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Comment by tacomonstrous | Hacker News Reader

Lenin wasn't the proximate cause of generational misery for an entire community of Americans (and yes, I realise there is also a sizeable group of escapees from Soviet communism here, but I hope that I don't have to point out the obvious differences in scale and effect).

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As a Lithuanian-American, I'm appalled that you would shrug off the hate implicit in that statue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Lithu...

"Deportations of the civilians served a double purpose: repressing resistance to Sovietization policies in Lithuania and providing free labor in sparsely inhabited areas of the Soviet Union."

While I certainly wouldn't 'shrug off' anything, there is a very material difference between a privately held statue to a foreign historical figure with a ruinous effect on a large segment of the world's populations and a public commemoration of an actual traitor to the nation, responsible for attempting to defend the actual enslavement of a large population of Americans. Especially when the main utility of the former in this context appears to be to distract from the latter.

If it is a distraction to the latter, then shouldn't it come down? Next, you're going to defend the Gandhi statue on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, I suppose!

http://www.gandhism.org/san-francisco/

> I'm appalled that

Therein lies the problem. Why can't we all just have friendly conversations without being so upset all the time. Not everyone has the same information as the other person.

Is it because the scale of the demise he caused, or because he caused it to non-americans?

If it's the former, Lenin is no saint worth a statue: http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Quotes/leni...

If it's the latter, it's a sad example of US-centrism. By that token, <insert any other non-US dictator here> would be acceptable.

It's the latter, and it's not because of US-centrism, but because of the context in which the question was asked, which is the desire to remove statues to Confederate soldiers.

> the obvious differences in scale and effect

What do you mean? More people were killed by communists than by Nazis.

I was explicitly talking about American communities, which is the context in which the comparison between Confederate statues and the one of Lenin arose.

We should probably include the leaders inspired by Lenin as well, which leads to significant communities of Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Cuban, and other nationalities as well as the Russians.

Also the Eastern Europeans who escaped the Iron Curtain, or who still had families behind it.

The number of Americans whose families suffered because of Lenin and his followers is hard to count.

My thoughts:

a) Lenin didn't fight wars to preserve his right to literally enslave people.

b) This is still irrelevant to the issue of whether statues of Robert Lee should stand erected in public spaces.

> Lenin didn't fight wars to preserve his right to literally enslave people.

Some have argued that communism enslaves everyone.

> This is still irrelevant to the issue of whether statues of Robert Lee should stand erected in public spaces.

Agreed, especially if the statue is privately owned, but I do wonder if groups like Antifa are calling for the owner of the Lenin statue to be fired.

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