[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
From what we are hearing of aircraft strafing crowds and so forth, I don’t think a lack of ruthlessness is a problem for Gaddafi and friends.
[/QUOTE]
I didn’t say that the Libyan’s lacked ruthlessness…I said that the Iranian’s are more ruthless (‘perhaps’). They are also better skilled, and have a stronger internal government and secret police force. Remember that the Iranian ‘revolutionary government’ has only been about since 1979…so, they haven’t managed to decay as much as the Libyan ‘revolutionary government’ has. Also, Kaddafi has built something more akin to a secular dictatorship a la Saddam than the more theocratically oriented Iranian state. Oh, he trots out mouthings about Islam in the same way Saddam did, and no state in the region is going to be completely devoid of religious elements, but it’s nothing like Iran. Also, Iran is a much larger and more populace country, and while their military isn’t up to 1st or 2nd world standards, it’s a lot more powerful than Libya’s is.
So, add all that up and while I think that Iran will have another round of protests and slaughter akin to the glorious smack down they had the last time, I’m not sure they are as rotten to the core and out of gas as Libya…so they will probably fulfill the OPs dream and hang together for a few more years or a decade or so before they completely fall apart and set the OP off into uncontrolled weeping and clothes tearing. Sort of like the Chinese Communist government currently.
By American backed regimes do you mean direct products of coups or revolutions or any government actively backed by the US? Note for instance Park Chung Hee and compare him to Kim Il Sung or the longevity of Pinochet to that of Castro.
Both. We train torturers, encourage rapes and torture and massacres as a means of keeping power. We sell WMDs to people like Saddam and look the other way when he massacres people with them.
Qin Shi Huangdi, you’re responding to Commissar’s ridiculous position by taking a diametrically opposed position that is almost equally ridiculous. This might be a good time for you to try taking a position in the middle.
[QUOTE=Marley23]
And I don’t agree with this comparison of Communism to Nazism.
[/QUOTE]
I know you were moderating, and perhaps it’s a hijack of the, um, debate, but…why? They seem pretty comparable to me on just about every count, including the numbers of bodies.
Racists, Klansmen, Nazis, 9-11 Truthers, Birthers, Astrologists, Holocaust Deniers, Communists, and Homeopaths are not automatically banned. However, it’s usually the case that people with that sort of mindset find it very difficult to keep from getting banned for other reasons.
A Holocaust Denier is by definition a major-league asshole, and major-league assholes eventually get themselves banned because they will keep acting like an asshole no matter how many times they’re told to knock it off. On the rare occasions when they manage to rein in their assholery, well, that’s actually a good thing.
Remove the prejudice, hatred and murder from Nazism and you no longer have Nazism; Communism can at least exist without those kinds of flaws. I’m not going to argue about how it’s played out historically.
Count as what? As I said, those people are generally allowed to post here as long as they remain civil. And since you’ve named yourself after a Chinese autocrat who was not averse to indiscriminate slaughter, I’m not sure if this is an argument you want to make.