Today we call it Obamacare!
P.S. don't forget Chairman Mao.
Mass Murder.
Today we call it Obamacare!
P.S. don't forget Chairman Mao.
And Reverend Wright tells us that Black Liberation Theology is communism (see youtube). Is there any doubt what his plans would be if he were in charge? Oh, but don’t worry. The man now in charge only sat as a member of Wright’s congregation for 17 years.
They are both genocide. When you get to that level, it is silly to play the who was worse game from numbers, both are equally bad. One just had more time and different systems that resulted in greater numbers. The level of evil isn’t different, just the efficiency of action.
I watched some of Piers Morgan’s interview with Netanyahu last night. They were discussing Libya, and at one point, Morgan casually mentioned that what Gadaffi is doing really amounts to genocide. Netanyahu kept a straight face, but I was thinking that this comment was pretty darn inappropriate.
freedom, silly
Comicide.
Yes, look at any commie country and youll see a THIN have class and a very very thick have not class. Basically a tiny minority lives the life of luxury while the rest work (and starve) to feed the haves. I’ve seen it up close and personal and I’m glad to be an American....very very glad. Living among such a culture would be an eye opener for the Left’s useful idiot class. What the terminally stupid of this country are clamoring for is slavery. Is that what they really desire?
That said lets not forget our evil, abortion, when discussing Hitler, Stalin and genocide. Can we condemn Hitler and Stalin and not, at the same time, ourselves? I think not b/c we’ve murdered at least a full generation for nothing more than money and convenience. Not only have we committed murder but we preyed on those we should have protected b/c they were powerless to defend or speak for themselves.
Actually there is a name for what Stalin did, “Holodomor”, which is translated to “killing by hunger”
The “difference” was that Hitler’s actions were primarily racial while Stalin’s were primarily political although there is plenty of overlap between the two. As for their victims, there was no difference.
It’s striking to continue to read how one is (rightfully) vilified - that being Hitler - and one is explained away - that being Stalin - by our leftist friends.
I am more convinced than ever that leftism (or progressivism) has NO moral compass; it exists only for the sake of power over the individual.
I should think that the American abortionists have far exceeded anything that Pol Pot, Mao Tse-Tung, Stalin, and Hitler could ever have done. Well over 50 million and counting . . . Can anyone top that??????
I think it is legitimate to characterize the communist outrages of the 20th century as a holocaust. In terms of their brutality and sheer numbers, the atrocities of Stalin, Mao, and Castro certainly rival Hitler’s.
Genocide on steroids?
Because of the fact that Soviet was on the winners side at the end of WWII, their crimes against the Human race prior, during and after the war never got scrutinized by Western media and intellectuals.
Russia still is a mess not wishing to become a part of Western Civilization.
We Swedes have fought them for ages. The people are all right, their leaders are not.
In my opinion, a particular problem with understanding the breadth and scope of Stalin’s mass murders, is the fact that he didn’t allow photographs to be taken, it was a punishable by death offense.
We have those horrible photographs of the German prisoner of war camps, and the crematoriums, and piles of bones, but Stalin did his murdering in secret. In fact, in the many instances where he actually had the soldiers kill whole groups of people (and pay them extra wages for doing so), he would then have those soldiers who had performed his killings then killed by others, and then those killed; and on and on it went. It’s actually pretty amazing we know what we do about those horrible times/crimes.
And then the fact of the Gulags located in the frozen tundra. There will come a day when that land finally unfreezes, when the bones of the millions who suffered and died there may finally be uncovered (what with global warming and all /s ) and the world will be amazed.
False utopias always end up with, “Up against the wall, mo’fo!”
Oddly enough, I do not equate what Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the Japanese militarists did; with what Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco did.
The difference is that of “the European way” vs. “the Asiatic way”. Two very different philosophies of life and even reality.
The European way emphasizes the importance of the individual, for in that philosophy, the individual retains all authority and responsibility. It is a hallmark of our civilization, and our society is imbued with the idea.
But it is not a universal idea. In Asia, the individual is less important than his family, and his family is less important than his extended family or clan, his village, his region, and his nation.
A rough way of describing this in practice would be that if a man were to offend the king or emperor in the West, he might be killed; but were he to do so in Asia, his entire village might be put to the sword.
Westerners tend to look at things with the perspective of individualism. As an American, if you look at the history of the US Civil War, what leaps out at you is that it is an event of individuals, hundreds of names that define the events.
But on the far side of the world, at about that same time, and much more horrific and destructive, was what was likely the *second* bloodiest conflict in human history after World War II. And most Americans haven’t even heard of it.
The Taiping Rebellion. 20-30 million killed, tremendously eclipsing the perhaps 700,000 dead of the American Civil War. Yet even in China, except by a few scholars perhaps, only a few individual names of top leaders are remembered, because it was not a “war of individuals”.
But back to more modern times. What so horrifies us all about Hitler’s genocide is, first of all, that it was an educated and “industrial genocide.” We are shocked that “civilized” people with university liberal arts educations, would turn into such barbaric and murderous, hate filled monsters.
And it is the individuals who were destroyed that also impact our imaginations. Real people with real names, many of whom were also highly educated and civilized.
Yet who did Stalin kill? Perhaps the only reason we are concerned is because Russia is half European and half Asiatic, which gives it a split personality. We care about those peoples West of the Urals, because they are more like us. We see in them some of the appreciation of individuality that we cherish.
But the nameless “mujiks?” The mostly uneducated Russian peasants who a mere generation before had been slaves to the great landholders? Their only hint of individuality was recognition from the Russian Orthodox church that they had souls. But little else.
Genocide is the destruction of a people, as a people. An effort to wipe out an entire breed or culture of people.
The European Jews were up to their eyebrows in culture and individuality. Thus the effort to exterminate them was openly and clearly one of genocide, that the Nazis had mulled over at length during the Wannsee conference and later.
Stalin’s orders, according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were vague and based on quotas. Directions to his secret police just to round up and kill a given number of a group of people, indifferent to any individual trait.
While utterly inhuman, this is an effort at control, not extermination. Humans exist only in the generic, in such schemes.
An odd example was Stalin’s obsession with building immense water dams. For this he ordered his secret police to just round up a given number of university students, not out of hatred or punishment, but just because they were a group. They were sent out to the hinterland to build dams, where countless numbers of them perished due to starvation, overwork, and disease.
Mass murderous in the extreme, but not genocidal.
Likewise, one of the most restive peoples during Stalin’s reign were the (surprise) Chechens. And though the Soviet army punished them hard and a lot, though they very well could have, there was never any intention to eradicate them as a people.
An omelette?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,753448-1,00.html
“RUSSIA: Stalin’s Omelette”, TIME, Oct. 24, 1932.
Hope and Change?
“In the spring of 1933 they died at the rate of more than ten thousand a day. “The only meat was human.” That fall the United States extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union.”
Let’s see ... what change in US politics would have led to diplomatic recognition of the USSR in 1933?