Town Hall:
Professor Ilya Somin called to designate May Day as the “Victims of Communism Day.” I wholeheartedly support his idea with only one suggestion–let’s call it the “Victims of Communism/Socialism Day.”
According to Karl Max, socialism is the transition stage to communism. Communist countries such as the former Soviet Union and China under Mao, never claimed that they had achieved Communism. Instead, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their Communist cadre, committed crimes against humanity, which caused a total of 80-100 million death in the 20th century, under the banner of socialism. It’s also important to remember that the full name of Nazi is National-Socialist German Workers’ Party. Socialism and communism are similar shades of darkness and we need to condemn both of them in the same sentence. In the meantime, we ought to commemorate victims of communism/socialism on the same day.
I’ve always thought that communism and totalitarianism was the path of least resistance.
The system is not very complicated and a dictator doesn’t have to be very smart, just brutal and ruthless… and you get to change the rules on a whim. You will get most people to toe the line and function at a low level, but that’s it. Those that don’t are disposable.
On the other hand Freedom is complicated. Freedom is hard, but Capitalism and competition make things work like no other and our enemies know it, which is why they hate it, fight it and continually try to bring us down to their level of absolute Suck.
^ what this guy said.
@Rat Fink – well said!
As for naming, I’d call May 1 Kill Collectivism Day (and collectivism isn’t the monopoly of the left).
Don’t forget the Italian Fascists; Mussolini left the Italian Communist Party over a dispute concerning who they should side with in WWI. Mussolini didn’t want to back Germany because he (correctly) believed the Germans would not win. He didn’t leave over a policy or principle issue. He did have a different view on ownership of the means of production, and he was a Nationalist, with the clearly and frequently stated goal of creating the 2nd Roman Empire.
We could have a Victims of Communism Museum, but there isn’t a building in existence big enough to hold all of the bodies.
Socialism is just a marketing campaign for communism.
Communism is just a marketing campaign for a totalitarian police state.
These communist states didn’t accidentally or inadvertantly end up as totalitarian police states, rather than the communist utopia that was promised.
The totalitarian police state was always the intended end. They just leave this part out of their propaganda.
It is no coincidence that the most dedicated communist revolutionaries are always the first ones rounded up and shot by the new communist government. The second they realize they have been played, they become the new regime’s worst enemies – and the new regime is well aware of this, even if the useful revolutionary idiots are not (until it’s too late, anyway).
I’ll also say that the NSDAP came into being as an anti-communist movement, to save Germany and the German people from genocide at the hands of the Jewish Bolsheviks (who had spent the previous two years gleefully genociding ethnic Germans in Russia), after the failed communist coup in Germany in 1919 (see Spartacist Uprising).
The Nazis were anti-communist, and their ‘socialism’ was seemingly genuinely intended to benefit the German people, rather than merely being a marketing facade for the type of inner-party parasitism of society we universally see in communism.
Last weeks Communist White House Correspondents gala was the tuneup for today’s great celebration of all the good things resulting from comm…., uh, never mind.