Yeah but a key point is that his opinion was very influential on Marx and the other communist thinkers. He didn’t think Robespierre and the terrorists went too far, he thought he didn’t go far enough and the revolution was cut short by Napoleon and other reactionary forces before it could become a true proletarian revolution. He was very clear that he thought terror (in the sense of authoritarian state violence) was a crucial part of the revolution.
Sure, but earlier in history before Turkish nationalism took off means you’re also pre-Tanzimat, and in the pre-Tanzimat Ottoman Empire religion was more important than it would become later.
Non-Turkish Muslims, Armenians and other Christians, as well as Jews all fit neatly into the Dhimma system. How well did the Ottomans get on with people who weren’t “People of the Book”? I know there were a lot of massacres of Yazidis, but they’re kind of a special case because sometimes Muslims view them as apostates rather than as a separate religion (and those massacres were ordered by individual muftis or sometimes sultans).
I think Zoroastrians did better under Ottoman rule? But I also don’t think very many of them actually came under Ottoman rule?
As best as I could tell the Turks of that part of the world were pretty thoroughly Islamized (though not everywhere, since there are Tengri Turks in Siberia to this day) by the time that the Ottomans arose; but if there were large numbers of Tengri Turks under Ottoman rule, I can find no sources mentioning them.
All that to say that I’m not sure we can tell how well the Ottomans would have treated the Native Americans, because expanding into large swathes of land inhabited by people who follow non-Abrahamic religions is not something that they ever did in real life. It’s a novel situation for them.
But if the Native Americans widely adopted Islam (or even Christianity, if the Ottomans aren’t the first on the scene, so to speak) then I agree that they’d have likely done better under Ottoman rule.
Because not every imaginable product is on the market, capitalist societies are not particularly more free than communist ones? Really?
To-may-to, to-mah-to, amiright?
Eta: but actually, it occurs to me that the posts we are responding to are in fact a perfect answer to the question posed by the OP. A real-time example of how people in the West can defend Communism: “Western freedom is an illusion, we are no freer than those under Communist rule”.
So it’s a complete side track but there is a sort of analogy in their treatment of Montengro which was Europes last tribal society. The Ottomans spent a long time attempting to pacify the province and probably during that time I’d guess your average Montengran would swap places with your average native American under US rule. Of course they ultimately failed which made a big difference for the outcome for the native population of the two places
All of that stuff about corruption perfectly holds in any capitalistic-oriented kleptocracy as well, as any (sincere or insincere) Communist will point out. And rhetoric concerning “the state of human nature” is, in this context, almost invariably bullshit contrived and twisted to justify anything the writer wants from Stalinism to the Guillotine to USA-style “democracy”, imperialism, racism, and banana republicanism.
So this is exactly the kind of “both sideism” that was used to justify support for the Soviet union in the era of the great purges. Even if you ignore all the nonindigenous genocide, famine and oppression, the indigenous population of Siberia face far worse under the communists than the native Americans in the US. There is no way you can validly point to the (very real) historical injustices perpetrated by the US and say “see! the US is just the same as the USSR”.
Again this right here is the answer to the OP. This is exactly the kind of spurious comparison a 1930s pro-soviet communist would make to justify his support of the USSR.
The American right wing in 2024 are the most extreme fringe enthno-nationalists that have ever had mainstream acceptance in the US. But they absolutely would not call for (and then write into law as a practical state policy) the execution of large sections of the American population for being class enemies. That is exactly what the politburo did. We are not talking about vague allusions to political violence, I mean actually advocating for wiping out huge sections of society, and then carrying it out.
But then there was (is?) the Lada Niva. Sure it’s a primitive car (it already was 40 years ago), but enthusiasts also in the West swear by it. They say you can fix any problem with a Lada Niva with a hammer and a screwdriver.
No, they had a choice, but that choice meant double the price, and more importantly, even a few more years on the waiting list.
Professor Eric Hobsbawm was quoted as saying something on the lines of if that if all the suffering and death generated by the Russian Revolution had produced a model Marxist state, then it would have been absolutely worth it.
I’ve been unable to find the exact quote, athough he did write " As I think back, I ask myself, again and again: was there an alternative to the indiscriminate , brutal, basically unplanned rush forward of the Five-Year Plan? I wish I could say there was, but I cannot. I cannot find a answer."
I agree with a lot in the thread, but another factor through the 1930’s was the idea that Communism was the future of mankind, and one should embrace the future. Famous quotation:
I have seen the Future, and it works
— Lincoln Steffens, 1919
This demonstrates both how Communism is regularly defended with “whataboutism”, and how much of it is just a rhetorical shield for anti-Americanism. Much of the modern Communist movement can be boiled down to a belief that “America is the Devil, and it doesn’t matter how many people we need to kill to defeat the Devil because once the Devil is defeated the world will be perfect”.
Defenders of Communism drag America into the conversation no matter how irrelevant it is, blame it for literally everything wrong in the world, and support everything up to and including genocide even if all doing so does is let them “score points” against America. Not an exaggeration, I’ve seen a number of them argue for the genocide of the people of Ukraine because somehow that would let them get one-up on the US.
And with pretty much any issue across the world they bring up the US as a cause even if it’s not involved or actively opposed to the issue; “America is the Devil” is axiomatic to them.
And then there’s the fact that it just doesn’t matter how bad America is; no amount of America being bad will make Communism good.
remove “class” and replace it with “religious” and you’d get there in a generation…
You think the US didn’t do that? Read about them taking away Linus Pauling’s passport so he couldn’t leave the country.
It wasn’t always easy for Jews to leave the SU though. They could only go to Israel and they would immediately lose their jobs while waiting for their exit visa.
Really, now.
I met several, and they all said Soviet or Chinese communism was “not true communism”.
Nowaday’s Chinese “communism” really isn’t. It’s the worst of both worlds, capitalism’s free unabashed reign and communism’s suppression of freedom combined.
True. It seems Deng and his successors secretly took Marshal Piłsudski’s advice:
“Comrades, I took the red tram of socialism to the stop called Independence, and that’s where I got off. You may keep on to the final stop if you wish, but from now on let’s address each other ‘Mister’”
This requires the belief in only two alternatives: total chaos or jackboot tyranny.
I think Marx and Engels looking at China’s “communism” today would weep. But they would already have wept about Stalin’s USSR.