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Socialized health care isn't communism. It's just admitting that the "free market" isn't a magic panacea that automatically makes everything work. (Kind of like how most of us get our water from the government, or how we get our protection from our government-run military.)
Equating socialized healthcare with communism is a poor argument: Canada, Australia, and the UK have socialized health care, and those countries are very capitalist. If you don't like socialized health care, I suggest looking at how those countries operate and build your arguments based on observed facts of those systems' weaknesses.
I'll agree with that statement when I can practice my religion where I believe that psychedelics are a sacrament!
> being forced to help you
I pay taxes and registered for the draft when I turned 18. That argument doesn't fly.
I think you are justifying being greedy under the guise of "freedom."
Let me introduce you to when the US locked up its own citizens without cause or due process: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Ameri...
In Dennis v. United States the government jailed the leaders of the american communist party, and the supreme court upheld the conviction.
And if it's said that it's justified because they were the leaders: in Harisiades v. Shaughnessy the supreme court ruled that immigrants can be deported for being a previous member of the communist party, not even in any sort of leadership position. This includes just being a member for a year or two several decades ago.
You can make the argument that those were cases from the last century, so how about being arrested for exercising your first amendment in the wrong place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
For something even more recent, protesters attempting to stop a massive new police training center* are being charged with domestic terrorism
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Cop_City
While there is definitely plenty of latitude around "free speech" in America, it's not limitless and the government will happily jail you if they disagree with what you're saying.
This is not even getting into topics like COINTELPRO
In practice, I am sure there are many abuses and lack of due process to establish that each detainee is in fact a terrorist. But comparing that to extermination of millions by Stalin or Ughur reeducation camps in China is ridiculous. It's a small number of individuals who slipped through the cracks, and any system has cracks.
Is Taiwan no longer claiming they are the legitimate government of mainland China (as well as parts of a bunch of neighboring countries)?
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2021/04/25/20...
Likewise, I wouldn't put every excess of a capitalist state on the head of someone who calls themself a capitalist. Should they be held a priori individually responsible for the late Victorian famines in India and Ireland? The various coups and dictatorships in the Middle East, Central and South America? The sanction regimes whose explicit goal is "to bring about hunger" because it violates the anti-sovereignty "sphere of influence" Monroe Doctrine?
That was a “common position” in the sense that it was around, but it wasn’t the overriding position until 1956, when both the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary and Khrushchev’s changes allowed European communists to make an easy break with Stalin. Before that, many European Communists were reluctant to alienate the Soviet Union or be tarred as Trotskyists.
Then in the mid–late 1960s, the decline of Stalin’s popularity gave way to a rise in Mao’s popularity among some French, British, and German Communists, a position which has also dated badly.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Communist movement in many European countries remained fragmented, with the largest parties being post-Stalinist, but splinter parties still upholding Stalin and Mao as the models of their struggle. Interestingly, some of the smallest splinter parties operated just like cults of the Scientology sort, only without any religious basis – there was a trial in the UK fairly recently about an old Maoist party keeping a woman hostage for years.
(I'd argue the continued lack of development of what the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as opposed to the current "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" can successfully look like, and how to then achieve "the withering away of the state" -- or even how to take power in the place where it's supposed to, the developed capitalist countries like Germany, without just gesturing at "the contradictions" and saying the people will get there -- that's what destroyed the Old Left communists. I have a different but no less critical appraisal of the New Left, and the Millennial Left. None of these projects even have a vision for how to get a vision for the future).
Sadly it wasn't. Some continued to deny Stalin's crimes well into perestroika. Especially in the academia.
Yet you just did. A lot of the “communists” in the Hollywood blacklist era were advocating for things exactly like this.
Plus communism isn’t even close to history’s deadliest ideology. If you’re going to tally communism’s numbers then you need to also total capitalisms.
The main & most cited work in that area is “Red Holocaust” which estimated the total for communism at ~60 million people.
But using the same criteria as that work we can easily attribute 100 million deaths to capitalism in the 20th century alone
(btw, this pales to both Christianity & Islam, who are #1 & #2 respectively)
Capitalism, communism, Christianity, and Islam have killed the most people because the most people have lived under them.