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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

The ideology that underpinned Stalin’s policies of mass extermination died in 1989 with the fall of communism, but the racism that drove Hitler’s lives on in myriad forms that continue to trouble the world today.

The opposite is true. While countries like North Korea and Cuba continue to experience the joys of communism in all its range (from genocidal to merely impoverishing), the west is so obsessed with not being racist that we will let heinous crimes slide, or even actively cover them up, like in the Rotherham sex abuse scandal.

I do wonder why communism gets a pass. Is it because they won and had half a century more for propaganda? Because intellectuals like the idea of central planning?

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Because intellectuals like the idea of central planning?

That can't be it, because fascism and nazism both involve massive central planning and State intervention. For example, the plan for the NSDAP[1] included such points as "We want all very big corporations to be owned by the government", "Big industrial companies should share their profits with the workers", "We also want a law to take over land if the country needs it, without the government having to pay for it; to abolish ground rent; and to prohibit land speculation", "The State must protect health standards by making a law for compulsory gymnastics and sports", etc.

Likewise, if you read Mussolini's and Franco's speeches and writings, they're both very critical of capitalism and markets in general (which were often connoted with the Jewish people) and defended the creation of State-run or at least State-sanctioned monopolist corporations to take control of certain sectors of the economy.

[1] http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSDAP_25_points_manifesto

I think if those countries people started widespread revolt against the regime the willingness of the west to intervene might change, but as-is a) You can't tell people their way of government is "wrong", on the principle that if capitalism was a minority you wouldn't want to be suppressed either; b) Most countries don't care and would find it hard to come up with support for an invasion from population/congress/etc c) They're just two nations, not a growing part of the globe as in cold war. As far as starvation goes, I don't think either of those two have refused external food aid. As crazy as Kim Jong-un is he doesn't want his population to starve.

I didn't mean to imply that anyone should intervene in DPRK, or Cuba, or anywhere else. Just that communism did not disappear in '89 and that our social norms around those ideologies are weirdly incongruent.

Revolutionary leftism is immensely fashionable today, and anticommunism is treated as a joke while antifascism is treated like a sacred duty. People like Oliver Stone are taken seriously when they publicly support communist dictators like Castro (who is such a great leader, he has to try to keep people from leaving his country, and whenever they send their national baseball or soccer team to the U.S. for a tournament some of the players defect). A film director who publicly supported Pinochet would be blacklisted forever, but we consider it a travesty that, for a few years in the 50's, Hollywood blacklisted people for supporting Stalin.

Isn't it a reasonable difference that a director who publicly support Pinochet would be "blacklisted" in that people would shun him and it would be unpopular to work with him? There would not be a show trial and an official state sponsored blacklist for him or her to go on, it wouldn't be systematic and rife with corruption.

That has, in my mind, been the main reason it was considered a "travesty".

The Hollywood blacklist was established by studio executives, not the government.

Established by studio executives by putting only those those cited with contempt of congress for refusing to testify at the Un-American Activities commitee. The separation between studio executives and government in that case was pretty damn fuzzy if it existed at all. I'm not an expert but isn't the current view that those executives were basically government proxies?

But still, you are right and my phrasing was in bad faith.

I do think there is a substantive difference between what we'd call boycotts and the kind of government influenced blacklists we're talking about.

To make a side point: Revolutionary leftism is fashionable these days, but any and all kinds of authoritarianism - based on any politics - is viewed as something people have a duty to oppose. It doesn't feel to me like the left/right dichotomy is the main factor here.

Revolutionary leftism is a kind of authoritarianism.

The mainstream view of HUAC and the Red Scare is, in my opinion, extremely biased. HUAC investigated all kinds of subversive organizations, including German sympathizers during WWI and the German-American Bund during WWII.

HUAC acted purely as an investigative body and didn't have (and, per the Constitution, never had) the legislative power to blacklist people from working in any given career. The expectation was that HUAC would carry out the investigations to bring information to the public light. The studio executives who acted on the information discovered were doing so of their own volition; HUAC had no real power to compel them to do anything in particular.

House committees investigate things all the time, too; even things that are purely in the domain of the public sector. For instance, in 2005 a House committee investigated steroid use in baseball. And, largely as a result, Mark McGuire, who refused to testify, has never been elected to the Hall of Fame. Are the Hall of Fame electors "basically government proxies"?

It's also a matter of historical fact that most, if not all, of the "Hollywood Ten" were, in fact, members of the Communist Party USA, which as another matter of historical fact, was directly bankrolled and controlled from Moscow. In other words, the Hollywood Ten were, albeit indirectly, under the influence of Joseph Stalin.

If a Congressional investigation today discovered that ten screenwriters and filmmakers were members of a secretive racist organization under the control of a hostile foreign power, they would be immediately blacklisted by their private employers, and everyone would support that. Just as, if the owner of a basketball team were discovered to make racist comments in private to his own girlfriend, he would be immediately blacklisted from the league and forced to sell the team to Steve Ballmer and everyone would think this was OK.

Well, for a brief moment in American history, people figured that being a Stalinist was just as bad as people today think making racist remarks to your girlfriend or using steroids to break the home run record is, and reacted in exactly the same way.

I think it's just that there were more communist countries in the last century. It's easier to dissociate communism from Stalin than Nazism (and Fascism) from Hitler. Also it's harder to link communism with genocide on an ideological level.

Both Naziism and Stalinism died long ago, but only one of those ideologies died with Western soldiers [and journalists] marching in to liberate the death camps. And only one of them emerged from a developed democracy.

"...Western soldiers [and journalists] marching in to liberate the death camps..."

Are you from some parallel universe, where allies and not USSR had won the war and liberated people?

North Korea is not communist, it's a dictatorship.

Communist countries inevitably end up in tyranny because expecting a ruling caste (party members) not to abuse that power is naive.

Yes, but you see, not all communists support the single party system. The single-party system is mostly a result of the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which is the most popular (at least in terms of actual implementations) but not the only communist ideology. The fact that the Bolsheviks won over the Menchviks during the 1917 revolution did much to strengthen that position.

In the end, it's hard to claim that "communism" will lead to a certain outcome, because there's a different version of the ideology for every adherent - as demonstrated by their fervor in killing each other.

Ah, good to know. Are the Trotskyists the predominant opposition to Marxist-Leninism? Looking at WikiPedia it seems like their "deformed workers state" identifies the problem of party rule within communist states. I remember from during my activist days that the Trotskyists were regarded as fanatics by most communists and anarchists, but the underlying idea that Marxist-Leninism is flawed definitely jibes with history.

Well, as far as I know, Trotskyism doesn't oppose the Marxist-Leninist concept of the single-party state ("democratic centralism"), while maintaining an "inner-party democracy".

Trotsky himself had committed to the side of the Bolsheviks, and didn't so much oppose Lenin's ideas, but Stalin's, though he also disagreed with the former about the need to expand the revolution to other countries.

In general, Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc are all more-or-less aligned ideologies with an authoritarian bent, and were opposed initially by the Mensheviks, and later by various Libertarian Marxist and Socialist movements[1], and of course by the anarchists.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism

Vietnam doesn't seem particularly tyrannical, no more than its non-communist neighbours, and has been opening up more and more of late.

Arguably, the Nazis carried out fascism to the letter, while the USSR, North Korea et al have created a highly bastardised version of communism.

I think that it's arguable that the Khmer Rouge carried out the closest attempt at pure Communism, but it's not like that turned out all that well.

That said, plenty of people associated things like the Stazi/KGB with Communism. I haven't actually read Marx's manifesto, but I highly doubt that his "worker's paradise" involved disappearing masses of people and a "report your neighbour, Comrade" mentality[1].

[1] Though I do know that he thought that there would be a progression like "Democracy => Socialism => Communism" and that each transition would involve bloody revolution.

>the Nazis carried out fascism to the letter

Is there fascist literature detailing mass extermination? It seems they went beyond the letter.

And when speaking of communism, don't forget China which is also strongly authoritarian. If every implementation of Communism ends in tyranny then perhaps the ideology isn't compatible with reality.

"...merely impoverishing..." - that's because of the sanctions not ideology or dictatorship.

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