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Comment by cgb223 | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that bothers me about recent censorship on hate speech is how selective, and how inconsistently it's applied, if it is to be applied at all.

My grandfather escaped the Soviet Union. Stalin's regime killed all of his siblings. All of them.

But yet when I check YouTube, Twitter, and so on I see lots of videos professing communisms values. Hell I've seen a pro-communist march in a city I recently moved from.

Neo-nazis are awful, and Nazis have done unspeakable terrible things in this world.

But to me the Neo-nazis are being actively forbidden from expressing support for another ideology that has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths, while the communists are allowed to do the same thing.

I hate nazis and I hate communists. But to pick and choose which people are allowed to express support for these regimes is inconsistent at best, and tacticitly implying a preference at absolute worst.

This needs to change.

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My both grandfathers have fought Nazis during WWII, one was wounded and drove them out all the way back to Berlin. I've heard stories from a teacher about their childhood friend being raped and dismembered by German soldiers and other horrors. I find it disappointing when everyone today slaps "Nazi" label around an anything they disagree with. They are people alive who have concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms and they are probably shaking their heads listening to a bunch of spoiled brats, sipping their $5 Starbucks lattes and tweeting on their latest iPhone 7s how they live in a fascist country and nazis are literally around every corner.

Hold on. I'm not a fan of Communism, but there's a pretty clear difference. The Soviet Union was a particular implementation of Communism which chose killing. Killing is not an inherent requirement to the ideology. Contemporary proponents of Communism or Socialism usually aren't claiming that the Soviet Union's implementation was good. In Neo-Nazism the ideology itself has the elimination of other races as its goal. The ideology itself is violence. Talk about false equivalence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communis...

The highest death tolls that have been documented in communist states occurred in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, in the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by these three regimes alone range from a low of 21 million to a high of 70 million.

>The Soviet Union was a particular implementation of Communism which chose killing. Killing is not an inherent requirement to the ideology.

How could communism be implemented without killing people who refused to give up their property, or refused to stop trading with each other?

Neo-Nazism is not Nazism. That's also a false equivalence. Racial / tribal superiority has been with humanity in one form or another since before we were even human. Neo-Nazism is just a modern interpretation / flavor of that idea. Actual Nazism was far, far more destructive than a bunch of people clamoring about whatever they were clamoring about.

When Neo-Nazis are violent, the actual violence shouldn't be tolerated, but to ban thoughts is something completely different.

FWIW, I never understood why US citizens would carry a Nazi flag, when they know damn well people in their family were directly affected by it in one way or another.

Most communist countries kill those that disagree with them, for the common good they say. If you fully embrace communist values then you need to rid yourselves of those that don't agree otherwise you are not going to be able to create a perfect society.

And in a society adopting capitalism the Bourgeoisie must violently suppress the proletariat otherwise you're not going to be able to create that perfect society.

In the United States most people did not come here already rich and they had to trade among each other to survive. Everywhere communism touches has problems. In Britain check peoples teeth they are a nice color yellow, in Canada you can wait for months for medical care, in Russia you need to bribe the doctor to get medical care, in Venezuela you need to travel to a neighboring country to get food, in Cuba you earn $25 a month, in Mexico no one can own guns except for the drug gangs that rule cities....

All so that people can be equal... equally screwed that is.

Your information about Russia might be a bit outdated, there are commercial dental clinics and in public hospitals you can pay for priority reception.

It was Ukraine I was thinking of, you are right.

Killing is indeed an inherent requirement of communism. That's the only way to gain and hold such authoritarian power and to subjugate the masses as communism does. There has never been a communist regime that did not kill large numbers of people and that's because this is an inherent quality of communism without which it cannot come to or hold power.

It's an inherent quality of government. Since WWII, the US has killed somewhere around 20 million people during their various adventures around the globe. The Soviet Union killed an equivalent amount, perhaps up to three times as much, but both are staggering, horrifying numbers.

> The Soviet Union was a particular implementation of Communism which chose killing.

It was an implementation of (what it called, though there is debate in socialist circles about the validity of the claim) socialism. Communism is the end-state they claimed to wish to achieve, not the thing they implemented, even in theory.

Why is it then, then when you see an outspoken communist on the Internet they freely use Soviet symbolism like hammer and sickle. I take that as an affirmation of the fact that these people don't really think that Soviet Union was a bad implementation of communism. Like, there exist far-righters who avoid using swastika because they don't want to be associated with Nazi Germany. Why do most communists want to be associated with Soviet Union specifically by adopting its symbolism?

Because the USSR isn't just Stalin killing people with his bare hands.

Ah yes. The ol' "Communism has never been implemented right" argument... Oh please.

One peculiar irony is that the American left is sort of going through their own red scare, wherein half of the US is paranoid that everyone around them is a Nazi.

Are you seriously comparing communism and nazism because both happenned to occur under dictatorships ? Then capitalism is all the same, and people got killed for being politically opposed to their capitalist dictatorship, just saying.

Seriously, since when do people who march for a more equal society are to be compared with people marching for genocide ?

Similarly, do people who spread buddhist ideas in the US advocate for/support the genocide of muslims in Birmania (or whatever it's called in English) ?

I think Stalin did that not because he was a communist but because he was a dictator who didn't trust people and thought they were going to betray him.

And if I remember correctly labour laws are there because of communists, before people worked for 12 hours a day for a very small salary.

That is a very dangerous road to travel, no pun intended: the famous German motorways were built by the nazi regime. The 'Volkswagen' - people's car - was built on request from the nazi regime.

Stalin was both a communist as well as a dictator who didn't trust people. So was Lenin, although he was more manipulative than Stalin and as such did not get the reputation for being paranoid like Stalin. Communism and national socialism and fascism (which is not the same as national socialism) are not all that different once you look past the ideological veneer. All strive for a totalitarian state, all make the individual subservient to that state, all claim to create a better world for those who are being made subservient. All have been tested in practice, none of them have delivered the promised benefits. In all cases the result was a state run by an overclass which was relatively well off compared to the subjugated masses. None of them could handle dissent.

For all three of these totalitatian ideologies - communism, national socialism and fascism - you could argue that those states which claimed to implement them never 'really' followed the doctrine to the logical and supposedly beneficial conclusion but that is a fallacy. It is the ideologies themselves which are at fault as they all try to do away with the individual 'for the good of the state' while people do see themselves as individuals first - especially in situations where the survival of the individual is at stake.

Yes, things get very complicated when we as a society decide to ban thoughts and ideas. I would say it eventually gets so complicated that we would end up banning way more things than we should, out of a sense of fairness.

This is always going to be a challenge with managing the content of any platform. It's not easy to be a moderator of different views.

Arguably, Nazism tends to ring more obvious to moderators. There is more than one form of communism that has been implemented, and it's likely these videos alll aren't professing a support of Stalin's bloody reign. Communism also (usually) lacks a racial/nationalist superiority component that calls for the decimation of all others. But that doesn't mean people should be free to use Marx's good intentions to let terrible communist regimes off the hook.

It's probably not a bad idea for people with your experiences to attempt to organize with the goal to inform users and moderators about propaganda videos on their platforms.

> Arguably, Nazism tends to ring more obvious to moderators.

Unfortunately, white nationalist (neo-nazi) groups learned a long time ago that PR matters. The average person starts to notice anything that actually looks similar to stereotypical Nazism. The Southern Strategy with Lee Atwater's use of dog whistle terms like "forced busing" and "state's rights" as indirect codes for racism demonstrated not only is public perception very important, but also how easy it is to make fascist beliefs palatable to the average citizen by wrapping it with carefully chosen euphemisms and coded language.

I highly encourage everyone to watch this[1] very well made overview of the current language and other propaganda techniques used by fascists. Unless you have been spending a lot of time over the last few years involved with "alt-right"/etc groups, it can be had to follow because confusion about facts is the goal.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx4BVGPkdzk

Here's the full interview that you are referring to with Lee Atwater. Since it's becoming referenced more and more, it really deserves a full listen. I believe it is mostly misinterpreted, and I was guilty of that myself.

https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...

Atwater was referring to the GOP Southern Strategy and how it evolved from 1954 to 1968. He wasn't referring to his strategies during the Reagan election in 1980. I believe he's gotten a bad rap for that. He graduated college in 1973 after that period.

Atwater: But Reagan did not have to do a southern strategy for two reasons. Number one, race was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been, quote, southern issues since way back in the sixties. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the issues of economics and of national defense. The whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference. And I'll tell you another thing you all need to think about, that even surprised me, is the lack of interest, really, the lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters about the Voting Rights Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater

The South voted primary Democrat (southern democrat, there were northern democrats that were a different flavor) for 100 years, since 1860 because Lincoln was a Republican and Lincoln burned the South. I mean the South constantly voted majority Democrat up until about the civil rights era in the 1960s when they turned majority Republican. I'm sure you are aware, the South almost always votes majority Republican (in 2008 Obama won 3 southern states though). This shift was due to the Southern Strategy that Atwater was referring to, but did not implement himself. It's absolutely fascinating how much slavery and it's affects are part of this nation. I consider it our "original sin."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

From the video, some of the subtle strategies fascists use to code their ideas:

1) They deny being a fascist.

2) Euphemism (e.g. I'm a X, not a fascist or talking about purging criminals, rapists and terrorists which is actually code for purging non-white people.)

3) Pedantry. They bog you down and waste your time in a "petty terminological dispute" as they specifically detail why they are not a fascist.

I can't even go on, I feel like I listening to a guide on how to spot a witch.

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