[Split From] Lies of WWI: Communism Inherently Unworkable?

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Originally Posted by Craig B (Post 10328966) You're, without doubt intentionally, smuggling stuff in here. I'm not attempting to justify people who committed crimes against humanity, and your obfuscation about "later amounts to" atrocities will not disguise that. I'm discussing, in the passage you cite, credulous supporters of the USSR who didn't believe that atrocities were taking place. They didn't believe that collectivisation had entailed famine or mass deportation. They knew nothing of the Purge, and believed that the Show Trials involved a limited number of people who were really guilty of state crimes. Everything they learned to the contrary they dismissed as bourgeois or fascist propaganda.

Oh, okay - sorry, I didn't understand it as such.



Not much I can say about it, really. Some certainly are foolish enough, I agree. No one this foolish and easily misguided should determine what the state policy should be. Ever. It's basically the reverse scientific method we learned from 9/11 twoofers: decide what the truth is, discard all evidence to the contrary and hail your chosen Truth^TM as the only possible explanation.

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I don't think the rank and file communists outside the USSR were insane. They were credulous and deluded. The leaders who did indeed commit the crimes, and concealed them behind a barrier of lies unparalleled in previous human history, weren't nutjobs either. They were tyrants and criminals.

Well, I would say some Communist leaders were outright nutjobs - Pol Pot certainly was and Kim Jong Un possibly is. You can determine who's insane and who isn't by whether they hide their actions or not. A nutjob will consider his work, however twisted and evil it is, as good and proper and will not hide it - and this is reasonably true for Pol Pot, who actually invaded and tried to ethnically cleanse Vietnam not long after the end of Vietnam war. He was outnumbered something like 20 to 1 in population, and even more so in weaponry and experience. A nutjob, clearly.



In that respect no Soviet leader was a clear-cut nutjob. Many of their key personnel were, but the leaders themselves weren't.



McHrozni

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