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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

You make some valid observations about them using social wedges to drive participation. It was a means to an end --it happened in Africa, South America, Asia, etc. but yet, once communist those promises never came to fruition.

In principle many of the constitutions of communist countries afford(ed) citizens more freedoms to the people than say the US constitution, but in practice that was blatantly not the case with a bit of happy time in some parts of eastern Europe for a few years before the Soviets went in to quash the threat and establish harder regimes.

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I would counter that by saying that despots have existed all through human history, and have always cloaked themselves in claims of their power coming from god, or them being actual gods, or something like that, so if the batch of despots that cropped up after ww2 used communism as their justification it’s hardly surprising- that was the set ideas floating around at the time that could be used to make them appear virtuous. And of course, by doing so they could get Soviet funding.

Of course, in places like Cambodia, atrocities did take place that were really inspired by some demented but sincere interpretations of communism.

I would say, 20th century communism’s great failure is that it attempts to abolish politics itself by trying to create a utopia where nobody ever disagrees with one another. This is impossible, and totalitarian by definition.

That explains the regimes coming to power via deceptive means and methods -all par for the course... but it doesn't explain the infatuation by intellectuals from the early to late mid XX century. It's like someone seeing Mussolini and being captivated by the act and not digging further.

All of your critiques come with the benefit of historical hindsight, and being completely detached from the dire circumstances that allowed demagogues or populist movements to flourish. You are seeing things through the lens of over a century of world history with which you shape your views; but this is the opposite of myopia, you see the big picture so largely you are unable to consider localized views in context.

To whit, Mussolini, who incidentally was a socialist before he became a fascist, rose to power in a time when Italy was in a state of crisis and discontent. This was a decade full of national revanchist ressentiment compounded by the economic devastation of the Great Depression. In that era, strongmen of not only far left or far right, but liberal center- consider FDR being the only American president to break the two-term precedence and be reelected to four terms- rose to power. Surely that should tell you people in the era had very different worldviews, concerns, and knowledge from yourself?

It's still a fair question to ask around WW2, given that there was already plenty of evidence for atrocities perpetrated by the USSR. Indeed, it was noted at the time: Orwell wrote this in 1944:

"At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. ... The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicised with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. ... In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so.

Throughout that time, criticism of the Soviet régime from the left could only obtain a hearing with difficulty. There was a huge output of anti-Russian literature, but nearly all of it was from the Conservative angle and manifestly dishonest, out of date and actuated by sordid motives. On the other side there was an equally huge and almost equally dishonest stream of pro-Russian propaganda, and what amounted to a boycott on anyone who tried to discuss all-important questions in a grown-up manner. You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly the whole of the highbrow press. Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ‘not done’. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ‘inopportune’ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest. ... Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in the purges of 1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicise famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in the Ukraine."

I'd wager that much of that is because people are susceptible to be lured by the idea of strength. If you identify severe problems with how the world is, even an oppressive government like what the bolsheviks created that claims to solve them might seem like a ray of hope, and you might be willing to look past a lot of horrid things / convince yourself that they're not real so long as you believe those fundamental problems with the organisation of labour and wealth are being solved. It is worth noting that this infatuation was by no means universal - Camus and Sartre famously had a split over Soviet gulags, and Orwell consistently criticised the Soviet Union's authoritarianism despite both being socialists. The fact that only centralised, authoritarian socialist governments managed to take power in the first half of the 20th century has probably done irreparable damage to the idea of communism. If more moderate, decentralised, or liberal (as opposed to authoritarian) governments had managed to take power (such as in Spain) people might not be as quick to dismiss the (in my opinion, very real) structural issues in capitalist systems, and we might live in a better world today because of it - or perhaps that is just my infatuation with the counterfactual!

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