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Authoritarian regimes tend to commit atrocities. Unchecked power tends to lead to abuse of power. This is true regardless of what ideology helped the regime ta
by klibertp 6y ago
Authoritarian regimes tend to commit atrocities. Unchecked power tends to lead to abuse of power.
This is true regardless of what ideology helped the regime take root. Recognizing this fact is not whitewashing anything.
To give you a less personal (to you) example, the Islamic State of Irak and Levant filmed and uploaded executions of hundreds of people, and killed many, many more people off-screen. They have "Islam" in their name.
Should the page about "Islam (religion)" put ISIL front and center, despite them existing for less than a 1‰ of time Islam existed, and having similarly little adherents in comparison to global population of muslims?
- Const-me 6y agoI dunno man, communism is different. About 25% of the world population are Muslims, roughly 25% of modern countries are predominantly Muslims, yet as you wrote in the comment, ISIL is a small percentage in both space and time. For communist countries, these atrocities seem more like a rule than an exception. Soviet Union, countries of Eastern Block in 20-th century, China – they all did horrible things. Wikipedia’s articles about fascism and nazism do mention war crimes and genocides, rightfully so. Yet Wikipedia’s article about communism does not. They do have two links in the “Related topics” section, but other links in that section aren’t particularly related, they also link to capitalism and trade union there.
- klibertp 6y agoThere's a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_... in the See also section of Communism article... EDIT: I see it's probably the same link you saw in Related topics, so it's mentioned twice on the page. Should it be mentioned in the text of the article? I don't know. There's similarly no mention of crussades on the Christianity page.
- Const-me 6y agoThe “nazism” article has links to night of the long knives and holocaust in the very first section. The “communism” article links to the mass murders from the very last page, in an article about 10 pages long. Looking at the edit history of that article, I see the edits to change that are systematically reverted: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Communism&type=revision&diff=1010679793&oldid=1010665304 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Communism&type=re...
- klibertp 6y agoOk, I'm not going to defend that, you might be right that the great leap forward or the great famine should be mentioned. The only defense I can think of is that neither is central to the ideology of communism, while holocaust arguably was central to nazism. But, I'm not an editor, and I agree omitting it looks a bit suspicious. I wouldn't object to writing something like "aside from theory of communism, most communist governments practiced [links to police-state, mass killings, etc. here]" into the summary.
- kaba0 6y agoCommunism as an ideology is absolutely not at the same level as nazism, that’s ridiculous. Should capitalism include in the introduction the outsourcing of work to third-world countries where people work for pennies in brutal conditions, the acceleration of climate change, the wars directly caused by oil, and the like? Communism is social and economical ideology, whereas nazism is straight up about killing people. Do not forget the evils of the Soviet Union, but it is not equivalent to communism. And the former does include in the introduction the mass famines, so I don’t see what’s the problem here. And I say that as an Eastern European.
- Const-me 6y ago> Do not forget the evils of the Soviet Union, but it is not equivalent to communism. Yep, also China and North Korea. And in recent history, the evils of Cambodia, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Vietnam, Cuba, Ethiopia. I don’t believe these are coincidences or implementation issues, the list is too long for that. Can’t explain with soviet occupation either, some countries on the list are very far away and never had Soviet military presence.