I don't understand how can you talk about ISIS, Nazis and Communists in the same sentence? Communism has nothing to do with violence compared to ISIS and Nazis...
Edit: Why downvotes? Idea of communism does not propose violence, Nazis and ISIS on the other hand do.
There has been plenty of communist-inspired violent terrorism. Germany's RAF, Italy's Red Brigade, Japan's United Red Army, Peru's Shining Path, Columbia's FARC, Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, etc. etc. Saying these are not real communists is just a No True Scotsman. As soon as people start believing in utopias there's a danger that they will cross a line.
You're not contradicting anything I said, I wouldn't claim utopias are the only reason for people to become violent. I do believe that true believers such as with religions or utopias are particularly dangerous. Did you reply this way because you approve of communism?
>You're not contradicting anything I said, I wouldn't claim utopias are the only reason for people to become violent.
Well, why single them out then if both sides can be dangerous?
If you think they are the "more dangerous", then I think the previous 2 milenia of bloodshed for pragmatic land/power grabbing, including WW I, refute that.
Besides, even so-called utopians are quite pragmatic in their actions. When Mao executed tons of people, it wasn't some "utopianism" guiding him, but a very pragmatic power grab to stay in power and get rid of possible contenders.
(You might say that this was only possible because his subordinates were deluded by some utopian zeal. But lots of other cases, from the Belgian colonies and Pinochet to Indonesian "death squads", prove that you don't need that to have mass killings, just unquestioned power and the upper hand).
>Did you reply this way because you approve of communism?
No, I replied this way because I approve of utopias. The US was one too at some point -- for persecuted from Europe religious nuts.
Also because I like being objective, which needs taking all sides into account. Of any binary (utopia/pragmatism e.g.) I'd never say "the first is dangerous" if the second has been historically proved just as dangerous.
Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung - just to name a couple of famous exponents of communism. Perhaps you are mistaking the ideal of communism with the actual practice of it, which has proven to be just as genocidal as anything else in history.
Sure, be we could name the famous exponents of non-communist states too, and amass a huge blood toll that rivals and surpasses these people.
Heck, there were 2 world wars in which communists countries were only involved in the second, and only on the allies side. How many people were killed there, including civilians?
And let's not get started in the 18th-19th century history, before marxism was even invented...
War, murder and dictatorship are what they are -- they don't just belong to one single side of the political spectrum.
In Indonesia, for one example, nearly a million communist sympathizers were executed by right wingers (as were in Pinochet's Chile and elsewhere). This is an interesting watch:
Your comment is irrelevant to the point being discussed, which was specifically about communism. It's akin to saying, "We excuse X for doing something bad because Y (something to which we are ideologically opposed) did the same bad thing". In other words, it's the "side", not the "principle" you are arguing. If you take that position you can be an apologist for practically anything that happens.
>Your comment is irrelevant to the point being discussed, which was specifically about communism.
Only under the naive assumption that we assess things in isolation and not comparatively and in historical perspective.
>It's akin to saying, "We excuse X for doing something bad because Y (something to which we are ideologically opposed) did the same bad thing".
No, it's more akin to saying "You singled out X as the cause of something bad when it's also an attribute of Y".
E.g. something like:
"- Python is slow because it's a GC language".
"- Nope, Java and Swift also have GC and are very fast".
Also note that I never said anything about "excusing" -- I actually condemn both.
>In other words, it's the "side", not the "principle" you are arguing. If you take that position you can be an apologist for practically anything that happens.
What you can actually be is pragmatic, someone who assesses things in historical and relative perspective, instead of taking sides and singling out.
It's amazing how someone that begins by saying that "this discussion is only about X, anything else is irrelevant", accuses someone adding the stats for Y for comparison as "taking sides".
Didn't you get the memo? They were bad, but now that they make loads of plastic crap for us which we then rebrand and resell to them, they're mostly ok.
...or Bolsheviks, try reading wikipedia about the immediate post-revolution violence called the Red Terror as it will turn your stomach it was truly, truly terrible [0]
...or Maoism "struggle sessions" which resulted in 2 million deaths [1]
...or just read about mass killings in communist regimes[2]. Clearly communist governments have mass killed a lot of people.
The period after the French Revolution that threw down monarchy and more or less brought democracy to Europe was called the Terror [1] as well and tens of thousands of people were guillotined or executed (that was quite a lot of people at the time). Unfortunately, when oppressed people overcome the power in place, bad things happen as the results of the change in the balance of powers. IMHO this is similar to what happened when Bolsheviks took over the tsars and Communist Chinese put down the Emperor. I am of course not condoning violence (I am French and still in shock with what just happened) but I think these examples are sometimes more a sign of the people getting rid of hundreds (thousands) years of oppression than a particular political alignment. Unfortunately history is rich of mass killings in the name of politics, religions and other ideologies.
I'm talking about Lenin (founder of the VChK/KGB), and Stalin, and Mao, and Pol Pot, and the Shining Path, and the Red Army Faction, and I could go on but the other names escape me. When a political movement kills more people than Hitler, I'm fine with mentioning it in the same breath as Hitler.
edit: Why downvotes? I've asked a question, I wonder how western people see Stalin in history. I as Russian see him as the one who was involved in defeating Nazis
As a Russian do you know about the purges he enforced? What is your opinion about the killing of people just for being educated or having having grievances with stalin's governing. Is it OK to kill people for disagreeing with government policies? Like even the post-Stalin soviet government had disowned him.
I am absolutely against that, but I am also against blatant lie and made up figures attributed to people died under Stalin's regime, just look at the comment list here, people saying any kinds of figures from 10 to 100 million deaths, so tomorrow somebody who reads this chat will pick the figure which is more appropriate to his point of view and bring it up in his discussion which will be complete lie and un-official data, which will result in more wrong opinions like that.
I definitely put all three in the same category. Stalin was probably less bad than Hitler (he killed more people than Hitler did historically, but imagine the body count if Hitler had won); but it's not easy to choose among totalitarian regimes -- or aspiring totalitarian regimes, in ISIS' case.
>he killed more people than Hitler did historically
Only when counting famines and a civil war type situation among his casualties. He killed much less than Hitler otherwise (which would still be a lot).
> So you think Stalin was as bad as ISIS and Nazis?
The general consensus is that Germany under Hitler killed around 11 million noncombatants. The USSR under Stalin killed at least 20 million, with some estimates ranging much higher.
Many people in the west still say that Hitler was worse because he tried to exterminate entire ethnic groups, where Stalin mostly killed anyone that he thought might get in his way. I think they were both monsters, and there's no profit in trying to measure which one was worse.
Stalin did help defeat the Nazis. Don't make the mistake of thinking that makes him the good guy. In stories, the villain's enemy is always a hero, but in real life, villains fight other villains all the time.
We can debate on his motives and methods, but in terms of death count he is as good as any. But you are right that ISIS is more evil in this sense: if ISIS had Stalin's power and military apparatus, they would do more damage than Stalin ever did.
As horrific and scary as terrorist acts are to civil societies (and impactful to our politics), Stalin's rule was far more devastating. "In February 1989, two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, a research paper by Georgian historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev published in the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule amounted to some 20 million lives (on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War), for a total tally of 40 million." http://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-did-joseph-stalin-kil...
The article you mentioned has no explanation of where he got those figures, as far as I know there is no official data on this and estimates range from 3Mln to 60Mln [1], which as you can see is quite bizarre estimate. According to official documents there were 799,455 people executed in a period from 1921 to 1953 [2] and keep in mind that's a total number of execution, not only those that were executed for political reasons, and that's over a span of 30+ years, so thats around 72 person a day across a whole soviet union territory (around 160+Mln people)
> on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War
What does it have to do with Stalin? It was a war and people perish during a War.
> estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule amounted to some 20 million lives
Just think about it, Stalin was in power for 30 years, so he had to "directly attribute" to a death of 2000 people every single day? Sounds quite bizarre to me. No official data of the 20Mln of "dead by Stalin's attributing", if you want to down vote me - at least show me official data.
It looks like you're not quite as naive as you'd sounded at first...
Remember, Stalin didn't go in for executions; he preferred slave labor. Deaths in the GULAG -- which could be as high as in the non-death-camp Nazi concentration camps, or higher -- should be counted as well as executions. (Remember how part of Stalin's price for peace with Japan was 300,000 Japanese slaves, none of whom ever returned to Japan after the war.)
Also, some deaths in the war should be attributed to Stalin -- at the very least, deaths in the punishment brigades. If you force someone to march through a minefield, and he hits a mine and dies, it's your fault.
> Remember how part of Stalin's price for peace with Japan was 300,000 Japanese slaves, none of whom ever returned to Japan after the war.
Most of those Japanese POWs who survived the winter of 1945 / 46 had been repatriated by 1956, with mediation by the Red Cross.
Furthermore:
In 2005, the Russian government provided the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare microfilms of personal information of 40,940 Japanese POWs who had died during their detention.
Still horrific but less than 10% of the total number.
There is a fascinating history of those who returned to Japan but couldn't fit-in again due to Soviet indoctrination.
> If you force someone to march through a minefield, and he hits a mine and dies, it's your fault
That's a war, Nazi Germany attacked USSR, people had to fight them, Stalin is not a field officer to force solders to march through a minefield, people die in a war, I don't think you are right here equating people who died fighting for their country with those who were executed for whatever reason.
I said that concessions will work no better with ISIS than they will with Nazis and Communists. Both the Nazis and the Communists were revolutionary movements convinced that the world was going their way. When they got concessions, they became emboldened; the only way to be left alone by them was to challenge and defeat them.
Concessions work with people who have "moderate" (asking for more rights or territorial independence) goals. People who are interested in a global caliphate may leave you in peace for a few years if you withdraw from the war (maybe), but they'll be back eventually.
Because they hate our "freedoms" man! Our enemies, they all a mob of crooks. We're the good guys.
At least, that's what the sorta person who bunches together ISIS, Nazis, and Communists has in mind. He fails to realize that Capitalism is just another utopian philosophy that will fail just like the others. It is also as violent as the others, even if its violence is covert.
Edit: Why downvotes? Idea of communism does not propose violence, Nazis and ISIS on the other hand do.