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In Poland they send off around 1.5 million people to Siberia or Kazachstan. Around 150 000 of them died.
Or you know, better example - Holodomor. Systematic killing of Ukrainian nation.
it's irritating how smart someone can think they are for saying something so stupid, a stupid thing they repeated from someone who repeated it from someone who repeated it from....
doesn't it get tiresome? you and i must both know this same conversation has happened a million times, maybe even word for word. why bother?
i really shouldn't involve myself.
The trouble with communism is as ever that it has to be implemented by people. Communists as ever tend to gloss over this detail. As once-Marxist economist Thomas Sowell put it: great idea, wrong species.
I'm not sure how fair it is to describe Thomas Sowell as a once-Marxist economist. He spent until he was 30 being Marxist, but then the next 50 years of his life being incredibly well-known as a fairly pro-Capitalist economist.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a huge fan of his. I'm just not sure this is a fair characterization of him :)
Like everything else! Big surprise!
Have you ever seen capitalism implemented by plants or AI developed by rocks?
> Communists as ever tend to gloss over this detail.
Some do, many don't.
You're implying that communists are somewhat lesser people than other.
But they are just like everybody else.
Do you realize that in 2021 an elected president of USA said nothing about literal nazis assaulting the Capital hill?
does it say something about the american way?
> As once-Marxist economist Thomas Sowell
"Sowell writes from a libertarian–conservative perspective"
Sowell described his serious study of Karl Marx in his autobiography; as a former Marxist who early in his career became disillusioned with the philosophy, he emphatically opposes Marxism, providing a critique in his book Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (1985).
It's like asking Talibans what they thought of USA when they financed them and after they invaded their country and bombed their villages.
With the difference that no communist ever harmed Sowell.
I find reading the early revolutionary sources for the French, American and Russian revolutions that they're really not asking for anything we modern folk would consider too wild, since they were basically reacting against monarchy, aristocracy or a proto-capitalism run largely by the aristocaracy.
Comparing Russia against America with its long, if flawed, history of Socialist (yes really) and Republican (as in anti-monarchy) Democracy seems to make much less sense when the revolutionaries that apparently should have known what Marxism or "The Terror" would lead to were asking for that same basic stuff as the American ones.
I mean the basic point of this python joke (other than punning on 'class') hinges on "all men are created equal"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_men_are_created_equal
And the famous Animal Farm seems to take a similar view:
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/a/animal-farm/critica...
The Jacobins got executed and replaced by the Thermidorian Reaction, which was a shift "rightward" and may have paved the way for Napoleon. And France generally also had to fight wars against the combined monarchies of Europe (which they generally did and won) which again, paved the way for Napoleon to become emperor.
I'm still at the early stages of reading up on Russia, but the Bolsheviks at the time are "radical" but aren't really calling for more than what we'd view as actual democracy. By "sensible reforms" I assume you mean people who advocate mostly just leaving concentrated wealth concentrated, and then obviously you've got wars and outside empires there too as well as the remains of the concentrated wealth.
I dunno, it feels like there's centuries of cultural and political propaganda that gets in the way of objective views on this.
The Bolsheviks publicly called for whatever was popular at the time and what they thought would allow them to get into power. In 1918 they basically copied the entire Socialist Revolutionary programme (ending the war and distributing all land to the peasants without compensation to previous landowners and giving controls of the factories to their workers) and promised to end the war which basically guaranteed that most soldiers and ordinary people would not oppose them (they never had mass public support prior to the October revolution, at best a plurality in Major cities and approximately 0% in the countryside). However after they ousted the socialist government they proceeded with a policy of collectivization and centralization instead.
"aren't really calling for more than what we'd view as actual democracy"
No, the Bolsheviks lost the first democratic elections in Russian history, decided they don't like the results and dispersed Russian Constituent Assembly 13 hours after it convened. Unlike most other socialists in Russia at the time Bolsheviks were totally anti democratic from the outset, which is why they were so effective at gaining and holding power. While other socialist or liberal parties were organizing peaceful public protests, strikes or walkouts expecting that the masses would rally around them the bolsheviks simply sent in their troops.
If communism wasn't hateful and selfish, then it would look a lot more like christianity: freedom + sacrificial charitable giving.
GP's view isn't unique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann#Views_on_Russian_c...
but are you sure it actually failed?
I’m partial to interpretations which treat the Twentieth Century megadeaths, and subsequent rise of the contemporary, technological society as a unitary problem.