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Comment by DannyPage | Hacker News Reader

The Communists defeated the Nazis in World War II, so that's a big point in their favor.

After making a secret deal with them to partition Europe. They didn't come around on principle, it's just that Hitler eventually decided to invade Russia too.

And after winning the war, Stalin proceeded to kill millions for good measure.

Stalin did the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to (successfully!) buy time and breathing room for the inevitable Nazi assault after his numerous entreaties to Western/Allied powers were rebuffed.

Or to recreate the czarist Russian empire by invading Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, and Poland

That pact started the Eastern campaign of the Nazis. You could argue that it also bought time for the Nazis, as they could gain territory without worrying much about resistance from the Soviets.

I'm not really inclined to do too much Monday morning quarterbacking of the USSR's defeat of Nazi Germany. I'm especially not inclined to give it the time of day when it's coming from Westerners who never say a peep about their own countries having given Hitler territory and financing.

This claim would have been a lot more credible if Stalin didn't keep control of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania after the war.

That's one interpretation, another interpretation is that Stalin was expecting Hitler to struggle in France for years get worn down like in WW1 and then Stalin would attack and make whole Europe a satellite to USSR.

France buckled in months and Wehrmacht then attacked Red army which did not have setup defense positions because they themselves were preparing to attack...

They killed many tens of millions more, so that's a big point against.

Was that communism or was that authoritarianism?

Authoritarianism. And there's a huge argument to be made that communist states were and are corrupted not by their principles but by the pressure capitalist states place on them.

Now we’re talking…

And to be clear so I don't get dogpiled and dox'd for this later. I don't think that excuses the blood that was shed. I do not think a state has a right to terrorize it's populace into submission, regardless of the ideological motivations for doing so.

No human being has the right to determine if another human being should live or die. That's not power. That's not authority. That's cowardice. Sadly we have ideologies and religions that think otherwise.

In principle I agree with you but the "pressure" you mentioned means my view on this is sort of like Bjarne Stroustrup's take on programming languages: there are political systems that people complain about suppressing dissent & interference in their nascent stages, and ones that nobody lives under.

Just like Stroustrup's formulation, this can become a cover for unnecessary and mistaken excesses, but I don't necessarily think that's inevitable.

I wonder what he would keep and what he would throw away from the current state of his legacy

I'd like to see that argument. Russia pre-WWII and Mao's China don't seem to me to have much capitalist pressure against them, yet Stalin and Mao killed millions. Stalin's purges were internal, against people who were on his bad side. Now, you could say that maybe Western spies agitated, but there's no way that Western agitation would account for millions of people. Furthermore, in 1930, the Communist system was widely seen as successful, since initial food production in the USSR was strongly up. Mao's deaths were incompetence (famine: killing sparrows, resulting in sparrows not eating insects the next year; famine: misallocation of resources, causing starvation in Sichuan when enough food existed elsewhere; Cultural Revolution: Mao's reaction to losing his grip on power). I think China was so poor that it realistically did not interact with the rest of the world, but in WWII, the US actually helped the Communists.

Every other Communist state that I am aware of also killed millions in internal purges: Cambodia and N. Korea, notably. I'm actually not sure what happened with Vietnam and Cuba. I'm not sure if contemporary Venezuela counts as Communist, but I am under the impression that there was killing or at least persecution of internal political enemies. I don't see how US sanctions have anything to do with how one treats political enemies.

I guess Eastern Europe might be an exception, but I think that is because Communist states were imposed with external force, not revolution from within, and the population mostly capitulated. However, I believe that political opposition was still likely to be deadly.

Since Communist states seem to be highly correlated with killing internal enemies, it seems like a feature of the system, not a response to external pressure, particularly since the largest two did not have serious external pressure at the time.

About the most important tenet of communism is collectivism. When you attempt collectivization on a national level, there's always a significant portion of the population who doesn't want to play along and wants to keep doing their own thing. That's the end of the road for your political system unless you do a bit of mass murder, which is why every "successful" communist state resorted to that.

So yes, of course, no political ideology has "let's murder millions of people" as its founding principle. But some political systems require it.

or you let them be hermits that they are. No need to murder people. If they don't fit in with the collectivism then they are shunned from society. Much like social media.

It's important to remember the Anti-Comintern Pact started as an anti-communist agreement between Germany and Japan. Look what that did.

The two tend to go hand-in-hand because communism - in its most popular formulations anyway - encourages consolidation of power in the state, "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" and all.

true communism has no concept of "The State", what you are describing is authoritarian socialism.

Marx argued the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was an essential part of the transition to "true communism". I think it's fair to say that if X is an essential part of actualizing Y, X "goes hand-in-hand" with Y, regardless of whether or not Y itself when fully actualized (if that's possible) means to incorporate X.

Let’s be clear, I am not advocating for this. Just stating that communism doesn’t recognize a state, not even of the proletariat.

I’m not advocating for this transition. I’m on the side of peace and pacifism. I see no man as above me, or below me. Marx may be right but who really wants to try and test it? History has shown that regimes who try, fail. Those who stop short and just be all dictatorships, end up destroying their own. So, I guess cheers (champagne glasses) to the sinking ship.

where is that popular, and what is a proletariat?

To clarify what I meant, Marxism and its descendants (Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Juche, etc.) are the most “popular” forms of communism. By which I mean: they’re what was implemented in most (all?) countries that had communists seize power - the USSR, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and so on. In university we read Marx, not Bakunin; in Canada we have a Marxism-Leninism party, not an anarcho-communist party. Etc.

If you’re asking the latter question in good faith, I’d encourage you to consult Wikipedia; it has good articles on both the term “proletariat” and Marx’s phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

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