ancestors – Their ancestors were not Russian…
Care to compare the total, net immigration between the USSR and the US/Western Europe during the lifetime of the USSR?
…perhaps you’d like to compare the number of lynchings in the U.S. and U.S.S.R.?
I would. What are they?
Well, 20 million or so sent to the Gulags/shot/starved to death in the USSR vs maybe a a couple thousand lynchings on the high side in the U.S.
Give or take a few million dead indians…
Just goes to show how the bitter reality can be overcome by a useful fantasy.
Watch out, Sandino! I have a feeling you’ll be… cited.
Anyway, just to mess up the equation a little we must also consider incident-based racism! For example, my pseudo mother in law owns a restraunt that has been robbed 3 times by black men. Consequently, she now does not trust black men.
How do we get rid of racism of this type? Education is only so strong in the face of repeated or traumatic experience. I suppose only the “mix races until well-blended” method would work, but I don’t see that happening 100% - there’s always someone who doesn’t want to play along.
Sandino is clearly a treasure. A fly trapped in amber. Don’t be too harsh on him, lest we lose sight of the past.
That said, the Jews of the USSR had it pretty easy as far the catalogue of Communist racism goes. (Anti-flame shield: my wife is of mixed Jewish extent.) Just in the USSR, Balts, Poles, Ukrainians, Moldavians, Bulgars, Greeks, Tatas, various Caucasians, and Koreans were ripped from their homelands and forcibly resettled in Siberia or Central Asia. The Ukrainians suffered particularly hard in the politically motivated and deliberately enforced famine, with millions dying.
China? I assume people have heard of Tibet, where the deliberate influx of ethnic Chinese is intended to make Tibetans a minority in their own country. Various groups of ‘hill people’ and the nomads of western China have suffered similar forced assimilation or ethnic inundation. Mainland Chinese I’ve talked to have commented that they view the problem as similar to that of the U.S. settling its West in the 1800s. There is a conscious policy of forced assimilation and Han/Cantonese settlement.
The Czechs and Poles expelled the Germans from their territories. Understandable, of course, but still a manifestation of ethnic hatred. I’ll leave others to provide other examples.
There are three very important differences between the crimes and tragedies of the USA vis a vis its Amerind and black populations and those of the Communist countries.
The first is that much of the destruction of the Amerind population was by disease. Yes, there were some smallpox blankets, but I laugh in the face of anyone who thinks things would have turned out much differently without them. To a very minor extent, the USSR can claim ‘natural causes’ for the Ukrainian genocide-by-famine, but the historical record is clear that the famine was deliberately aggravated to break the resistance of the Ukrainian peasantry.
The second is that all the crimes of the Communists were crimes of the State, thus of the Communist system. Many of the crimes against Amerinds and blacks were crimes of private individuals, especially in the 20th century. Yes, the government may have been callous or insufficiently attentive, but that’s quite different than ethnic abuse as government policy. Let’s not forget that the US fought a war over slavery (among other things, but really, slavery was the primary issue). And the U.S. government policy towards the Amerinds was consistent only in its vacillations–sometimes benign, sometimes malign.
The third is time. All the Communist crimes were committed after 1917. While America, post-1917, was still horrendously unjust towards blacks and Amerinds, both groups lived with more freedom, human rights, and material abundance than most of the world at that time. During the period of America’s worst crimes, except towards the end of slavery, America’s behavior was typical of the era and all human history up to that point. By 1917, the Communists could hardly make that argument. They continued in their policies of ethnic hatred after they’d gone out of style.
(1) you ignore the many american indians not killed by disease.
(2) you ignore the active role of the us gov’t in the suffering and death of many american indians; e.g. slaughter of the buffalo and forced relocation to inhospitable environments.
(3) You ignore the systematic keeping of black people as slaves in favor of “we fought a war over slavery, sorta” Wow, those free black people must really owe us, huh?
Further, it is a complete apples to oranges argument in that you are comparing a single rich country to multiple, sometimes much larger, much much poorer countries which are also less stable politically and geographically more imperiled by their neighbors. I’m surprised you didn’t point out that America also has tastier peanut butter.
Mind you I’m not, like Sandino, singing the praises of workers revolution, just pointing out the weak underpinnings and overall inappropriateness of your arguments.
No america doesn’t have as much blood on it’s hands lately as say, N Korea, but then 20th century Communist Mongolia probably hasn’t come close to the number of atrocities as democratic America… (“sure we killed a few billion people but that was back in the 1300’s…”). Does either statement stand for anything significant? Not IMHO.
Cite that the US government was primarily responsible for buffalo hunting, please.
Regards,
Shodan
What kind of …??? Sometimes you browse through these threads and see the most outrageous kind of crap.
U.S. imperialism is soaked in blood from head to toe, dripping from every poor. It recently invaded a sovereign country, mind you, after laying siege for over a decade. From the bombing of Yugoslavia to the starvation embargoes of Iraq and Cuba, to the economic warfare waged against Africans, to support for genocidal dictators around the world, the U.S. has left a trail of bodies and blood that is unlikely to be “outdone.” How brainwashed can you get to compare the crimes of the U.S. to North Korea?
WHAT HAS NORTH KOREA DONE “LATELY” THAT CAN EVEN COMPARE TO THE CRIMES OF U.S. IMPERIALISM?
Sooo, Ninotchka, I suppose the Jews in Kiev machine-gunned themselves, then reached up out of their graves to erect a sports stadium over themselves?
Sandino, the US isn’t developing nuclear weapons while large fractions of its population starve and die. (If NK is locked in a `death embargo’, how can it afford nukes? How can it afford nukes and not food?) It isn’t using force to keep people in who desperately want to leave. (If my people were starving, I’d certianly allow as many of them to leave as wanted to. Or is this somehow America’s fault, too?) It didn’t run horrendous POW camps during the Korean War. (Something it shares with its ideological brother, Vietnam.)
And, just so we’re clear, what is your opinion of Pol Pot? How does this opinion differ from your stance on Stalin? Lenin? Chairman Mao Zedong? Kim Il Sung? Ho Chi Minh? Fidel Castro? I simply want to know your opinion of various Communist leaders.
I don’t recall saying they were primarily responsible, IIRC it was railroad companies who were primarily at fault. But their work, despite it frequently being illegal according to US-Indian treaties was ignored (at best) and encouraged (at worst) by the US. And of course the US army provided protection for Buffalo Hunters, as in the Red River conflict.
First, cool it with the personal attacks. Crap stinks all by itself, people who go around calling stuff crap are typically fresh out of real arguments.
Next, as for brainwashed you are one to talk. Lately, the US is responsible for nowhere near as many deaths as, simply, the N. Korean starving of several million of their own people. Multiply the civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined by 10 fold and korea is still ahead by a longshot. Heck your wonderful USSR killed far more afghanis (and communist civilians) then the US could ever have dreamed of.
A real communist would have the guts to call out murderers like the Kims. You apparently prefer to simply regurgitate the extremist view, no better IMHO then the talk radio dittoheads regurgitating how Rush and Foxnews tell them America can do no wrong.
Re Crook 'n Dope
[1] I said that ‘much of the destruction of the Amerind population was by disease’. In my book, much and many are both words that mean something less than ‘most’. Most would imply more than 50%. By using the word ‘much’ I am attributing less than 50% of the destruction of the Amerind population to ‘natural causes’ and therefore am attributing more than 50% to the actions of the American government and/or individual Americans. Therefore it can hardly be said that I’m ignoring the actions of the US government or individual US citizens in directly causing Amerind deaths.
[2] Again, I’m not claiming that the US government and individual US citizens didn’t wage war against the Amerinds, with all the horrors that implies. Deaths by forced marching, relocation to hostile enviroments, deliberate destruction of food sources, cavalry saber, musket shot or whatever all fall under ‘man-made causes’ and thus that ‘more than 50%’ mentioned above.
[3] I think it would be very difficult to pin the blame for slavery on capitalism or democracy. Sandino would agree, I think, that slavery is a pre-capitalist system. And while slavery was supported by the (all-white) electorate of the South, it was also being threatened by the all-white electorate of the North. Do I think American blacks ‘owe us’ (leaving aside who is us)? No. That claim would be grotesque in it’s injustice. But, given the efforts of northern whites in the Civil War, and given that most whites in America are either descendants of northern whites or immigrants who arrived post 1860, I think it’s equally grotesque for blacks to say that whites owe them for slavery. (Leaving aside Jim Crow and other racial injustices for now.)
Your example comparing Mongolia to the USA does say something useful. Economic and political systems should be judged not by their aspirations, but by their results.
So, concentrating on the economic and political system of the Mongols, roughly shared by other pastoral nomads, we can see that it gave rise to periodic outbursts of conquering their neighbors (bad) and very little good that I can see. It’s not an economic and political system we would want to advocate.
The economic and political system of capitalist democracy have lead to societies that have unprecedented prosperity and freedom. They’re not perfect. To paraphrase Churchill, “They’re the worst systems except all the others that have been tried from time to time.”
The economic and political system of Communism have lead to neither prosperity nor freedom.
Don’t you? I cut and pasted it in my post -
So when you said “active role of the us gov’t”, you didn’t mean that it was an active role, and you weren’t referring to the US government. Glad we could clear that up.
As a point of information, bison hunting was not primarily a function of the railroads, either. It was a commercial enterprise, supplying hides to the American east. Although some of the hides were shipped via rail. Remember “Buffalo Bill” and so forth?
Regards,
Shodan
Let me know when you figure out that “active” does not mean the same thing as “primary”
Yes I do. As a ‘point of information’ he killed Buffalo in the employ of the railroads.
http://members.aol.com/Gibson0817/buffalo.htm
or any number of google hits…
Fortunately, the definition of “weaselly” remains a constant in these troubled times.
So, everybody kills everybody else. Wow, what an insight. It looks like the only way to determine which form of government is the best is to throw open all borders and let people move wherever they want.
I just hope the U.S. can stand the influx. Personally, I think Canada is severely underpopulated, so they should be neighbourly and send the more skilled immigrants our way.