great resource for economics study.
He even wrote complete and very useful guides of capitalsm and other systems, but we tend to forget that.

So I don't completely agree that he was a 'genius' sarcastically and pejoratively speaking for simply manipulating historical facts, I think he was a true genius for his research on economics in an anthropological and empirical point of view.
But when people makes an opinion about him, they always focus specifically on the Communist part, disregarding everything else we wrote.

However, I do agree that the more he got in depth with his studies and views, much as in the later years of Einstein, he got derailed and eventually he lost much of his objectivity and became radical and a bit of a delusional theorist (thus, for me, he also loses credibility, but only on later works).

[retrofuturist]

Greetings,

Earlier today I watched For Greater Glory... a documentary on the doping practices that were endemic in East Germany's Olympic campaigns. At one point in the mid 70's, the government actually forced athletes to be doped up on steroids, testosterone etc. in order to maximise their chances of winning. Whilst it helped their performance at the time, it made a mess of their bodies... particularly for the female athletes.

Metta,
Paul.

[binocular]

“The obvious differences apart, Karl Marx was no more a reliable prophet than was the Reverend Jim Jones. Karl Marx was a genius, an uncannily resourceful manipulator of world history who shoved everything he knew, thought, and devised into a Ouija board from whose movements he decocted universal laws. He had his following, during the late phases of the Industrial Revolution. But he was discredited by historical experience longer ago than the Wizard of Oz"
― William F. Buckley Jr.

Blaming Karl Marx (or any other individual) for the horrors of communism is as absurd as blaming Adolf Hitler for WWII.
It's convenient, of course, to find one person and then pin the whole blame on them. Anything that takes the spotlight off of the way people usually are anyway. Anything that makes it easy to point fingers.

First authoritarian regimes control your actions, then they control your speech, and then they seek to control and manipulate your thoughts... demonstrating a complete disregard for personal and spiritual autonomy that should be abhorrent to us as Buddhists with an understanding that actions, speech and thoughts are the roots of action (kamma).

Such regimes don't come into being over night just like that, nor are they the work of one man, not even the work of a handful of men. They are the combined result of the actions of millions of people over a longer course of time.

[chownah]

Greetings,

Earlier today I watched For Greater Glory... a documentary on the doping practices that were endemic in East Germany's Olympic campaigns. At one point in the mid 70's, the government actually forced athletes to be doped up on steroids, testosterone etc. in order to maximise their chances of winning. Whilst it helped their performance at the time, it made a mess of their bodies... particularly for the female athletes.

Metta,
Paul.

Definitely this obligatory doping is a pretty much standard communist activity. I think if you did a study of doping of athletes around the world you would find that it really exist mostly in communist countries. Like the russian athletes are famous for doping and russia is communist, right? And lance armstrong did doping and he is from.....wait, no, not lance he's not from a communist country but I bet all those people pushing these drugs to all the athletes around the world are from communist countries?...right?
Didn't karl marx say that religion is the opiate of the masses and steroids is the path to gold?...or something like that?
I hope you don't mind me having a bit of fun with your post. Since marx's views on communism do not promote nationalism it just seems funny that an obvously nationalist ploy like doping athletes would be considered a communist inspired sort of thing....but then eastern germany was rarely accused of being marxian and only occasionally accused of being actually communist at all except for in places like british tabloids and john birch society publications. hahahaha.....actually there were uninformed people all around the world who thought that eastern germany was communist and in fact some people are still uninformed enough to think so....same as it ever was.

I want it to be clear that I think that the doping of athletes as described in the video is unacceptable and a violation of human rights in many cases....bad, bad, bad, etc. This is something that could happen in any over nationalistic totalitarian regime I think....even if it was a capitalistic regime....
chownah

[practitioner]

For me, change begins with individual. Every individual needs to have spiritual anchor so that the collective has spiritual anchor.

Until this happens, all the talks on politics is academic and not fruitful. All political systems are impermanent. No matter how good it begins, people change so the system changes. With prosperity, there is greed which leads to corruption and chaos eventually. Talks become idle spinning of the wheel.

Better to talk about how we can help others to focus on spiritual path and relinquishing the grasping of views.

[Modus.Ponens]

Maybe this article provides further insight into olympic ethics in these countries.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -bars.html



I think the main thing I learned in this thread is that arguing against communist regimes and marxist theory is facing multiple "no true scotsman" falacies from their appologists. In the end no argument is valid for the communist "purist". Meanwhile, tens of millions of people died. And tens of millions more were enslaved.

[Will]

I think the main thing I learned in this thread is that arguing against communist regimes and marxist theory is facing multiple "no true scotsman" falacies from their appologists. In the end no argument is valid for the communist "purist". Meanwhile, tens of millions of people died. And tens of millions more were enslaved.

Quite so, that is why I picked the Victims of Communism site. It is light on argument and long on personal testimony and experience. Like their new series of reports, "Our Lady in Havana".

http://blog.victimsofcommunism.org/the- ... d-fantasy/

[chownah]

Maybe this article provides further insight into olympic ethics in these countries.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -bars.html



I think the main thing I learned in this thread is that arguing against communist regimes and marxist theory is facing multiple "no true scotsman" falacies from their appologists. In the end no argument is valid for the communist "purist". Meanwhile, tens of millions of people died. And tens of millions more were enslaved.

If you argue against totalitarian regimes then I am with you 100%...or if you talk about the miscarriage of justice and the unhuman atrocities that occur in EVERY type of government then I am with you 100%. To say that "communism" across the board is the cause of these things can not be supported or at least I have not seen anything which supports that conclusion.

Totalitarian gov'ts always have some ideology to justify their claim to power. It used to be the divine rights of kings but in the 20th century the divine rights of kings did not fly any more because people had seen only too clearly that kings were not divine....so....totalitarian gov'ts adopted "communism" as their justifying principle but in fact they didn't actually adopt "communism" they created their own idealogical contortion which contained enough rhetoric elements of "communism" to fool people into thinking that they were implementing "communism". In retail sales it is called "bait and switch" which means to promise one thing but deliver something else.

My view on "communism" as espoused by past and present governments is that if a government (or a group of people who are trying to implement a government) claim to be "communist" then they should be watched very carefully because history has shown that "communism" does not work when implemented so whoever says that a gov't is "communist" is deluded and the delusion results in misrepresentation, dishonesty, and a gov'tal system which does not deliver what is promised. The problem with "communist" gov'ts is that their inability to deliver what is promised means that they have to be totalitarian to maintain power. But the problem is not with the ideology of actual "communism" as defined by those who "invented it" because that ideology is never implemented....the problem is with totalitarian gov'ts.
chownah

[practitioner]

Everything goes back to what I said before. Any kind of system, as long as it is made of people will ultimately degrade.

[Modus.Ponens]

Practicioner,

Naturally, every system of government degrades. Impermanence is implacable in all composed phenomena. But the question of which imperfect goverment can deliver us the least imperfect results is, in my opinion, very relevant. I think a fundamental step in search of a good enough form of government starts with the aknowledgement you made _ that of the imperfection of human beings and thus of human governments. But I don't think it should stop there.

We have seen time and again how the search for an Utopia ends up in horror. The belief that things would be almost perfect, or perhaps even perfect, if we just tried this or that system of government is dangerous for one reason: as soon as the notion of "the greater good" of this utopia trumps individual freedoms the results are human tragedy. That is what has happened in every utopian system, be it right or left, religious or secular. If individual rights and freedoms become obstacles to "the greater good", the declared enemies of the greater good, be they guilty or innocent, will be dehumanised, tortured or even killed.

The problem of communism is precisely that it sounds so altruistic and so ideal. It's very easy to declare an anti communist as a person against altruism. It's very easy to dismiss and dehumanise an anticommunist as some selfish and heartless exploiter of the oppressed. But the truth is that as soon as this is done by the people with power in the utopia, the declared enemies of "the greater good" will either be arrested, tortured, enslaved or killed. The only way of having a communist regime is if some country unanimously decides to be communist and the unanimity remains communist for decades. Otherwise, mass violence is the only way of installing a communist regime.

Liberal democracy, with respect for individual rights and freedoms, and the several variations we've come up with so far are not perfect. Far from it. But when you compare this with other systems, it's better. It's good enoguh.

[binocular]

But the truth is that as soon as this is done by the people with power in the utopia, the declared enemies of "the greater good" will either be arrested, tortured, enslaved or killed. The only way of having a communist regime is if some country unanimously decides to be communist and the unanimity remains communist for decades. Otherwise, mass violence is the only way of installing a communist regime.

The methods in different systems may vary, but the goals are the same.
In the end, there isn't that much difference between imprisoning a "political opponent" or ruining their reputation and making it impossible for them to find employment and earn a living: the goal is the same, that is to crush all opposition to the system.

In democratic systems, the methods for crushing opposition are more subtle than in some other systems, but just as effective, if not more.

Liberal democracy, with respect for individual rights and freedoms, and the several variations we've come up with so far are not perfect. Far from it. But when you compare this with other systems, it's better. It's good enoguh.

Democracies so far either had slaves (like in ancient Greece), or outsourced their dirty work and their cheap work, like modern capitalist countries do.

So whenever you think of all the wellbeing in some Western capitalist country, think of all the people in poor Asian, poor South-American and poor African countries who are working hard for pennies and whose countries are polluted by dirty industry -- just so that the capitalist country for which they work can look like the model of wellbeing and democarcy.