It needs to be reduced into component elements, the elements crushed into dust, and the dust recycled.
Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Here’s some facts:
1. The Soviets purged all previous materials from the Czarist days when they took over, except for a collection owned by the KGB. This was all done by the gov’t, in a country where literacy was not commonplace, so it didn’t require the public to bring in books- they just went and got them, and disposed of them quietly. Then it was just a matter for them to make sure nothing got published they didn’t like. Ask your opponents why samizdat was necessary, if the Soviets were so ‘tolerant’.
2. The Soviet system created poverty for all except for the communist party members, who had the best of everything, meaning toilet paper with no splinters. No truly classless society is possible, and the Soviet Union is a good example of what happens when it is tried.
3. You want some authors to read, try Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Herta Muller, and Vaclav Havel.
Good luck arguing with communists though. They are usually best dealt with using an M1 Garand....
Go to Youtube and get a bunch of Milton Friedman videos, especially his interview with Phil Donahue.
Friedman will save having to do a bunch of research, and he is articulate and easy to hear.
Pro Commies are ALWAYS athiests. If you are a Christian raise the level of the discussion to wittnessing to them about the Lord. If you are not a Christian...
Soviet Union did not ever burn books. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The USSR merely banned them. One of my employees, a former dentist in the old communist Bulgaria, told me banned books were written on tiny slips of paper and carefully passed from person to person.
Democrat friend, Marxist friend, liberal friend, progressive friend...etc.
ALL OF THE ABOVE ARE OXYMORONS!!!!! ( Yes!, I am shouting!)
Get them out of your life. **ALL** of the above are either too evil or too stupid to be a friend.
I don’t agree with the theory of total disengagement, at least not until you’ve broken one or two of their main pillars. That doesn’t mean you have to win; it only means you have to show there is a substantial body of scholarship for which they have failed to account. Calmly make them look uninformed. They hate that.
Ignore the Fahrenheit 451 nonsense. An author can say whatever he likes, but his interpretation of history is not history. Don’t waste your time on authorial interpretation. Stay with history. It is your best friend.
Their twin premises that Nazi’s were rightists and that book burning logically flowed from their right-wing aspirations are both demonstrably false, as it is relatively easy to show the Nazis were hard left socialists. However, the arguments can be technical and can entangle you in endless hours of trying to set shared definitions of terms. Probably not worth the effort in a hostile setting.
Their premise that Stalin was a nice guy who got blind-sided by a widespread famine is their exposed underbelly. Go for that, as there is much history and a huge churn of modern of scholarship to help you. Stick with obvious, indisputable fact. Let them wander off into wild reinterpretation if they must; you only need to keep your focus and leave a record that their historical facts (or lack thereof) are part of a long-standing campaign to rehabilitate Stalin’s regime through a policy of systematic disinformation. Break them there, and their other arguments become clouded with doubt. But even in this, do not spend inordinate time wrangling with them over nitpicks. Let your main cannon roar, and leave them to pick up the little pieces on their own. You will not dissuade them in a single session.
Some resources on the Ukrainian Famine to get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor
Do valiantly.
Peace,
SR
This argument about book burning appears to be a “watch the right hand, not the left hand” argument.
Whether they burned books or not is really immaterial. Tens of millions of lives were lost under the ideology of a centrally controlled state, regardless of what letters come before the suffix ‘ism’.
What modest praise of a system, to say “They may have made tens of millions disappear into the Gulags without a trace, and they may have allowed 20 million Ukrainians starve to death, but at least they didn’t burn books”.
Socialism is the maturation of iniquity; evil incarnate as a governing state.
The German Army was even sent to the Soviet Union to train to avoid the limitations imposed by the Versailles treaty.
Communist countries have seen the greatest and fastest growth in their standard of living. Communism brought Russia out of a backward existence and made it a world power in little more than a generation.
When one starts with nothing, a little of anything is enough to raise their standard of living from squalid to squalid with a non-leaky roof. The communists "freed" the Czar's peasants and made them communist slaves, forcing them to work on land they didn't own for crops they could not keep. Throwing a loaf of bread a day to the peasants is what this idiot is calling "raising their standard of existance".
Freedom is hard. Any idiot can scratch out a life under communism because the state provides with the barest of necessities.
Ask this bonehead if she's ever been to a communist country.
It needs to be reduced into component elements, the elements crushed into dust, and the dust recycled.
Liberals love to cling to minor details like religious fetishes. The whole “only the Nazis burned books” meme is completely idiotic, since
A) It is essentially meaningless if the Soviets only “censored” books while the Nazis “burned” them. There’s no qualitative difference between burning, pulping, dumping, cutting up, or burying a book in a landfill.
B) What does this idiot think happened to the works of Trotsky, which were printed in editions of hundreds of thousands in the 1920s? And, yes, Solzhenitsyn records many public instances of Soviet book=burning, many of them PREDATING the Nazis.
Fahrenheit ? who cares
Soviets burned book and anything else they wanted. Send them a free copy of Solzhenytzin’s Archipelag Gulag.
Ukraine in it’s history never had a famine.. that is right. In hundreds of years and innumerable wars no famines. Why? Because you can stick a stick in the soil there and it will grow with no effort. There are no real droughts or other climatological events that cause it. Soviets take power and you have a famine.. Stalin created it, it is as simple as that.
As far as I’m concerned, there is only one reason to debate a far-left lunatic. That’s if the debate occurs on a public forum, in which case debate would signal to the lurkers that there are actually reasoned arguments refuting whatever it is the loony leftist said. The idea being that the lurkers might not be very informed on the subject, and you need to make them aware of the rational point of view.
The best way to engage in such a debate is to pick ONE fallacy out of their rant (usually the whole rant consists of fallacies built upon fallacies) and to thoroughly debunk it. They’ll usually come back with pointing out another of their fallacies—”Well, what about ___? HMMM?”—as if they’re making some sort of great point. You then proceed to debunk that fallacy. Don’t try to tackle every single fallacy—you can’t. The only goal is to make them realize that no matter what lie they say, you can refute it—and this is often enough to make them go away.
You will never convince them to accept the truth. In some cases, they’re mentally ill; in others, they’re full of bitterness and self-loathing. Whatever the root of their leftism, they will not let go of it.
Who is the bigger fool? The fool, or the fool who argues with him?
USSR!
It must be really cold and lonely up there.
The Soviets used the swastika before the Nazis, in 1917.
http://rexcurry.net/ussr-socialist-swastika-cccp-sssr.html