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I don't see how hammer and sickle, a symbol used by multiple governments to oppress and murder millions of people, is in any way more appropriate than any far r
by Grue3 10y ago
I don't see how hammer and sickle, a symbol used by multiple governments to oppress and murder millions of people, is in any way more appropriate than any far right symbol.
- lacampbell 10y agoI too am always baffled about how much more accepted communist imagery is than Nazi imagery. Mao and Stalins death counts far outstrip Hitlers. Also anyone advocating nazism in public would be rightly shouted down but you get heavily upvoted posts here advocating all sorts of nonsense proven to kill millions.
- giggles_giggles 10y agoEverybody read Elie Weisel's Night in school but almost nobody's heard of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, for one thing..
- vidarh 10y agoI have never seen anyone here advocating "all sorts of nonsense proven to kill millions" without getting shouted down for it. I would love to see examples (well, not love, but you get the point). I have seen people here advocating anti-authoritarian socialist ideologies of the types that would get you executed by regimes like those of Mao and Stalin.
- namlem 10y agoCommunist death tolls are mostly due to economic mismanagement, whereas the Nazis were intentionally exterminating people. Obviously many people were killed in the gulags, but that number is far smaller than the numbers killed in Nazi death camps or in the famines which resulted from the aforementioned mismanagement.
- bonzini 10y agoSome of the mismanagement however was intentional (for example in Ukraine) and/or enforced to a criminal extent (thinking of China here). People died of starvation because their harvest was taken away in its entirety.
- lacampbell 10y agoDown-voted for talking truth about the largest mass murders of the 20th century. Kind of makes you not want to be here, doesn't it?
- bonzini 10y agoOh well. And I am myself European socialdemocratic, which should be just a little bit short of bolshevik for the American POV. :)
- kofejnik 10y agothis is simply not true, please read up on Holodomor, forced Chechen relocation, etc. Stalin was pretty much as evil as Hitler.
- lacampbell 10y agoFYI Holocaust revisionists make similar arguments.
- vidarh 10y agoAs someone far left, I sort of agree. The hammer and sickle was conceived for the Soviet Union, and the Bolsheviks took power in a coup against the socialist provisional government that actually had popular support. It's a symbol of a movement that grabbed power in a coup and then went on to outlaw, persecute and kill socialists and communists with equal fervour as they killed reactionary supporters of the Czar (who had been deposed months before their coup). At the same time it is in an odd position because it was also very early on, before it was widely known what was happening with the Soviet government, adopted by anti-authoritarian socialist and communist groups, some of whose members risked their life against Stalin, and it was later knowingly adopted by groups opposed to the Soviet regime, such as e.g. the Trotskyist 4th International, as well. This makes it quite different to symbols that are singularly attached to totalitarian governments and movements, in that it also has nearly as long history of use by their opponents. Personally I think it's unhelpful to use it, but I also understand those who use it as an attempt to "reclaim" socialist imagery that has been relentlessly abused.