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The ideology that underpinned Stalin’s policies of mass extermination died in 1989 with the fall of communism, but the racism that drove Hitler’s lives on in my

by blfr 12y ago

The ideology that underpinned Stalin’s policies of mass extermination died in 1989 with the fall of communism, but the racism that drove Hitler’s lives on in myriad forms that continue to trouble the world today. The opposite is true. While countries like North Korea and Cuba continue to experience the joys of communism in all its range (from genocidal to merely impoverishing), the west is so obsessed with not being racist that we will let heinous crimes slide, or even actively cover them up, like in the Rotherham sex abuse scandal. I do wonder why communism gets a pass. Is it because they won and had half a century more for propaganda? Because intellectuals like the idea of central planning?

darkmighty 12y ago
I think if those countries people started widespread revolt against the regime the willingness of the west to intervene might change, but as-is a) You can't tell people their way of government is "wrong", on the principle that if capitalism was a minority you wouldn't want to be suppressed either; b) Most countries don't care and would find it hard to come up with support for an invasion from population/congress/etc c) They're just two nations, not a growing part of the globe as in cold war. As far as starvation goes, I don't think either of those two have refused external food aid. As crazy as Kim Jong-un is he doesn't want his population to starve.
- blfr 12y ago
  I didn't mean to imply that anyone should intervene in DPRK, or Cuba, or anywhere else. Just that communism did not disappear in '89 and that our social norms around those ideologies are weirdly incongruent.
pidg 12y ago
Arguably, the Nazis carried out fascism to the letter, while the USSR, North Korea et al have created a highly bastardised version of communism.
- pyre 12y ago
  I think that it's arguable that the Khmer Rouge carried out the closest attempt at pure Communism, but it's not like that turned out all that well. That said, plenty of people associated things like the Stazi/KGB with Communism. I haven't actually read Marx's manifesto, but I highly doubt that his "worker's paradise" involved disappearing masses of people and a "report your neighbour, Comrade" mentality[1]. [1] Though I do know that he thought that there would be a progression like "Democracy => Socialism => Communism" and that each transition would involve bloody revolution.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- mcantelon 12y ago
  >the Nazis carried out fascism to the letter Is there fascist literature detailing mass extermination? It seems they went beyond the letter. And when speaking of communism, don't forget China which is also strongly authoritarian. If every implementation of Communism ends in tyranny then perhaps the ideology isn't compatible with reality.
philwelch 12y ago
Revolutionary leftism is immensely fashionable today, and anticommunism is treated as a joke while antifascism is treated like a sacred duty. People like Oliver Stone are taken seriously when they publicly support communist dictators like Castro (who is such a great leader, he has to try to keep people from leaving his country, and whenever they send their national baseball or soccer team to the U.S. for a tournament some of the players defect). A film director who publicly supported Pinochet would be blacklisted forever, but we consider it a travesty that, for a few years in the 50's, Hollywood blacklisted people for supporting Stalin.
- freshhawk 12y ago
  Isn't it a reasonable difference that a director who publicly support Pinochet would be "blacklisted" in that people would shun him and it would be unpopular to work with him? There would not be a show trial and an official state sponsored blacklist for him or her to go on, it wouldn't be systematic and rife with corruption. That has, in my mind, been the main reason it was considered a "travesty".
  - philwelch 12y ago
    The Hollywood blacklist was established by studio executives, not the government.
    - freshhawk 12y ago
      Established by studio executives by putting only those those cited with contempt of congress for refusing to testify at the Un-American Activities commitee. The separation between studio executives and government in that case was pretty damn fuzzy if it existed at all. I'm not an expert but isn't the current view that those executives were basically government proxies? But still, you are right and my phrasing was in bad faith. I do think there is a substantive difference between what we'd call boycotts and the kind of government influenced blacklists we're talking about. To make a side point: Revolutionary leftism is fashionable these days, but any and all kinds of authoritarianism - based on any politics - is viewed as something people have a duty to oppose. It doesn't feel to me like the left/right dichotomy is the main factor here.
vacri 12y ago
North Korea is not communist, it's a dictatorship.
- mcantelon 12y ago
  Communist countries inevitably end up in tyranny because expecting a ruling caste (party members) not to abuse that power is naive.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Yes, but you see, not all communists support the single party system. The single-party system is mostly a result of the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which is the most popular (at least in terms of actual implementations) but not the only communist ideology. The fact that the Bolsheviks won over the Menchviks during the 1917 revolution did much to strengthen that position. In the end, it's hard to claim that "communism" will lead to a certain outcome, because there's a different version of the ideology for every adherent - as demonstrated by their fervor in killing each other.
    - mcantelon 12y ago
      Ah, good to know. Are the Trotskyists the predominant opposition to Marxist-Leninism? Looking at WikiPedia it seems like their "deformed workers state" identifies the problem of party rule within communist states. I remember from during my activist days that the Trotskyists were regarded as fanatics by most communists and anarchists, but the underlying idea that Marxist-Leninism is flawed definitely jibes with history.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        Well, as far as I know, Trotskyism doesn't oppose the Marxist-Leninist concept of the single-party state ("democratic centralism"), while maintaining an "inner-party democracy". Trotsky himself had committed to the side of the Bolsheviks, and didn't so much oppose Lenin's ideas, but Stalin's, though he also disagreed with the former about the need to expand the revolution to other countries. In general, Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc are all more-or-less aligned ideologies with an authoritarian bent, and were opposed initially by the Mensheviks, and later by various Libertarian Marxist and Socialist movements[1], and of course by the anarchists. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism
auganov 12y ago
I think it's just that there were more communist countries in the last century. It's easier to dissociate communism from Stalin than Nazism (and Fascism) from Hitler. Also it's harder to link communism with genocide on an ideological level.
notahacker 12y ago
Both Naziism and Stalinism died long ago, but only one of those ideologies died with Western soldiers [and journalists] marching in to liberate the death camps. And only one of them emerged from a developed democracy.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  "...Western soldiers [and journalists] marching in to liberate the death camps..." Are you from some parallel universe, where allies and not USSR had won the war and liberated people?
icebraining 12y ago
Because intellectuals like the idea of central planning? That can't be it, because fascism and nazism both involve massive central planning and State intervention. For example, the plan for the NSDAP[1] included such points as "We want all very big corporations to be owned by the government", "Big industrial companies should share their profits with the workers", "We also want a law to take over land if the country needs it, without the government having to pay for it; to abolish ground rent; and to prohibit land speculation", "The State must protect health standards by making a law for compulsory gymnastics and sports", etc. Likewise, if you read Mussolini's and Franco's speeches and writings, they're both very critical of capitalism and markets in general (which were often connoted with the Jewish people) and defended the creation of State-run or at least State-sanctioned monopolist corporations to take control of certain sectors of the economy. [1] http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSDAP_25_points_manifesto http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSDAP_25_points_manifesto
CmonDev 12y ago
"...merely impoverishing..." - that's because of the sanctions not ideology or dictatorship.

by blfr 12y ago

darkmighty 12y ago

I think if those countries people started widespread revolt against the regime the willingness of the west to intervene might change, but as-is a) You can't tell people their way of government is "wrong", on the principle that if capitalism was a minority you wouldn't want to be suppressed either; b) Most countries don't care and would find it hard to come up with support for an invasion from population/congress/etc c) They're just two nations, not a growing part of the globe as in cold war. As far as starvation goes, I don't think either of those two have refused external food aid. As crazy as Kim Jong-un is he doesn't want his population to starve.

blfr 12y ago
I didn't mean to imply that anyone should intervene in DPRK, or Cuba, or anywhere else. Just that communism did not disappear in '89 and that our social norms around those ideologies are weirdly incongruent.

pidg 12y ago

Arguably, the Nazis carried out fascism to the letter, while the USSR, North Korea et al have created a highly bastardised version of communism.

pyre 12y ago
I think that it's arguable that the Khmer Rouge carried out the closest attempt at pure Communism, but it's not like that turned out all that well. That said, plenty of people associated things like the Stazi/KGB with Communism. I haven't actually read Marx's manifesto, but I highly doubt that his "worker's paradise" involved disappearing masses of people and a "report your neighbour, Comrade" mentality[1]. [1] Though I do know that he thought that there would be a progression like "Democracy => Socialism => Communism" and that each transition would involve bloody revolution.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
mcantelon 12y ago
>the Nazis carried out fascism to the letter Is there fascist literature detailing mass extermination? It seems they went beyond the letter. And when speaking of communism, don't forget China which is also strongly authoritarian. If every implementation of Communism ends in tyranny then perhaps the ideology isn't compatible with reality.

philwelch 12y ago

Revolutionary leftism is immensely fashionable today, and anticommunism is treated as a joke while antifascism is treated like a sacred duty. People like Oliver Stone are taken seriously when they publicly support communist dictators like Castro (who is such a great leader, he has to try to keep people from leaving his country, and whenever they send their national baseball or soccer team to the U.S. for a tournament some of the players defect). A film director who publicly supported Pinochet would be blacklisted forever, but we consider it a travesty that, for a few years in the 50's, Hollywood blacklisted people for supporting Stalin.

freshhawk 12y ago
Isn't it a reasonable difference that a director who publicly support Pinochet would be "blacklisted" in that people would shun him and it would be unpopular to work with him? There would not be a show trial and an official state sponsored blacklist for him or her to go on, it wouldn't be systematic and rife with corruption. That has, in my mind, been the main reason it was considered a "travesty".
- philwelch 12y ago
  The Hollywood blacklist was established by studio executives, not the government.
  - freshhawk 12y ago
    Established by studio executives by putting only those those cited with contempt of congress for refusing to testify at the Un-American Activities commitee. The separation between studio executives and government in that case was pretty damn fuzzy if it existed at all. I'm not an expert but isn't the current view that those executives were basically government proxies? But still, you are right and my phrasing was in bad faith. I do think there is a substantive difference between what we'd call boycotts and the kind of government influenced blacklists we're talking about. To make a side point: Revolutionary leftism is fashionable these days, but any and all kinds of authoritarianism - based on any politics - is viewed as something people have a duty to oppose. It doesn't feel to me like the left/right dichotomy is the main factor here.

vacri 12y ago

North Korea is not communist, it's a dictatorship.

mcantelon 12y ago
Communist countries inevitably end up in tyranny because expecting a ruling caste (party members) not to abuse that power is naive.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Yes, but you see, not all communists support the single party system. The single-party system is mostly a result of the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which is the most popular (at least in terms of actual implementations) but not the only communist ideology. The fact that the Bolsheviks won over the Menchviks during the 1917 revolution did much to strengthen that position. In the end, it's hard to claim that "communism" will lead to a certain outcome, because there's a different version of the ideology for every adherent - as demonstrated by their fervor in killing each other.
  - mcantelon 12y ago
    Ah, good to know. Are the Trotskyists the predominant opposition to Marxist-Leninism? Looking at WikiPedia it seems like their "deformed workers state" identifies the problem of party rule within communist states. I remember from during my activist days that the Trotskyists were regarded as fanatics by most communists and anarchists, but the underlying idea that Marxist-Leninism is flawed definitely jibes with history.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Well, as far as I know, Trotskyism doesn't oppose the Marxist-Leninist concept of the single-party state ("democratic centralism"), while maintaining an "inner-party democracy". Trotsky himself had committed to the side of the Bolsheviks, and didn't so much oppose Lenin's ideas, but Stalin's, though he also disagreed with the former about the need to expand the revolution to other countries. In general, Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc are all more-or-less aligned ideologies with an authoritarian bent, and were opposed initially by the Mensheviks, and later by various Libertarian Marxist and Socialist movements[1], and of course by the anarchists. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism

auganov 12y ago

I think it's just that there were more communist countries in the last century. It's easier to dissociate communism from Stalin than Nazism (and Fascism) from Hitler. Also it's harder to link communism with genocide on an ideological level.

notahacker 12y ago

Both Naziism and Stalinism died long ago, but only one of those ideologies died with Western soldiers [and journalists] marching in to liberate the death camps. And only one of them emerged from a developed democracy.

CmonDev 12y ago
"...Western soldiers [and journalists] marching in to liberate the death camps..." Are you from some parallel universe, where allies and not USSR had won the war and liberated people?

icebraining 12y ago

Because intellectuals like the idea of central planning? That can't be it, because fascism and nazism both involve massive central planning and State intervention. For example, the plan for the NSDAP[1] included such points as "We want all very big corporations to be owned by the government", "Big industrial companies should share their profits with the workers", "We also want a law to take over land if the country needs it, without the government having to pay for it; to abolish ground rent; and to prohibit land speculation", "The State must protect health standards by making a law for compulsory gymnastics and sports", etc. Likewise, if you read Mussolini's and Franco's speeches and writings, they're both very critical of capitalism and markets in general (which were often connoted with the Jewish people) and defended the creation of State-run or at least State-sanctioned monopolist corporations to take control of certain sectors of the economy. [1] http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSDAP_25_points_manifesto http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSDAP_25_points_manifesto

CmonDev 12y ago

"...merely impoverishing..." - that's because of the sanctions not ideology or dictatorship.