Hacker News Reader

Comment by selectodude | Hacker News Reader

There isn't a single communist country that wasn't a dictatorship. There are plenty of capitalist societies that aren't dictatorships.

I find these discussions always fly into the "no true scotsman" fallacy.

View on HN

Are you saying communism cannot exist separately from (evil) dictator? Lots of the ideas do (there are plenty of functioning highly socialist countries). Theoretically at least communism could exist peacefully (although it seems you would need everyone in the country to agree and remain agreed to the principals for that to work).

Also - dictatorships can work. There have been several 'benevolent' dictators who made communism work without introducing any more evil than many democratically elected leaders. A dictatorship doesn't naturally lead to Mao/Stalin etc.

This is the same tired argument: "But communism would work if people did it right." This is neither an historical nor a scientific argument. It is pure wide-eyed ideology that ignores the devastation that communism has caused everywhere it has been tried. Communism = oppression, poverty, and starvation.

> Are you saying communism cannot exist separately from (evil) dictator?

History does seem to bear that out.

Around 100 years of history isn't a big sample size when it comes to political/economic ideologies. Also, I would argue their are examples of it existing with non-evil dictators. I won't bother naming anyone specifically as it's easy to say 'but x did y' however I feel like that applies to a majority of world leaders under any system. There are certainly leaders of communist countries who did no-more evil than some of our recent democratically elected leaders in the west.

There have been many attempts at communism and it has had a 100% rate of ending in dictatorship. Which of those dictators would you consider non-evil? Should we want dictatorship, even if the the dictator is non-evil? Given the absurdly bad consequences in many cases and the fact that it's not all that surprising that an ideology like communism ends in dictatorship, I'd suggest that trying it again is not very wise.

> There are certainly leaders of communist countries who did no-more evil than some of our recent democratically elected leaders in the west.

What if they had the most powerful army in the world at their disposal?

What examples can you come up with?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com