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This is called the "No true Scotsman" fallacy, and it's one of the sloppiest fallacies you can commit. It's astonishing how many people cling to it with regard
by mynameishere 15y ago
This is called the "No true Scotsman" fallacy, and it's one of the sloppiest fallacies you can commit. It's astonishing how many people cling to it with regards to Marxism. The same thing can be said of anything. The Nazi regime wasn't really fascist. Obama isn't really a liberal. Bush wasn't really a conservative, etc, etc. All of those statements are true. And no true conservative would start a war of aggression. And no true Marxist would butcher millions.
In fact, the Soviets were constantly justifying their policies based on the writings of Marx and Lennon.
- ehsanu1 15y agoBased on Wikipedia's definition of this fallacy, I don't think your examples fit. From Wikipedia: No true Scotsman is an informal logical fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion.[1] When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule. The key part is "without reference to any specific objective rule", which I don't think you're taking into account.
- ashconnor 15y agoThis isn't the case. Marx differs from other ideologies in that it was Karl Marx himself that wrote The Communist Manifesto. I can't do the same for most other ideologies; there's no Conservative Manifesto as it were. With that in mind we can take Marx's book and compare it against history in these countries. If you do this then you will come to the conclusion that these regimes were not Marxist and in fact not even close to socialism.