>>In fact the EU were quick to remind Musk that they do not share the US definition of free speech.
Yes, that was particularly chilling. EU-approved opinions only.
Yes, that was particularly chilling. EU-approved opinions only.
So, either allow holocaust denial or forbid all the others - there are many more examples - as well. I vote for allowing denial but then I do have enough background information to be able to place these deniers.
So, improve education, get the subject of history out of the hands of the ideologues and into those of historians worth this title. Make sure that the coming generations know where it is at when they read or meet any of these historically inaccurate narratives.
I think it's possible that less attention is not the only reason Communism is tolerated more than Nazism. Nazism is much more inherently genocidal than Communism is. While the death toll for Communism is higher, it can be argued (and frequently is according to Wikipedia) that those deaths occurred under Communist regimes, but not because of Communism. So while some may wear a t-shirt with Che on it, they could be attempting to signal a Communist ideal that has never been implemented. While a t-shirt with a swastika on it, or worse, Hitler himself, doesn't leave much room to interpret anything other than racism, fascism, and ultimately genocide.
I also support improved education. Particularly body counts of states and their leaders, past and present. Especially for those that receive perhaps the least attention of all, Western democracies.
These ideologies belong in the same dust bin of history, "tried & failed disastrously - avoid" but somehow they are not. This needs to change and it needs to change sooner rather than later given the resurgence of Communism as somehow being a viable ideology.
[1] https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Communist-and-Proud-of-I...
I'll assume we can stay focused on Nazism and Communism, rather than any precursors to complicate things. In that case, I don't see how the above statement can be right at all.
According to Wikipedia, communism is all about common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, allocating products to everyone in the society. That sounds very fair, admirable, equitable. Further, it involves the absence of social classes, money, private property. Lack of social classes seems especially appealing to an anti-harm, equality ideologue. Nazism on the other hand is associated with fascism, dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, and racism. These are directly linked to aggressive, harmful mindsets. I mean, it's pretty clear that an ideology that promotes racism is going to lead to problems.
So do you disagree with that? Is that an example, or result of how these subjects are treated in schools, media, politics, and entertainment?
> The dictatorship of the proletariat needs a class enemy
Admittedly, I had no idea what this meant until looking into it just now, but it seems this is further deviating from the main point of Communism vs Nazism since it is not quite Communism. I don't really understand why you're bringing precursors into the discussion if it's very easy to see parallels between Nazism and Communism. We should be able to talk about them directly and leave out precursors. The Che t-shirt guy is not championing precursors to Communism in this discussion, he's championing Communism, which doesn't have inherent animosity as part of its ideology.
It doesn't at all. I mean the infantile view of it maybe, in the same way that someone who promises you that their magic snake oil will cure cancer sounds great.
Clearly it can't work though, right? Someone has to decide what is fair, someone has to take things from people, someone has to decide who gets it. Is it fair to take from someone who is more productive and give it to someone who is less productive? It's both no and yes depending on the situation and depending on who you ask. So some people will be unhappy, and so there need to be deciders, enforcement, and now you have classes. So much for the classess utopia.
A proportion of your most productive people who view the deciders and redistribution as unfair will want to leave for a society that better values their contributions, so now you need to place controls on them leaving to prevent a spiral. Another proportion of the highly productive and effective people will try to change the system to one that better values their contributions, so now you have to cease democracy and disallow political opposition. So you have a paranoid police-state dictatorship. It seems almost inconceivable that a communist society can remain stable and productive without this oppression. At that point, the gulags and genocides follow quite naturally.
This all follows from pretty basic obvious principles about human behavior, nobody should even need to look at history to see this. But when you do look at history, it has been proven out again and again from USSR to Cambodia to North Korea to China to Ethiopia. And yet the way it's presented, those failures and atrocities were some kind of aberration and not representative of real communism. Which is totally false, akin to arguing that WWII and the genocide of Jews and other undesirables wasn't true Nazism and that we really should give Naizsm another try (and another few dozen tries after that). These atrocities were directly caused by communism. They are the true communism.
Obviously it's not clear to a lot of people that it can't work. I haven't thought much about it, but here are some responses to your hypotheticals.
> Someone has to decide what is fair, someone has to take things from people, someone has to decide who gets it
I don't think so. You could have the group decide what is fair and there need not be taking things from people if everyone is contributing willingly based on the agreed upon rules. Ownership is common, so control must also be common. As soon as you have a "someone" as you describe you've gone out of the realm of the communist ideology as I've understood it.
> Is it fair to take from someone who is more productive and give it to someone who is less productive?
Common ownership of the means of production and distribution doesn't imply that the distribution must be equal regardless of individual output. So it's back to the group deciding on how that works, since they are the common owners.
> A proportion of your most productive people who view the deciders and redistribution as unfair will want to leave for a society that better values their contributions, so now you need to place controls on them leaving
Even if the group decides on the distribution, you will have a curve representing individual production and another representing satisfaction with the rules. I think this is going to be the case in many ideologies. But this might only be a problem if you're presupposing other problems, like an egotistical psychopath "someone" at the top who insists on maximizing output from their workforce. Which is again way outside the communist ideology. At least, I didn't see anything that required forced compliance as part of the ideology. What if people who were on the strong disagree end of the curve could simply leave? Unfortunately in our world of countries we can't easily go somewhere that operates under rules we are more aligned with, but that's an implementation problem and in this discussion we're talking about the ideology itself, not problems with poor implementation. But we might be getting too close to the infantile view you mentioned. I suppose it's not unreasonable to say that espousing an ideology that can't work "in the real world" is infantile. But when Lennon had people imagining there were no countries and no religion, I don't think he was widely thought of as infantile. I think there is a certain type of person who believes that things can change for the better, even if the changes required are drastically different from what we have now. You could call this type of person a dreamer. Maybe being a dreamer is infantile. Anyway, I don't see how this is related specifically to communism.
> Another proportion of the highly productive and effective people will try to change the system to one that better values their contributions
To me this is also only a problem if other problems external to the ideology are presupposed. And is not communism specific. You've stated that the problems are basic, obvious principles about human behavior. I'm not capable of a decent attempt to refute that. We do have a pretty abysmal track record.
> so now you have to cease democracy and disallow political opposition
You definitely don't have to do that.
A group can't decide as a group with everybody on equal terms and no consolidation of power or authority. This is the human condition. This is why communism doesn't work and you definitely do have to hold any stable communist society together with a brutal authoritarian police state and single-party dictatorship. History and reality agree with me.
In other words, the Wikipedia page on Communism is not a good source for an unbiased view on Communism.
To answer your questions arising from the propaganda page on Communism on Wikipedia: no, I do not agree with a Communist view on Communism.
I'm not surprised at this answer. I don't know enough to have an opinion on it, but the cynic in me tends to side with it. In any case, thank you for the discussion.
Poverty worldwide included 94 percent of the world’s population in 1820. This number was reduced to 17 percent in 2011. The largest part of the fall of poverty took place between 1981 when 53 percent of the world lived in poverty and 2011 when the aforementioned 17 percent did so. This rapid fall is largely due to the onset of industrialisation which in turn was made possible by the availability of the capita needed to build the mines and factories. While it may have been a rough ride to start with - working conditions in early capitalism were atrocious - this was eventually solved in western countries due to regulation and enlightened self-interest. The same cycle has taken place in non-western countries where working conditions sometimes more resemble those in the early industrialised west.
Capitalism with regulations is still capitalism, no matter whether that be European- and North American-style big-state capitalism or Deng Xiaoping's Chinese state-regulated capitalism.
Now about those examples you gave:
On the death toll of the Atlantic slave trade here's some numbers courtesy of Statista [1]. From 1501 until 1866, it is estimated that the transatlantic slave trade saw more than 12.5 million African people forcefully put on slave ships and transported to the Americas. Of these 12.5 million, only 10.7 million disembarked on the other side of the Atlantic, meaning that approximately 1.8 million (14.5 percent) did not survive the journey, known as the Middle Passage.
The principal cause of the Bengal famine - with a death toll of around 3 million people - was the epidemic of Helminthosporium oryzae (a plant disease affecting rice crops), an epidemic only matched by the Irish potato famine of 1845. This was exacerbated by poor regional administration and the war with Japan [2].
The potato famine was caused by an infestation of Phytophtora infestans (potato blight, a crop fungus) which was exacerbated by the fact that only a single variety of potato was grown in all Ireland in combination with inadequate (the repeal of tariffs on grain products, import of corn from the USA) and counterproductive (continued and sometimes even increased export of food products from Ireland to Great Britain) government responses. The death toll of the Great Famine is estimated to be up to 1 million people.
The death toll of the colonisation of the Americas (north and south) was largely due to diseases like Smallpox which had been chronic in Eurasian populations for hundreds of years but to which native Americans did not have any acquired immunity. It is important to realise that the Spanish and Portuguese and French and British and Dutch (etc.) did not know about the dangers of these diseases to the native population when they landed on the shores of the Americas, this was not some plot to eradicate the native population. It was also not related to Capitalism which only became a thing some 400 years later. As to the numbers involved this seems to be disputed but they are indisputably large, probably in the tens of millions. The number of native Americans killed in combat by westerners in the 'Indian wars' in the United States is far lower, around 30.000. Most importantly, none of this has anything to do with Capitalism unless you want to equate all types and wars of conquest with Capitalism in which case Genghis Khan was the greatest capitalist of all.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1143458/annual-share-sla...
[2] https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/the-bengal-famine-what-the-ex...
Modern American style capitalism didn't really start until late 1700s.
You could even go further and say that modern state-capitalism didn't start until the central banks took a foundational role in the economy.
Slavery started under mercantilism then started dying off as capitalism rose to dominate the world.