Which would be a perfectly valid comparison if he had used it. What’s objectionable is the comparison that he actually did use:
He is equating “communism” in its entirety with the Holocaust, and as I noted is historically incorrect as well about Americans liberating Nazi death camps which were ironically enough all liberated by communist troops; the extermination camps were all located in Poland. While the victims of it aren’t around today, only their descendants, a lot of the treatment of the Native American and Aboriginal Australian populations could be compared in their impact with the Cambodian killing fields, or the Cultural Revolution, or the Holdomor, or the Stalinist ethnic cleanings, or the Holocaust. It would be equally invalid to make the leap from this to “while we have survivors of the Holocaust living in this country, we have survivors of democracy as well.”
And as I said, it would be awkward for the US government to set up a memorial to the victims of the Khmer Rouge on behalf of the sizable Cambodian immigrant population seeing as the US fought to continue to recognize the government of Pol Pot as the legitimate government of Cambodia at the UN.
So it’s just a coincidence that huge weapon contractors make a lot of money by killing people and perpetuating the need to kill people using their weapons systems?
Not a coincidence but you’ve got the tail wagging the dog. Weapons contractors don’t create wars; wars existed long before there were weapons contractors. Weapons contractors just observed that war already existed and in a capitalist system they saw this as an opportunity to sell a product. But it’s not like non-capitalist economic systems lacked for weapons either.
I’m not quite sure “capitalism” really exists, it lacks what paranoid German bachelor philosophers call “thingness”, it is not a discrete entity, all of its qualities are dependent on the observer. Is the brutal savagery of the coal mine owners in the 19th Century a product of “capitalism” or simply bad people doing rotten things to people who cannot resist? Similarly, is the artificial famine Stalin created in the Ukraine because of “Communism”?
If I say that capitalism is inhumane, do I mean to say that capitalism cannot be humanely practiced? The examples of social democracies suggest otherwise.
Now, I am perfectly willing to use the term “capitalism” as a form of shorthand, a loose but nonetheless useful term, if for no other reason than I don’t want to define it every time I speak of it, life is too short for that. And as a radical lefty committed to democratic equality, I am almost invariably critical of “capitalism”, but again, it is little more than a shorthand description for the sake of convenience.
It wouldn’t be entirely wrong to blame the Inquisition on “Christianity”. It would be more correct to blame it on “Catholicism”, but only a little better. So long as we don’t pretend there is anything more to it than a convenient means of reference, no real harm done.
Is it your belief that the military industrial complex does not make campaign contributions, lobby, or manipulate media to encourage conflict? That is a strange claim to me, that would make the weapons industry almost completely unique.
Indeed, nobody ever accused communist run countries of being unable to produce enough weapons. Enough bread to eat, that might be more of a problem. But tanks? Forget about it, we’ve got acres of them. Here, have a free PPSh-41, we’ve literally got millions of them lying around in storage and you can’t sell one for love or money since the AK came around.
I disagree. I believe the military-industrial complex which president Eisenhower warned against has come to exist in the worst way. It spends a lot of effort and money to influence politicians and public opinion and today’s paranoia in America about security and terrorism is a direct result of this influence. And Washington starts wars because it is good for the military industry. That’s it, really. So, weapons contractors do not declare wars but they exert pressure and influence so that the country and especially its politicians are prone to wars which benefit the industry.
I can buy a ticket and ride a bus to Brooklyn. But that doesn’t mean I made the bus go to Brooklyn. The bus was going there anyway regardless of whether or not I bought a ticket and was on board.
Or maybe it’s just another example of us looking for somebody else to blame for our own flaws. We don’t start wars, the military-industrial complex makes us start wars. Or the alliance system or the international banking system or the Freemasons or the Illuminati or the Divine Word of God. We’re always suddenly looking around at a million dead bodies and saying, “uh uh…this wasn’t our fault…we didn’t do this.”
Wars exist because we’re a warlike creature. Someday, if we’re able to stop fighting wars, it won’t be because we discovered the outside influence that makes us do it. It’ll be because we’ll finally stop looking for scapegoats and change ourselves.
If you keep a rabid dog in your backyard and it gets out of control and bites people, it is your fault for keeping the rabid dog, true, but the rabid dog also needs to be put down. So it is both the fault of the people for not regulating industry, and the fault of capitalist greed and the military industrial complex for manipulating the country into needless wars. There is plenty of blame to go around.
Well, yes, obviously there is plenty of blame to go around but I believe leaders and powerful people have more responsibility. Note that powerful leaders and lobbies can implement and hold policies which are detrimental to the common interest. It is really not in the interest of the common person to not have health insurance or to keep starting wars and yet these policies remain because the leaders and the powerful successfully manipulate public opinion and create support for those policies.
It is difficult to establish who is ultimately responsible because how can you apportion responsibility and blame between the people and their leaders?
Who is responsible for the war in Iraq? Well, ultimately the entirety of the American people but obviously there were very powerful leaders who pushed for it and who were followed. I believe those bear more responsibility than the common person in the street.
I do understand it is very difficult to find where the ultimate responsibility lies. Social dynamics are very complex and way beyond what I can analyze and understand. What makes a society degrade and have worse politicians and policies? Does it start with the people who elect worse leaders? Or does the game change in such a way that favors the worst? Or are the leaders themselves responsible? Everybody bears some responsibility but if you point at someone in particular they will tell you it’s not their fault, it is the rest.
As far as concerns Cubans, it’s always been my sense that they tend to view themselves, not as “victims of communism”, so much as “counterrevolutionaries in exile.”