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Comment by willmadden | Hacker News Reader

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These tiresome ideological ping-pong battles, trading the death-counts and horrors attributable to simplistic labels of economic systems are useful only to remind less fanatical observers that said horrors are not innate or exclusive to any particular system or label, and that the primary issues are (a) scarcity of resources and (b) the brutality of nature, with everything else just being a case of humans trying desperately to cope with these grim realities.

Everyone can play the game of saying everything horrific in the past or today is directly attributable to the economic system that they oppose and that their opponents advocate, and we can even go further and play tricks like this: "Nazism was really a left-wing system in nature". See, it's great fun.

Ultimately it's pointless though; it doesn't persuade anyone to think differently about anything, and serves only to make the writer feel righteous, without needing to go to the effort of formulating and advocating something genuinely better and workable for the future.

it's hard to give capitalism a lower death tole. India and Ireland under the British had entirely preventable famines also, and all the cia backed coups had quite high numbers of deaths themselves

Dogma makes for good rhetoric, but it doesn't stand up to daylight. The Soviet Union advanced the technology of not just itself, but many of its vassal states such as Cuba. China has long since abandoned communism-in-practice, but it is still one of the most advanced nations in the world. If the success of those countries cannot be accounted to communism, then the success of the U.S. cannot be attributed to capitalism either..

And as far as death tolls, they're completely indefensible, that's why I am not a proponent of communism or other anti-democratic ideologies. But it is curious that the death tolls from fascism never get added to the death toll of capitalism. Each ideological wing generates human suffering at the far end of anti-democracy, which is what we need to avoid, whether it comes disguised as facism or communism, or whatever else.

94 million dead isn't dogma.

Note, also, that "communism" isn't the opposite of "democracy". "Authoritarianism" is.

Conflating the two is part of the propaganda we've been sold for nearly a century now.

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