why is the red star still politicaly correct?

The number of 92 million does not include all wars with a Communist side, only wars "inspired by Communism". It is also interesting to see that this author ascribes 37 million of the 44 million deaths caused by "man-made famine" to Communism. Furthermore, the numbers he lists before his own are considerably less merciful towards Communism and its death toll.

Brzezinski
Not-war Dead: 80,000,000
of which due to Communist oppression: 60,000,000

Courtois
Victims of Communism: 85-100,000,000

Rummel
"Democides" - Government inflicted deaths (1900-87): 169,198,000
of which due to Communist Oppression: 110,286,000

Non-Democidal Famine (often including famines associated with war and communist mismanagement): China (1900-87): 49,275,000, Russia: (1921-47): 5,833,000

 

so...do we have a figure for executions/ work camp deaths under romanovs vs communists in russia ...anyone?

 

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The mere killing of one's own citizens is not necessary the proof of evilhood,
there can also be some arguments of when one's own brothers are in fact sundering themselves from the common wealth .
After all civil or religious wars are the usual way of deciding who is right and wrong .
The hard fact is that anglo saxon countries have been blessedly protected of the consequences of their own folies ,
being isolated by geography from strong neighboors could afford the luxury of dissent , develop such ridiculous concept as the pen being mightier than the sword and the delusion that judges are independent entities akin to angels

klagenfurt for ever !

 

I think the posters here are using the more commonly accepted view of what evil is. I think the vast majority of people would consider the wholesale slaughter of people to further one's own ambitions to be evil.
The pen is mightier than the sword and ideas do endure longer than men. A sword can kill a man but an idea once installed in the conciousness of a people cannot be killed with a sword. It could be killed with the pen. Convince people (and history) to change their ideas and you can eradicate an idea...but then that is just one idea replacing another.
More proof of the power of ideas.

 

Would that be aplicable to non totalitarian country and non-own poeple?

 

To get back OT...

There used to be a time when it was very PC, see this booklet:

 

IT WAS OUR ARMY while it was killing the wermacht... after ve day it once again became the tool of an evil dictator ...tiso ,yes its evil to kill innocents abroad to further ones own agenda ,,,,you mean like the nazis in poland and the ukraine , lebansraum ...the spilling of american blood and treasure while trying to promote democracy in a backward flyblown arab country might be foolish but its not evil warsaw ghetto =evil ...fighting insurgents while being constrained by roe in iraq =not evil ...civilians killed , yep ,sorry ,thats war in the 20th century ..ija takes nanking 1937 =evil...us marines retake hue 1968 =not evil ...hitler invades russia=evil ...allies invade normandy =not evil ...plo gunman kills 10 civillians on a bus =evil israeli jet kills 10 civilians while going after hezbolla hq =not evil ...if the us military wanted to kill every man,woman ,child and housepet in bagdad (as did moslem warlord ,tamerlane once) they could do it with a lot less trouble and expense than we endure at present ...but ...it would be evil..and us silly anglo saxon types strive to not be evil ...anymore...

 

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majorwoody , I sympatise with your feelings and share them
however to use morality and warfare in the same breath is making me uneasy .
War , by its very nature , escape the common test of proper behavior
it can and should be mitigated by good men but its nature is large scale organised murder ,

further there is always the risk of thinking well of one side and demonizing the opponent
.

 

jeag, i agree that we all view the world thru the prism of our own culture and upbringing ..imo ,war , in itself is not evil . war is the use of deadly force that is sometimes the only option there is left..to me , genocide is organized murder... the turks in armenia ,the nazis in poland and eastern europe ,the communist dictators ,stalin ,mao,pol pot , these were the forces of evil murderous repression in our time .makeing war against these forces was a just and noble thing . the allied armies were the good guys .the arsenal of democracy was a good thing .the pen IS mightier than the sword...peace ,freedom ,prosperity and tolerance are good things ...oppression ,coersion ,poverty and bigotry are bad things ..when servicemen throw their bodies into harms way while trying to kill the enemy ,its not murder ,its combat . calling all combatents murderers is left wing ,new age ,know nothing claptrap born in late sixties america ... the war to stop communist esxpansion was as just as the war against hitler communism was /is a bad thing ... useing deadly force is awfull ,wastefull and dehumanizeing... but . alas ..its the only alternative sometimes ,,.holding sit ins and singing "give peace a chance "would not stop roman legions in gaul nor the motorized rifle companies smashing thru nato ....when the police use deadly force to kill a deranged man swinging an ax in a schoolyard ,ITS A GOOD THING...i always try to see things through the other guys eyes and i try to be objective but im still not confused about what is murder and what is not...

 

I agree with your basic points, majorwoody, but your view is very slanted indeed. Communism as such is not evil - that is Cold War American propaganda. Regimes like those of Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot are decidedly evil but they're not the same thing as Communism and they cannot be so easily equated.

Also:

Surely I don't need to explain why this particular view is based on propaganda rather than facts... Promoting democracy isn't generally done by going to war, and it has never (by my knowledge) been succesful unless democracy was already in place in the targeted country before something went wrong.

Iraq is only part Arab. Large parts of it are not backward in any way, unless you consider Islam as such backward, in which case any country that publicly identifies itself as religious in whatever way is equally backward. I don't know what the "flyblown" designation is coming from but it keeps popping up in the right-wing descriptions of the situation in Iraq. It shouldn't matter to anyone what Iraq is like, what matters is how it is run (dictatorship vs democracy), isn't that true?

 

Unlike all those benign Communist systems we have seen throughout history? If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck etc we can safely assume it is a duck.

What about Japan and Germany after WWII? Neither was democratic prior to the war. Both had allowed a dictatorship to drive out any democracy that existed earlier.


ps..there is nobody posting on these forums that doesn't possess a slanted view. Choose your slant.

 

They were all totalitarian states with collectivised economies, not Communist states.

Germany may not have been democratic in 1939, but it certainly was in 1933 when Hitler came to power. This is why I said "before something went wrong". As to Japan, all the institutions of democracy (parliament in two chambers, codified national laws, etc) were in place since the late 1800s, they were just not formed by democractic elections.

Of course everyone on this forum has a slanted view one way or another, however we must all be on our guard for the spilling of blatant falsehoods to support our slanted views. This is why I commented on Majorwoody's post.

 

There seems to be several themes running through the discution

- evil , for me a politician mass murdering is not evil , its close , its politics
evil is doing something bad out of one's job description , like a doctor experimenting on live prisonners .

- perception of right and wrong ,exterminating all landlords can be seems as a good thing if one's is a dirt poor peasant ,
crushed into the dirt for generations

- war as organised murder ,to be sure soldiers are often noble souls ,still the whole business is pretty grim and definitely organised ,
I stand with general Sherman on this one

-There is a tendency to blacken the other side , it's quite natural and help to do quite unpalatable things ,
I'm certain that there were good nazis and good communists, honest , dedicated men and women

-as majorwoody state , one must trust one's moral reference and ethics,
more than uncertain propaganda or misguided enthousiasm , it is one own judgment of right and wrong wich justify us ,

on the aussie tv channel SBS there was a serie on the SS , one of the interviewed was send as a guard to auschwitz ,
saw what was happening and refused point blank to have anything to do with it ,

he got transfered

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jeag . im not sure about astrailia but here in the usa it would be hard for a politician to get elected were he to have any felonies on his record ..one murder would preclude someone from holding office ,mass murder should be enough to keep him behind bars for several lifetimes ..i think the carnage and murder most regretted by grant and sherman in the civil war would be the destruction of their own troops chargeing headlong into the rifled muskets and artillery of rebel positions as there was not much else they could do ..a precerser to verdun and flanders but sans machine guns and barbed wire...roel ,mabey ive been brainwashed with anti communist propaganda but where are /were these good and just communist states i have mistakenly lumped in with the bad ones.?..i know on paper marxist /leninism seems like a workable system ,in practice it always seems quite brutal and repressive..i know many of your proffesors in holland are anamored with the concept , here in the usa our academics often swoon and bat their eyes as well ..but so far not one has been able to point out a working model in the actual world...

 

There are none. However, the regimes mentioned above weren't Communist, and they weren't specifically evil purely because they tried to be Communist. That's all I'm saying.

Indeed, but because it seems workable in practice it cannot be considered evil in nature. No propagator of the ideas of Communism seems to intend evil to befall the nation where it is supposed to be implemented. As far as I know, some of the madmen who have become Communist leaders in the past may have thought it acceptable, but certainly men like Marx and Engels or the Mensjeviks would not.

You do? Please, name them.

Marxism is dying a pretty quiet death on most Dutch universities, and if you ask me, this is entirely right and well. If you think about it, the system makes no sense. However, one cannot argue that things are evil because they are Communist. Naive, certainly. Unrealistically idealistic, certainly. Evil, that is a very gross oversimplification resulting from decades of stigmatizing propaganda.

That is all I am saying. I am asking you to see it for what it is. Now for the love of all that's good, stop thinking I'm some kind of Communist sympathizer, because as I have repeatedly made clear on these forums, I am not.

 

As far as I see it, a state controlled economy may be restrictive and inefficient, but it is not evil... Censorship and propaganda may dissilusion the public, and deprive them of freedom... But though undesirable, I would not say that is "evil" either... It is when a country imprisons and executes its citizens for political control that I would say a government is "evil"...

North Korea and Stalins Russia are evil, however as far as I see it, Russia and Eastern Bloc countries in the 60's and 70's were not, as they did not commit any mass political crimes, they simply were less economically efficient and more socially repressive than the West...


The murders associated with communism are what make a system evil... However, social repression and economic underperformance... However undesirable... Are not typical crimes... Claiming that communism is evil for this reason would be hard to prove, as you are essentially holding the state responsible omitting to performing as well as it possibly can... Something no state can claim to do

As far as I am aware, the American constitution gives its citizens the right to freedom for persecution, freedom of speech, the right to vote etc. so the repressive political practises of communist countries may be intepreted as 'crimes' by American standards, however such notions never arose in Eastern European law until quite recently, thus there may have been no perceived problem in those countries...

General social repression such as censoring the televsion politically may not be the right thing to do, but I don't consider it to be "evil" by any standards... Total freedom of the public to do whatever they like would lead to total chaos, and is just as undesirable as total repression... Laws an regulations are needed to maintain peace and order in society... The question is to what extent must general social repression be extended, and whether (as in communisms case) an excess in socially repressive laws should account for a crime...

 

You sure about state controlled inefficientness ? Explain

 

Smeg:
Bit of an understatement me-thinks.
If that were the case, why the "Berlin Wall?"
East Germans left everything behind, and risked their lives to "escape" to the West... under threat of death if they were discovered. Many lost their lives in the attempt.
I doubt it was only because they were forced to drive Trabants.

Tim

 

Dosent communism manage resources and put them we're they're needed. Isn't that the most efficient system ?

I think it's lack of motivation cause of universal same wages in most jobs thats the problem

 

CSP, I think you know better than to ask such a question. Instead of replying in the traditional sense, let me reply by asking you another question:

Where has Communism been good for a country?

Look at the US (capitalism) in 1989. Look at the Soviet Union at the time. Which system resulted in the best economic situation?

You get one guess...