> I'm excited to read your next post about how Nazi Germany wasn't really that bad. Not exactly a good-faith reply to a substantial post, and the quote doesn't

> I'm excited to read your next post about how Nazi Germany wasn't really that bad. Not exactly a good-faith reply to a substantial post, and the quote doesn't even work to the thing you are trying to respond to. Hitler’s bad dude, and he’s usually counted as one of those victims of communism. Can you admit that a number that counts hitler and his soldiers as victims of communism might be a little overwrought? Deaths due to the prevailing political system are deaths due to the prevailing political system. Slaves forced into a life of servitude due to the prevailing political system are just as much slaves in a Corrections Corp of America prison as in a soviet gulag or a north korean camp, it matters not a whit your personal feelings on the moral complications of the death or the slavery and whether you feel the deaths from some systems are "excusable" or not inherently tied to the system (a grace you of course don’t extend). Again, the simple fact of the matter is that there are large-scale “excess deaths” and slavery and other morally repugnant outcomes that occur in large scale due to the nature of the capitalistic system and the way it treats problems that are not profitable to solve. If you can't accept that simple fact, then there is indeed no basis for a discussion. Can you even acknowledge that the body count of victims of capitalism is (substantially) greater than zero? I mean Pol Pot alone... analogous to your hitler comparison, can you not even disavow capitalism in such clear-cut cases of literal murder and death camps? Or Thailand and red drum killings? Do such things not taint the entire concept of capitalism, in the same way that you feel communism has been tainted? Even if the other victims of capitalism don’t matter to you… At the end of the day the “victims of communism” just isn’t a viable framing for the discussion. Atrocities and both high- and low-level oppression occur under capitalism too but people get very upset if you say it somehow represents a fundamental problem with the capitalistic system, but that’s the standard anything else gets held to. In the neoliberal consensus, communism is bad because of holodomor or NK slave camps (true) but capitalism is not bad because of pol pot or red drum killings or United States slave camps (false). And that means we can’t even have European-style state enterprises or worker-owned enterprises, because that’s all communism and dirty. Anyway honestly this is the problem with expats in general, people left for specific reasons and the ones who left are the ones who felt most strongly about an issue. Learned experience is one thing but you’re not exactly getting a balanced take on Cuba from some expat who had their family’s plantation expropriated either. Sure, your family lost your sugar farm, but living standards went up hugely for everyone else.