[hijack]Sadly, he left Ireland a lot worse off than when he found it.[/hijack]
Please do not get the idea that I, of all people, am defending the Soviets.
In practice they were every bit as nasty as the Nazis. I’m simply saying that may be why they are not looked at in quite the same way.
Yes, Cromwell royally screwed Ireland. I was reading something on this a week or so ago-I’ll try and find it again.
“Kill one person, it’s a tragedy. Kill a million, and it’s a statistic.” – Joseph Stalin.
The estimates for the number of people killed by Hitler top out about where the estimates of the people killed by Stalin start.
The estimates for the number of people killed by Stalin top out about where the estimates for the people killed by Mao start.
The number of peole killed by Mao is just below the number killed by Hitler.
Deaths attributed to Mao generally start at about 25 million.
Well…What communism is supposed to be widely depends on what you’re talking about. For instance, are you asking what was communism as practiced in the Soviet Union, or as practiced in China, what is Marxism according to the holy books, what were the goals of the western communist parties, etc…?
Don’t take my word on this because I’m not a specialist in any way. But here is how communism was supposed to work theorically :
1)Step one : Dictatorship of the proletariat. All the power goes to the workers, and is expressed through their comitees (the Soviets in the USSR). The former property/businnesses/land owners and other “bourgeois” and other exploiters are deprived from any say or rights, and of course of their property. The political parties which represent them are forbidden and suppressed. IOW, it’s the great clean-up.
2)Step 2 : The socialist state : Now that your country is cleaned, the property, and especially the means of production (farming land, mines, factories, etc…) is collectively owned through a centralized state which makes everything run. The government is emanating from the will of the workers (remember that now everybody is a worker), expressed through representatives.
There’s no requirement that there’s only one party (actually, there were several political parties in various communist countries, except that the number of seats in the representative bodies was fixed in advance via the “only one candidate” system), nor that the people couldn’t be able to change the government if they don’t like it. The one requirement is that the collective property system can’t be changed. Sort of in the same way the republican system can’t be replaced by something else, say a monarchy with an hereditary nobility, in the US. There’s theorically no reason why this system couldn’t be democratic.
The state is necessary because things are to be kept running, people aren’t that enlightened, individualism tends to prevail, society need to be reformed and organized, etc…
3)Step 3 : The communist state. At this point, people are enlightened. They understand it’s in their best interest to do things which will benefit the collectivity, they now how inneficient, poorly orgaznized and evil was the capitalist system and private property were, etc…Hence, a centralized government is less and less needed and necessary. People organize themselves at the lowest level for the well-being and benefit of the happy and equal collectivity they’re the proud member of. By way of consequence, the state and the governmental institutions slowly decay because they aren’t of any use any more and eventually essentially dissapear.
Having successfully followed these three steps, You’re now living in the perfect utopia of the Communist system (which has as much chance to actually work than libertarianism and anarchy).
AFAIK, the official stance of the former Soviet Union was that they were living under a socialist system (step 2) and were heading towards the land of milk and honey (I mean towards a true communist state).
Its very simply the Nazis’ vision of utopia was ugly. By contrast, it seems to me at least that Russian Communist leaders view was not.
I generally belive that under some counts, Mao’s body count is actually higher than Hitler, though lower than Stalin. I got this information from Death by Government, by R. J. Rummel. Cecil referenced it in his column about Andrew Jackson, and I was intrigued so I checked it out from the college library. Very frightening.
I’ve seen this comment before in this thread, but I can’t quite agree. The Nazi utopia was pretty clean, with the major caveat that this was after the brutal forced mass migration of millions of people to Siberia. I suppose they were simply more honest about the downside than the Soviets and Red Chinese, albeit not much.
I also decided I don’t like the Nazi-Right Wing-Center-Left Wing-Communist angle. Rather, I see too differeant axese. Theoretically they are independant, although historically, left-wing revolutions tend to be very unstable and degrade into totalitanism.
so basically:
Totalitarianism <-> Strong State (like Saudi Arabia) <-> Centralizied State (England) <-> Federalist State (US) <-> Libertarian State (US up till the New Deal).
That isn’t a very accurate image, and I understand my terms are hard to define and innacurate, but there it is.
"Why, then, is the Holocaust so widely known, while the Soviet gulags are (in relation to the general Western populace) something of a tragic historical footnote?"
Anne Applebaum is trying to change this in her new book Gulag: A History.
You can read a review of it in this week’s NYT Book Review. It looks like an excellent book. Communist USSR and China had lots of supporters in the West who were willing to turn a blind eye. Non-German supporters of Nazism are few and far between.
I think there are two big reasons that the crimes of Nazi Germany have received more attention than those of the Soviet Union.
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The Soviet Union emerged victorious in WW2, while the Nazis lost. So, British, American and Canadian troops got to liberate Hitler’s death camps and see what had happened. No one from the outside ever got to liberate Stalin’s prison camps and bring in cameras to show the world what was going on. It would be decades before the ouside world got a chance to find out in detail precisely how awful things were.
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Communism held a great deal of appeal for American intellectuals, while fascism generally did not. I can only think of a handful of American artists or intellectuals who sympathized with the Nazis (Ezra Pound was one). So, there have always been loads of artists and academics eager to remind us of the Nazis’ crimes- but folks who spent years singing the virtues of Uncle Joe Stalin were not inclined to look too closely at the Soviet Union’s crimes.
I can understand Communism as poltical/economic doctrine that can theoretically be applied to any nation, but what is Naziism if not simply a German political party that ruled Germany before coming to an end in 1945?
So the appeal of Communism for workers and poverty-stricken populations esp. in the Third World pales by comparison?
Insert standard disclaimer here.
Yes, sqweels, I’d say that Communism holds VERY little appeal for working folk, whether in Europe, America or the Third World. Wherever you go, you’ll find that intellectuals are far more likely to embrace Marxism than the working classes that Marxists claim to speak for.
The general consensus from sources that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen plenty) typically place the death toll from Hitler in the millions, and both Mao and Stalin in the tens of millions. In other words, Hitler killed a lot, and Mao and Stalin killed a whole lot. I mean, once you’re talking millions killed, precise numbers seem kinda beside the point.
Jeff
Jeff:
The Hitler numbers (in the millions) obviously do not count those foreign civilians (much less soldiers) killed during WWII.
Ah, but Mao’s assinine farming policy’s easily did the job.