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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

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And how many hundreds of millions has capitalism killed?

Considering American involved Wars: American Civil War, Vietnam War, First Gulf War, Iraq War, World War 2

Considering how many millions have died due to unrestrained capitalism destroying ecosystem, contaminating air, water, soil?

Please do not pretend that capitalism does not promote nor allow the deaths of those who it is profitable to allow to die.

Every death under socialism is attributed to socialism. Every death under capitalism is attributed to individual failing or inevitability. Please follow the rules.

It’s a very convenient set of rules, that allow us to place all the deaths into another column in our tabulation.

Socialism's high death toll is the _direct_ result of the _implementation_ of socialist policies. No other form of governance shares this honor.

Umm, I would argue that Fascism shares that honor actually.

You mean the National Socialist party? Heh, no I don't think that Nazis were Socialists, but NSDAP certainly used socialist rhetoric to broaden the appeal of their party. In fact in Mein Kampf, Hitler makes the argument that Marxists merely hijacked Socialism and corrupted it.

In any case, I don't want to entertain horseshit. It turns out that if a significant part of your political ideology is about elevating one group of people at the expense of another, mass starvation and mass murder is an inevitable consequence.

The whole point about spotlighting catastrophically bad ideas is that hopefully nobody gets the stupid idea to try that shit again. Except here we are.

Can you explain what “elevating one group of people at the expense of another” is, in the context of socialism? I don’t see the connection.

Are you saying the current fascist operating mode of Trump is the dumb shit we’re trying again (here, “we” being “humanity”), or something else?

Just trying to clarify, my bad if it’s poor reading on my part; I was just confused at the line being drawn.

I'd argue that the way that socialist Russia turned out was very specifically because of very greedy people, so not negating my point. Stalin basically appointed himself kings while using anti-king rhetoric to take down the Romanovs.

Except it's not just Russia...

My point still stands.

I think a lot of the awfulness that has come out of the implementations of socialism has come from greed.

North Korea’s awfulness came because Kim Il Sung decided to appoint himself as king right after their revolution. Cuba’s awfulness came because Castro decided to appoint himself as king right after their revolution.

I could keep going, but my point is, and call their surrounding system whatever you want, these things are still a consequence of immense greed.

ETA:

You keep trying to turn what I said into some anti-socialist thing, which seems to imply that you think I am a socialist. I am not.

I think that a lot of the biggest issues with socialism come from greed. Greed is not good. Greed is bad. It’s bad when it’s in a capitalist context, it’s bad when it’s in a socialist context. It’s bad in every context. You can keep going on about how horrible you think socialism is if you want but that’s orthogonal to what I was saying.

I don't think greed really has much of anything to do with the Great Leap Forward and the mass famine that was a direct result of some of those policies.

I don't see how greed plays into telling farmers they need to stop farming and melt down all of their tools to make shitty pig iron that isn't worth a damn and then starve to death because they didn't grow any food. Or to stop long-established working farming practices in favor of the unproven ideas of some dumbass who thought they were smarter than simple farmers and had never done it.

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