Why do you perceive Communism to be evil (Mice on the Menu for Christmas- Enjoy Kitties)

NeinNeinNein

[NeinNeinNein]

OK, this is not a flame thread. I'm genuinely curious why conservatives think Communism is so evil.

I am a Communist. I am also a God-fearing Christian, a tax-paying and loyal American, and a generally nice guy. Communism was perverted by third world despots and was never implemented fully in its true form.

Communism is about cooperation and good will. And it's important to note that economic success and cooperation are not mutally exclusive. In fact, I would argue greater cooperation among individuals leads to more prosperity and more overall happiness.

[jmacusa]

If religion is ‘’the opiate of the masses’’ Islam is herion.

[Still Thinking]

The only problem with Capitalism is that there tends to be unequal distribution of wealth.

That's not a bug, it's a feature! Seriously, different people desire wealth to different degrees. Some people will work 16 hours a day 7 days a week to accumulate it, others would rather have a part-time job and bike or relax or raise families or evangelize with the rest of their time; that's what they treasure, and they should have the opportunity to live that choice. So an uneven distribution of wealth alone isn't a sign the system isn't working.

[Fiji Hill]

Communism was perverted by third world despots and was never implemented fully in its true form.

In her book The Discovery of Freedom (New York: Day, 1943), Rose Wilder Lane argues, to the contrary, that communism was practiced for thousands of years by many of the world's primitive cultures, including American Indians. As a result, they remained primitive.

[Biggirl]

Enjoy kitties! =^..^=

[Tramonto]

Communism gives you the false belief it brings equality but what it does is create two classes of people, the political class and the enslaved class. The political class can control all aspects of the enslaved class under the guise of ‘equality’.

There are actually three classes in communism. The political elites, the slaves and the subhumans. The subhumans typically consist of Christians and capitalists.

[50mm]

Sorry, fellas - according to my atomically-synchronized timepiece, this troll somehow posted, then got zotted, before it was temporally possible for him/her/it to post to begin with.

The posts of noobs are delayed while Admin Moderator screens them. The moderator ZOTted the commie and then allowed its posts to go through.

[John S Mosby]

So, if Trotsky had run the Soviet Union and not Stalin,we would have a worker’s paradise, today? Sure, uh huh. Sheer utter lunacy. Read all the documents from this time— and please don’t post a polemic on how wrong Lenin was... and if he just......(fill in the blank).

Communism is flawed in it’s basic ignorance of human nature, and it’s insistence on eliminating the individual and incentive to better ones self for ones self. The dialectic fails in every possible way. Every single time it has been tried it has failed. It is contrary to nature, and therefore is destined always to fail.

[hope]

Communist believe they are god...You being a “God fearing Christian” should realize that the communist mentality is to replace faith in the Lord with faith in the government.

[ApplegateRanch]

As a “God fearing Christian”, you must be looking forward to the absolute theocratic rule in the Kingdom of God: how do you reconcile that with a desire for Communism, a Satanic lie?

[dynachrome]

back to your padded room neiny heiny.

[MarkL]

I realize that this account has been banned, but I'm going to reply to his post as if he were still here.

I am a Communist. I am also a God-fearing Christian,

Right here, we see that "NeinNeinNein" is confused. By definition, religion and communism cannot coexist. And not due to religion's "not playing nice." According to Marx, the "architect" of communism, religion subverts "the peoples'" loyalty to "the State." He did believe that on occasion, a state run religion can be helpful in bringing about an atheistic State, by manipulating those who insist on "clinging" to their religion. But the key to communism is that The State must be the ultimate authority, and must have the complete loyalty of "The People," something religion just doesn't promote.

Communism was perverted by third world despots and was never implemented fully in its true form.

This is part of the siren's call of the left... The belief that the ideas are good and right, that the "right people" have never implemented the ideas properly, THAT'S the problem. Of course, it's always the "true believers" who are certain they will succeed where everyone else failed. They refuse to believe that the entire philosophy is failed, from dialectic materialism (the core or Marxist economics) on, and actually lends itself to authoritarian and totalitarian styles of government

In fact, communism completely subverts the rights of the individual to the needs of The State. In that way, communism is incompatible with freedom, liberty, or individual rights.

Communism is about cooperation and good will.

Actually, communism REQUIRES the cooperation of all involved, which as I mentioned, lends itself to authoritarian or totalitarian governments. In fact, the requirement for cooperation is so great that anyone who doesn't want to cooperate will eventually be eliminated, either through the use of "reeducation" camps, gulags, or a bullet, usually with the cost of that bullet billed to the next of kin.

And it's important to note that economic success and cooperation are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I would argue greater cooperation among individuals leads to more prosperity and more overall happiness.

You've finally hit on something correct here, but you draw the wrong condition. Economic success REQUIRES cooperation between individuals. That's called "the free market." Where prices, supply, and demand are set by mutually agreed upon cooperation. Communism requires central control of the economy, where productivity, supply, distribution, and prices are all set by the central authority. Think about this for just a second... Think about the smallest local convenience store. How many products do you think the store carries... Several thousand? At the very least. Now think about this... Who determines what products are carried there. You can bet it's someone familiar with the needs of the community. They need to figure out just how much of each to order. The parent company needs to know how much all of their stores will need, and to use the best methods of distribution. Then the manufactures need to know what products should be produced in order to maximize their profits. This IS cooperation. Communism results in the central authority determining all of these. And to quote an old Dennis Miller bit, "The government can't pave the f*****g roads."

If you really examine communism and the philosophy behind it, you'll realize that individualism, freedom, productivity, and the ability to improve yourself and your standing are all the enemy of communism. Communism kills innovation and guarantees societal stagnation. The only way to get ahead is to "work the system." It you examine it closely, you'll notice that it tries to bring insect hive society to human beings. But it just doesn't "translate" all that well. Look at a bee hive. The workers are allowed to stay in the hive until they can no longer support the hive. Then they're banished from the hive and left to die. And drones? Once the queen has been fertilized and the survival of the hive ensured, ALL the drones are banished from the hive and left to die. Simply put, communism completely ignores human nature. The will to make the lives of your children better than yours. So it engenders corruption be its very nature.

Mark

[FreeKeys]

“From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.” — F. A. Hayek
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“If welfare and equality are to be primary aims of law, some people must necessarily possess a greater power of coercion in order to force redistribution of material goods. Political power alone should be equal among human beings; yet, striving for other kinds of equality absolutely requires political inequality.” — Tibor R. Machan in Private Rights and Public Illusions
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“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.” — F.A. Hayek

“Here is a truism about the wealth of nations: Zero-sum games do not increase it. Historically, the welfare of the poor always—always—depends on putting people in a position where their best shot at prosperity is to find a way of making other people better off. The key to long-run welfare never has been and never will be a matter of making sure the game’s best players lose.” — David Schmidtz
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“...the question becomes, are you going to have everyone play by the same rules, or are you going to try to rectify the shortcomings, errors and failures of the entire cosmos? Because those things are wholly incompatible. If you’re going to have people play by the same rules, that can be enforced with a minimum amount of interference with people’s freedom. But if you’re going to try to make the entire cosmos right and just, somebody has got to have an awful lot of power to impose what they think is right on an awful lot of other people. What we’ve seen, particularly in the 20th century, is that putting that much power in anyone’s hands is enormously dangerous.” — Thomas Sowell, in an interview in Salon 11-10-99
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“So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create ‘social justice’ is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity.” — Thomas Sowell
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“Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals.” — Lew Rockwell

“Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” — Prof. John Acton

“Communism is based on the BAD kind of selfishness (taking advantage of others without their permission, usually by having politicians and government control freaks do it for you), while free markets (and the greatness of America) are based on the GOOD kind of selfishness (taking care of yourself, your family, and whoever you want to — to the extent you want to — and being free to develop your life, your liberty, and your pursuit of happiness without interference).” - Bert Rand

“The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.” — Justice William O. Douglas

[VictoryGal]

Is it just me or has the number of trolls skyrocketed? DUmmies are extra frisky...

[sharkhawk]

My Mom was in Huta Stepanska, My Dad’s family was taken to Siberia by the NKVD in 1939. I had uncles and cousins killed at Katyn. Need I say more.

[Outlaw Woman]

Excellent :)

[driftless2]

"cooperation"

I think your post is meant as a joke, but free-market/capitalist economies exhibit far more cooperation than socialist economies. No capitalist makes a dime unless there's a lot of cooperating going on between him and his prospective customers. In fact cooperation is the essence of capitalism.

[John S Mosby]

Indeed, Castro paid Bolivians to turn Che in— ain’t now way Che’ was going to be more in control than Fidel. Just like Stalin.

[The_Reader_David]

Generally, conservatives (from Burke onward) have regarded as evil all political projects and social philosophies which are ill-adapted to human nature as it actually exists.

Communism of the Marxist variety (what is usually meant by large C “Communism”) was arguably anti-human in its conception: its notion of all of history is the “material dialectic”, without regard for the higher, spiritual nature of Man, which you surely acknowledge as you claim to be a Christian, indeed it denies that higher nature, reducing Man to a mere economic cipher, a member of a “class” who must pursue the interest of his “class”. Its notion of the perfectibility of society and of humanity in “Communism” is a denial of the reality of the Fall. In its practice, every attempt at using Marx’s ideas as a basis for social organization has lead to mass murder, sometimes on a lesser scale as in Cuba, sometimes on a vast scale as in the case of the Terror Famine in the Ukraine or in Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. To secure the “cooperation” of the “masses”, whom it purports to uphold, in every instance it has lead to the creation of a police state.

Now, perhaps, since you gave a pseudo-definition involving cooperation and good-will, you really meant “communism”, with a lower-case c, meaning the word with its denotation unsullied by Marx’s inhuman ideology. A great many conservatives, particularly those adhering to traditional Christian piety, whether Orthodox or Latin, have a warm spot for a particular instance of communism: cenobitic Christian monasticism, which is most assuredly not evil, but a great good.

Unfortunately, one cannot organize whole nations as monasteries. The communism of a monastery only works because all the members of the community are there voluntarily, striving for sanctity, willing to embrace poverty, willing to abandon their own will to obedience to a spiritual father, and because the community exists in the context of a larger society.

All historical instances of successful communism have four features in common:

1. They have a religious basis
2. Participation is voluntary.
3. They are small scale.
4. They exist in the context of a larger society with with the commune (be it monastery, kibbutz, or one of the utopian communes of 19th century America) can trade (or live off of an endowment established in the context thereof).

And, because it cannot be used as the basis for organizing a whole society (cf. Hayek and vonMises for critiques of why), the attempt to impose even a Christian humanist version of communism untainted by Marx on a whole society would be evil: the delusion that something (anything) which doesn’t actually work should work, will work next time, or the like is the root of many evils, yes evils committed even by men of good will. The communist who fancies he is benefitting society by imposing a system based on cooperation (by those at least intermittently unwilling to cooperate) and good-will (on fallen men, who more often than not lack good-will) becomes the sort of tyrant C.S. Lewis denounced:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Actually, it can be argued more cogently that it is capitalism, not communism that is based on cooperation and good-will. Buying and selling require agreements between buyer and seller, the freedom to enter into contracts (which require good-will in their negotiation) is the basis for most economic activity in a capitalist society. Of course, since it is fallen men, most of whom are far from saintliness who engage in these activities, there are needs of courts to adjudicate disputes, laws against fraud, and the like. And, as we see, it works, precisely because it is adapted to human beings as we actually are.

[denydenydeny]

Communism was perverted by third world despots and was never implemented fully in its true form

I honestly don't think this guy is kidding because this is EXACTLY what leftists always say: Never mind all those millions of dead and the gulags and execution cellars and starvation deaths, all we need is a few modifications and we'll have paradise. Well, no thanks.

[John S Mosby]

So, if Trotsky had run the Soviet Union and not Stalin,we would have a worker’s paradise, today? Sure, uh huh. Sheer utter lunacy. Read all the documents from this time— and please don’t post a polemic on how wrong Lenin was... and if he just......(fill in the blank).

Communism is flawed in it’s basic ignorance of human nature, and it’s insistence on eliminating the individual and incentive to better ones self for ones self. The dialectic fails in every possible way. Every single time it has been tried it has failed. It is contrary to nature, and therefore is destined always to fail.Goodbye.