The world didn't take it as red - the rise of communism and why it ultimately failed

guardian.co.uk ^ | May 13, 2007 | Tim Gardam

[Tailgunner Joe]

Comrades: Communism, a World History
by Robert Service
Macmillan £25, pp624

Most chilling is Service's account of how the clinical targets of state industrial planning during Stalin's five-year plans were replicated in the extermination of political opponents. Decree 00447 in 1937 stipulated that 259,450 'anti-Soviet elements' should be taken into custody; a precise 28 per cent of them were to be executed. Stalin's famine in Ukraine in the Thirties is eclipsed by the 30 million estimated killed in Mao's Great Leap Forward. The most horrible quotation in the book is Mao's: 'How many people would die if [nuclear] war breaks out? There are 2.7 billion people in the world... if we take the most extreme situation, half die and half live; but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world become socialist.' ...

Deng Xiaoping's China succeeded where Gorbachev failed. It was Deng who coined the phrase: 'Seek truth from facts.' He set in train the market reforms that led to China becoming 'the only communist state which developed a viable economy by giving it over to capitalism'. Yet at the same time he ruthlessly retained, as at Tiananmen Square, the full apparatus of centralised control and the rigidity of the one-party state; and the labour camps.

As Service concludes: 'The communist order has been retained only as a means of rigorous political and ideological control; its economic and social components were blown to the four winds.' It remains the most unsettling question for liberal democracy today: on what terms do we really want China to succeed? A state that lets loose unbridled capitalism but secures the full despotic apparatus of Leninism may yet demonstrate that the victories of pluralism in 1989 were not the end of communism.

[Tailgunner Joe]

It is no accident that communism should have displayed the same faults everywhere it was tried, according to Service. The founding fathers, Marx and Engels, were themselves peace-loving intellectuals, but they accepted the need for violent revolution to usher in their world of equality and plenty. They claimed to have the answer to everything, which politicians found as useful as religious leaders have done in a quest for power. The roots of Marxism were totalitarian. - LINK

[the invisib1e hand]

hold on to your wallets...another “communism is dead” campaign.

[SunkenCiv]

The founding fathers, Marx and Engels, were themselves peace-loving intellectuals, but they accepted the need for violent revolution to usher in their world of equality and plenty.

...in other words, they weren't peace-loving. And it goes without saying that they were not intellectuals. Engels was a capitalist, and allowed Marx to sponge off him.

Perhaps in more ways than one...

[RayChuang88]

Communism failed for one reason: the suppression of individual human rights. If you've read Mao: The Unknown Story, Mao Zedong's political decisions may have killed 70 million Chinese citizens--a figure that makes the the Nazi Holocaust seem like a minor event in comparison.

I can confidently say right now that once the reign of Fidel Castro ends and Cuba turns away from Communism, we will find a shocking death toll on that island country that could be just as brutal as what happened in China.

[SunkenCiv]

"On July 28, 1937, [NKVD head, Nikolai] Yezhov sent Stalin a list of 138 names. Stalin scrawled 'Shoot all 138.'" -- The Commissar Vanishes by David King (p 132)