4 ms·

Killing off sparrows is only one example of crazy/random/destructive policies that are a regular occurrence under communism. Some others (not in any order): -

Killing off sparrows is only one example of crazy/random/destructive policies that are a regular occurrence under communism. Some others (not in any order): - The USSR sometimes overproduced cigarettes, so ran ad campaigns to convince people to start smoking. - The Holomodor, in which Ukraine was starved by exporting (stealing) all its grain, including the grain needed to plant next season's harvest, and when starving peasants tried to flee they were then banned from leaving. - In modern China, ghost cities full of buildings nobody is living in. - Stalin's mass execution of basically everyone who mattered in Soviet society, including virtually all of his military and intelligence leaders, which put the USSR into such a weakened state that Hitler is on record as saying now is the time to strike because the Soviets will never be so weak again. - The single-minded obsession with steel production. - In NK the government maintains a list of approved hair cuts. There are 28 approved styles and anyone with a haircut that's not on the list will be punished. Additionally, punishment for crimes are often levelled against the families of the criminals. It's inevitable that these sorts of things happen because the goals of communism are deeply unnatural (e.g. banning markets, central planning) and can therefore only be implemented through totalitarian power, which lacks sufficient bandwidth and flexibility to incorporate feedback loops. So everything goes off the rails because the people making decisions are blinded to the outcomes.

CrackerNews 4y ago
The goals of communism are to resolve class contradictions, which "naturally" happened in the case of feudalism ending. Communist states attempt to accelerate and resolve them through stages. This is where they can seem "unnatural". On the flip side, there may not be anything to inherently prevent capitalism from doing similar things too. The USSR tried to have a much more planned and state managed version of capitalism to progress through the stages of socialism. The central planners decided where profits went instead of private property holders. If these property holders were to have control of a political system, then there is the potential they could enforce similar things.
- revelio 4y ago
  I'm really not sure that anything in the USSR could be described as capitalism, not even a state managed version of it (which sounds like a contradiction). They really saw capitalism as the enemy and one of Stalin's weird mental hangups was an insistence on seeing Great Britain as the center of global capitalism.

CrackerNews 4y ago

The goals of communism are to resolve class contradictions, which "naturally" happened in the case of feudalism ending. Communist states attempt to accelerate and resolve them through stages. This is where they can seem "unnatural". On the flip side, there may not be anything to inherently prevent capitalism from doing similar things too. The USSR tried to have a much more planned and state managed version of capitalism to progress through the stages of socialism. The central planners decided where profits went instead of private property holders. If these property holders were to have control of a political system, then there is the potential they could enforce similar things.

revelio 4y ago
I'm really not sure that anything in the USSR could be described as capitalism, not even a state managed version of it (which sounds like a contradiction). They really saw capitalism as the enemy and one of Stalin's weird mental hangups was an insistence on seeing Great Britain as the center of global capitalism.