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Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's always "wrong socialism" when it's built. But the next one (after the next one, after the next one, after the next one) will be the right one and will not murder millions of people, despite the previous attempts doing exactly that. Please go away already, we had enough of suffering caused by ivory-tower theoreticians unable to perceive the reality.

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It's important to remember that when the British Empire triggered a famine in Ireland justifying it using the free market, it had nothing do with capitalism.

But when Stalin murders millions with a famine, it's all communism's fault.

This is rightthink, and belief in it is the model for being a good little citizen. Wrongthink would be to consider both of these crimes to be separate from the economic system which they were committed under.

I know a number of places where you were rewarded for "rightthink" and could be imprisoned or murdered for "wrongthink". Most of them had been countries having "People's Democratic" or "Socialist" or something in that vein in their names. I'm sure that's also a pure coincidence having nothing to do with those systems. Though, to be fair, modern followers of those doctrines made a serious headway to implementing the same approach in countries which don't have such words in their names and even considered "capitalist", so I assume in a short while you'd have another excellent argument - that freedom of speech also wasn't particularly suppressed by totalitarian (which is, all of them) socialist governments, it's just something totally separate. Which always happens under socialism, but that's just a coincidence, and it was a wrong socialism anyway, under the right one it won't happen.

Are you just ignoring the whole capitalist systems killing millions of people then?

IMO, the most dangerous (and unique) characteristic of socialism is its immortality and capacity for reinvention. It is indestructible as a vision.

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