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Comment by seamyb88 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, because everybody was trying to make Communism work and there were never any extremely powerful opponents to it, working in the background to make sure Communism never worked. It just didn't work and we should forget about it. The best way is surely to have a handful of individuals run the show. Case closed.

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Having powerful opponents is inevitable. If a system of government can't stand against that then it is not a viable system.

This seems like a ridiculous oversimplification for finding good alternative forms of government.

A small community of people could come up with the greatest governmental system we could ever dream of, but if the leaders of the current system believe it to be a threat they could wipe out its adherents before it is ever properly understood by the wider population. Or spread misinformation about it to dissuade people from finding out more about it for themselves.

Sounds a lot like what happened to the Free Territory / Mahknovia in Ukraine in the early 20th Century.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Territory

Are you being ironic when you say there were "never any extremely powerful opponents to it"?

I absolutely am. It would require others to understand World history in relation to the terms they, and I, are using in this discussion, for them to get that irony.

I have absolutely zero faith in the average HN user to understand, but why should I explicitly appease their ignorance? The downside is people like you, who obviously realise that it could be irony, might imagine the avg HNer would legit say it.

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