Posted on 12/11/2011 5:35:03 PM PST by 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.
*snicker* Thank you
Where should I start with what's wrong with Communism? First of all, why are you so willing to take a disastrously losing gamble with entire societies - Communism has always failed - I'm willing to bet that you don't bring anything to the table that hasn't been tried and failed miserably before.
With the state being supreme and the individual/private sector marginalized or worse, it is virtually inevitable that personal rights and freedoms will be suppressed, and that societal institutions that might oppose Communism will be outlawed or marginalized in one way or another, institutions such as religion and marriage. And how about the concept of private property, since everything belongs to the government. And of course individual initiative will be trashed, so no Communist society will be as successful as one where initiative is rewarded, rather than suppressed. And in Communism, bureacracy is always a horror.
Most leftists, including Communists have a severe disconnect between the their abstract ideals and any possible pragmatic implementation of them - a gap that is unbridgeable. Idealistic baby Communists such as you are are called 'useful idiots' by the self aggrandizers who eventually assume power under any regime that has a chance of becoming Communist, and that points out yet another failure of Communism - it divides society by its nature between a 'ruling elite' and a 'proletariat' class - hardly the egalitarianism that some imagine Communism promises.
So Communism comprehensively sucks for these and many other reasons, and you had best get a lot more serious about your thinking, IMO.
Where should I start with what's wrong with Communism? First of all, why are you so willing to take a disastrously losing gamble with entire societies - Communism has always failed - I'm willing to bet that you don't bring anything to the table that hasn't been tried and failed miserably before.
With the state being supreme and the individual/private sector marginalized or worse, it is virtually inevitable that personal rights and freedoms will be suppressed, and that societal institutions that might oppose Communism will be outlawed or marginalized in one way or another, institutions such as religion and marriage. And how about the concept of private property, since everything belongs to the government. And of course individual initiative will be trashed, so no Communist society will be as successful as one where initiative is rewarded, rather than suppressed. And in Communism, bureacracy is always a horror.
Most leftists, including Communists have a severe disconnect between the their abstract ideals and any possible pragmatic implementation of them - a gap that is unbridgeable. Idealistic baby Communists such as you are are called 'useful idiots' by the self aggrandizers who eventually assume power under any regime that has a chance of becoming Communist, and that points out yet another failure of Communism - it divides society by its nature between a 'ruling elite' and a 'proletariat' class - hardly the egalitarianism that some imagine Communism promises.
So Communism comprehensively sucks for these and many other reasons, and you had best get a lot more serious about your thinking, IMO.
Other Democide Related Documents On This Site"Democide vs genocide. Which is what?" "War isn't this century's biggest killer"
"Democide in totalitarian states: mortacracies and megamurderers" "The Holocaust in comparative and historical perspective" Graduate Syllabus on Repression and Democide
"Power kills: genocide and mass murder"
Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder Statistics of Democide (entire) |
With the passing of communism into history as an ideological alternative to democracy it is time to do some accounting of its human costs.
Few would deny any longer that communism--Marxism-Leninism and its variants--meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood. Yet there has been virtually no concentrated statistical work on what this total might be.
For about eight years I have been sifting through thousands of sources trying to determine the extent of democide (genocide and mass murder) in this century. As a result of that effort** I am able to give some conservative figures on what is an unrivaled communist hecatomb, and to compare this to overall world totals.
First, however, I should clarify the term democide. It means for governments what murder means for an individual under municipal law. It is the premeditated killing of a person in cold blood, or causing the death of a person through reckless and wanton disregard for their life. Thus, a government incarcerating people in a prison under such deadly conditions that they die in a few years is murder by the state--democide--as would parents letting a child die from malnutrition and exposure be murder. So would government forced labor that kills a person within months or a couple of years be murder. So would government created famines that then are ignored or knowingly aggravated by government action be murder of those who starve to death. And obviously, extrajudicial executions, death by torture, government massacres, and all genocidal killing be murder. However, judicial executions for crimes that internationally would be considered capital offenses, such as for murder or treason (as long as it is clear that these are not fabricated for the purpose of executing the accused, as in communist show trials), are not democide. Nor is democide the killing of enemy soldiers in combat or of armed rebels, nor of noncombatants as a result of military action against military targets.
With this understanding of democide, Table 1 lists all communist governments that have committed any form of democide and gives their estimated total domestic and foreign democide and its annual rate (the percent of a government's domestic population murdered per year). It also shows the total for communist guerrillas (including quasi-governments, as of the Mao soviets in China prior to the communist victory in 1949) and the world total for all governments and guerillas (including such quasi-governments as of the White Armies during the Russian civil war in 1917-1922). Figure 1 graphs the communist megamurderers and compares this to the communist and world totals.
Of course, eventhough systematically determined and calculated, all these figures and their graph are only rough approximations. Even were we to have total access to all communist archives we still would not be able to calculate precisely how many the communists murdered. Consider that even in spite of the archival statistics and detailed reports of survivors, the best experts still disagree by over 40 percent on the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis. We cannot expect near this accuracy for the victims of communism. We can, however, get a probable order of magnitude and a relative approximation of these deaths within a most likely range. And that is what the figures in Table 1 are meant to be. Their apparent precision is only due to the total for most communist governments being the summation of dozens of subtotals (as of forced labor deaths each year) and calculations (as in extrapolating scholarly estimates of executions or massacres).
With this understood, the Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the cultural revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is the second worst megamurderer. Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such as North Korea and Tito's Yugoslavia.
Obviously the population that is available to kill will make a big difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, in this century by far, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his crew likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of a population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot's rule of slightly over just over 2 to 1.
In sum the communist probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world total itself it shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century's international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone--one communist country-- well surpasses this cost of war. And those murders of communist China almost equal it.
Figure 2 shows the major sources of death for those murdered under communism and compares this to world totals for each source for this century. A few of these sources require some clarification. Deaths through government terrorism means the killing of specific individuals by assassination, extrajudicial executions, torture, beatings, and such. Massacre, on the other hand, means the indiscriminate mass killing of people, as in soldiers machine gunning demonstrators, or entering a village and killing all of its inhabitants. As used here, genocide is the killing of people because of their ethnicity, race, religion, or language. And democide through deportation is the killing of people during their forced mass transportation to distant regions and their death as a direct result, such as through starvation or exposure. Democidal famine is that which is purposely caused or aggravated by government or which is knowingly ignored and aid to its victims is withheld.
As can be seen in the figure, communist forced labor was particularly deadly. It not only accounts for most deaths under communism, but is close to the world total, which also includes colonial forced labor deaths (as in German, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies). Communists also committed genocide, to be sure, but only near half of the world total. Communists are much less disposed to massacre then were many other noncommunist governments (such as the Japanese military during World War II, or the Nationalist Chinese government from 1928 to 1949). As can be seen from the comparative total for terrorism, communists were much more discriminating in their killing overall, even to the extent in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Vietnam, at least, of using a quota system. Top officials would order local officials to kill a certain number of "enemies of the people," "rightists", or "tyrants".
How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with the absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government--the Communist Party--was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.
Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 from 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead from 1959-61). In total almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as refugees, as though the countries of Argentina or Columbia had been totally emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of Marxism-Leninism.
But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that. . . . In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers.
What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state's instrument of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family. The result is what we see in Table 1.
But communism does not stand alone in such mass murder. We do have the example of Nazi Germany, which may have itself murdered some 20,000,000 Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslaves, Frenchmen, and other nationalities. Then there is the Nationalist government of China under Chiang Kai-shek, which murdered near 10,000,000 Chinese from 1928 to 1949, and the Japanese militarists who murdered almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and others during world War II. And then we have the 1,000,000 or more Bengalis and Hindus killed in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 by the Pakistan military. Nor should we forget the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, particularly by the Polish government as it seized the German Eastern Territories, killing perhaps over 1,000,000 of them. Nor should we ignore the 1,000,000 plus deaths in Mexico from 1900 to 1920, many of these poor Indians and peasants being killed by forced labor on barbaric haciendas. And one could go on and on to detail various kinds of noncommunist democide.
But what connects them all is this. As a government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and as it is less democratic, then the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. There is more than a correlation here. As totalitarian power increases, democide multiplies until it curves sharply upward when totalitarianism is near absolute. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires, to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite have it, other causes and conditions can operated to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels is warranted.
Finally, at the extreme of totalitarian power we have the greatest extreme of democide. Communist governments have almost without exception wielded the most absolute power and their greatest killing (such as during Stalin's reign or the height of Mao's power) has taken place when they have been in their own history most totalitarian. As most communist governments underwent increasing liberalization and a loosening of centralized power in the 1960s through the 1980s, the pace of killing dropped off sharply.
Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever seen. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering liberal democracy.
* Unpublished essay, November 1993.** Note as of 1998: the case studies resulting from that effort were published in Death By Government; the statistics and statistical analyses are in Statistics of Democide.
This “true” communism - the part where the State can be abolished due to everyone living in perfect harmony - requires perfection to implement . Humans are inherently imperfect. Therefore humans will never be able to implement communism such that it achieves its goal.
In fact, in search of that goal, human nature has lead (and will lead) to millions of deaths.
We are not the Borg. We are people who have our own wants, wishes and desires from our lives. The State encouraging the freedom to pursue those goals is a much more desirable method of how government should approach governing.
And before you whine about things being "corrupted" that is exactly what it is every single time.
What part of this sounds "Christian" to you?
Did we toss out two of the Ten Commandments while I wasn't looking?
Central planning of everything, means there must be a method to enforce the plan,,otherwise, the plan is useless. Ergo,, every communist society always involves heavy repression and secret police.
Also, if in 100 years, in asia, central america, russia, europe, africa,, NOBODY has managed to implement it properly as you claim, what does that tell you about it’s usefulness?
And im sure you are already gone, but if not,,IBTZ
Your dream system cannot work without control over ALL people, and it does not work well even then. It is based on coercion.
Why do I think communism is evil? The body count.
How old are you? The ideals of communism sound good but they absolutely conflict with human nature and creation or natural law. So centralized power has to crack down on human nature and you end up with gulags and terrible need. The state won’t compete for the affection of the citizens with God. So they crush people who actually beleive in God beyond the State approved scope and doctrines (if faith is allowed at all).
If you were educated in the US, you probably don’t know anything about the reality of communist nations - present and past. The communists have put the Nazis to shame in the numbers of people mass murdered.
Sweetheat, do yourself a favor and let go of the idealism of communism and seriously seek out the reality of communism in practice. If after you know about the suffering and death of communism you still support it, I wish you very bad luck in life and if I were you, I would not want God to know the state of your dark heart. This is worse than embracing Nazism which was communism’s wannabe little sister.
The other part of this issue you have been left ignorant of is the ideology of our own system of constitutional freedom. I’m not talking about the current state of our nation which has stepped way outside the constitution in culture and law; I am talking about the ideals, history and debates of freedom upon which this nation rests and upon which our culture once rested.
People have spun your head around with disinformation and filled your heart with rage. Stop your well intentioned self and get your big boy pants on, quick.
Christianity and communism can not exist together you are one or the other.
what a maroon
Then you would argue wrongly. Communism destroys the will to work in people because the people who don't want to work, don't, and the few that do end up supporting those that don't. Hence the whole system caves in after a time. It has happened over and over.
The oldest argument for communism is the one you stated: That it just hasn't been done right yet. Each new group that tries it comes up with that lame excuse and each time it fails in the same way. After a few thousand or so times it is tried and failed you would think people like you would wise up.
I’ve been in three Communist countries, lived in one. I know what evil is and Communism is definitely evil. Just ask the citizens who live under Communism; they’re afraid to talk about it - is that cool with you? If it is, YOU have a problem.
Bullsh!t. It's about absolutely nothing more than a glorified something-for-nothing scheme hatched by crazed "intellectuals" and power-mad politicians to sucker-in support from the lazy, the depressed, the frightened and the gullible.
"This right to life, this right to liberty, and this right to pursue one’s happiness is unabashedly individualistic, without in the slightest denying at the same time our thoroughly social nature. It’s only that our social relations, while vital to us all, must be chosen - that is what makes the crucial difference." -- Prof. Tibor R. Machan
"...individualism is not antithetical to community. Rather, it can involve free association and a belief in an over-arching harmony of interests. In a free socety, individuals join with others because of love and mutual benefit, not because they are programmed or coerced." -- Prof. Clifford Thies
"One byproduct of individualism is benevolence -- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human beings. Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each others' rights."[as they do in institutionalized communism] -- Glenn Woiceshyn
"State-mandated compassion produces, not love for ones fellow man, but hatred and resentment. The breakdown of 'basic civility' and the rise of the welfare state occur concurrently." -- Lizard
"Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all." -- Financial Times, London, Nov 22, 2001
"The number of poor people who can't afford food for their children is a lot smaller than it used to be -- thanks to capitalism. Capitalism didn't create malnutrition, it reduced it. The globalization of capitalism from 1950 to the present has increased annual average income in the world to $7,000 from $2,000. Contrary to popular legend, poor countries grew at about the same rate as the rich ones. This growth gave us the greatest mass exit from poverty in world history.
"The parts of the world that are still poor are suffering from too little capitalism. Foreign direct investment in Africa today, although rising, amounts to only 1% of global flows. That's because the environment for private business in Africa is still hostile. There are some industry and country success stories in Africa, but not enough." -- WILLIAM R. EASTERLY
"To embrace a collectivist system ... and thereby jeopardize sustained economic growth, inevitably misallocate scarce resources, and almost necessarily perpetuate destitution, hardly merits moral acclaim. Indeed, intellectuals in general and church leaders in particular who bewail the continued existence of poverty absolutely defined, and who state that they yearn for a world in which the hungry are fed, the naked clothed, and the destitute housed, yet who ceaselessly undermine the very system which, to date, has best done what they claim to value most, are, surely, moral imbeciles." -- The Reverend Doctor John K. Williams
America is the most generous, charitable civilization in all of human history. And the reason is: its recognizing the value of each person and each family -- and its letting them keep the fruits of their labor for the most part -- and trade peacefully with whomever THEY choose to -- results in REAL good will.
You are a special kind of FAIL.
((TOL))
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