Yeah, but Shodan, the Balkans have never been really peaceful-there’s a reason they call it the “powder keg of Europe.”
Der Trihs, actually, we were reluctant to join the Allies because of the totalitarianism of the Tsarist regime, and did not do so until after Nicholas was overthrown by the Duma/Provisional government, lead by Alexander Kerensky. No, it was not the church that was in charge, but it had nothing to do with religion at that point.
And again, our support of dictators had jackshit to do with religion-and everything to do with cold, hard cash. Hell, we supported a regime that at one point was passing out leaflets saying “Be a Patriot! Kill a Priest!” when the local clergy started speaking out against the Salvadoran military’s brutality.
So? The Middle East is not exactly a haven of peace for the last three thousand years, but I don’t see anyone arguing that we should minimize a million deaths there.
Stranger on a Train made a factually incorrect assertion, I provided a cite (from the Master himself, no less) that contradicted this. For this I get called a liar.
One of the reasons that people were/are afraid of Communism is that Communism tends to be associated with wholesale slaughter. Those acting on behalf of Stalinism (and Leninism and Maoism and whatever Pol Pot called his ideology) were acting on behalf of the great mass murderers of the twentieth century. Therefore, a lot of other folks felt it was not such a hot idea.
I don’t knwo if you meant that facetiously or not, but since some people on the board may nto know, I’ll reply as if it were serious.
Trofim Lysenko was a disaster for Soviet Agriculture. Among other things he declared that all creatures of the same species did not “naturally” compete, denied genetic theory (and therefore crossbreeeding), and generally held Soviet biology in an iron grip. He was fond of exiling scientists who disagreed with him to the gulags, although thankfully most of them survived because their knowhow was valuable. Unfortunately, Lysenko insisted on his theories being put to practical use whether they workd or not.
He was a major factor in the Soviet famines, although other Communist regimes managed to do just fine without their own Lysenko.
Much more complicated than your very simplistic version. Striking workers were not normally met with violence until they started to use it themselves. Labor movements throughout most of the 19th century were pretty peaceful. Anarchism and SYndicalism and other violent movements changed that, and violence became mre acceptable. But it’s not at all clear from the historical record that owners were particularly violent.
The discussion is murder, suppression, et cetera in the in the context of Communist regimes (i.e what makes “Communism so scary,”). The number of deaths you cite are both almost entirely in the context of an ongoing war and its aftermath in which the Partisans, led by Tito, were but one faction, and in which there is no demonstrated evidence that said deaths were in any way part of an organized campaign of an established autocratic regime led by Tito. The fact that ethnic and political violence in the Communist Yugoslavia–a Communist (informally, “Titoist”) nation–was less than several Western democracies is a point you have repeatedly tried to evade with misdirection, asserting death figures out of context, and haymaking; and ironically, it serves only to undermine the entirely legitimate claims of real abuses that occurred under many Communist regimes.
For clarification: there were no mass slaughters of peoples in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under and attributed to the autocratic reign of Josip Broz ‘Tito’, and the political suppression and human rights abuses that there occurred were modest even compared to contemporary conditions in democratic Western Europe. If you want to contest that with some factually-based information or data that you are prepared to stand behind and justify, be my guest. Otherwise you go pound sand.
Most of the people fighting–or, at least, bringing the fight–were not residents of Sarajevo, but were instead ethnic groups whose nationalist prerogatives had long been suppressed by Tito’s campaign of “Brotherhood and Unity” intended to appeal to the common ethnic heritage of Serbians, Croats, Slavic Muslims, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and the minorities of native Bulgarians, Albanians, Romanians, Magyars, Greeks, Cretes, et cetera, to see themselves as “Yugoslavs” first. This was especially challenging in the post-WWII era after the Axis powers established several ethnically-defined puppet nations in a successful effort to make the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia tear itself to pieces. Throughout Tito’s reign ethnic strife (save for the Croat Spring) was mostly minimal, but old resentments rose in the post-Tito decade, and the fall of the East Bloc and resurgence of ancient ethnic resentments across the Balkans reignited old conflagrations resulting in the most pointless and destructive conflict in post-WWII Europe.
Or, as Guinastasia notes, it’s always been Europe’s most consistent battlefield. Tito’s Yugoslavia was an aberration from the frequent ethnic strife of the region. Which is a shame, because it is a beautiful area with a long and storied history.
Facetiously; Lysenko was a horror. It was a shout-out to another famous superpower leader who famously appointed total incompetents to positions of power with the result that people needlessly died from natural catastrophes. I dunno if Stalin ever said, “Lysennie’s doing a heckuva job,” but the parallels are interesting.
(Not that Brownie was anywhere near the idealogue as Lysenko was, nor that Brownie’s missteps resulted in anywhere near the number of deaths; it was just a snarky aside to a point about Stalin’s appointment of incompetent administrators).
Communism in its two largest forms, and many of its smaller forms, has turned out to be a travesty; there’s no denying that. It’s worth asking, though, why so many tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people were so drawn to it around the turn of the century. What conditions made it look so appealing? To what degree have the conditions changed, and to what degree is it just that Communism no longer looks like an appealing alternative?
For me, it was as much about the economics as the mass murder and such. It seemed like everybody wore grey flannel jump suits and stood in line for hours just to buy scratchy toilet paper that cost a week’s wages. They lived in two room hovels, whole families, sharing a cold shower with everybody in the building. They snitched on neighbors, even making stuff up if they had to, if they could profit from it enough to buy something on the black market. They ate beets and beans, and drank water or rot gut vodka. They worked between naps when they showed up at the factories, which were dank and moldy and freezing in the winter. Their cars were so badly designed and built that they had to be shaken from side to side to mix the oil and gas before starting them. It just seemed like a hellish set of living conditions.
And you are obtuse, seemingly with intention. There were no “1.2 million” people killed by Tito distinct from deaths due to internal conflicts within WWII Yugoslavia, as an organized campaign of mass murder, genocide, or democide, or under the establishment of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Instead of benightedly waiving around a single figure without any context or substantiation, you might try reading up on some actual history.
So…perhaps 200,000 not including the war dead? Not a huge death toll…for a communist country. Pretty bleak though if this represents one of the ‘better’ communist countries and enough to show why things might have been considered ‘scary’, at least in context.
(ETA: Just as an observation, Rummel’s figures always seem to be the highest. I know the Master used him, but thought I’d point that out)
Funny, but everything cited about Western Fear of communism seems to be Post WWII.
Truth is, the Red scare goes back to the begining of the 20th century and really kicked off with Russian Revolution. Everyone can remember McCarthy but there was a Red Scare from 1917 to 1920. In which the governement of the US tried to stomp down on the tide of anarchists and communists.
The rise of this movement was only exasperated by a economic downturn, Union unrest, general strikes and in some cases anarchist attacks. There is were the seeds of the fear began.
Before we even knew how bad the USSR would become or had any real benchmarks to judge the real price and cost of practical Comunism there was a great fear of it.
During the depression when it seemed that Capitolism had failed a good number of socialist and Communist organizations began to gain more members throughout the Western world.
for examples see
In Germany the reason Hitler was given the Chancellorship was because the Nazis were dire enemies of the communist party in Germany. The establishment feared the Communists far more than the ultra right wing nationalists and decided to risk a relationship with a Party that was no better for the nation.
The seeds for the fear came because in its early years because there was an actual possibility that this competing ideology might actually overthrow the existing order of things.
Ironically, though the entire concept would eventually show itself to be an unworkable and monsterous failure, in its early years it caused enough ripples that it did change quite a few things in the old order (labour laws, adopting of some socialized legilsation to deal with the Depression).
Well, sure, that’ doesn’t sound pleasant. But really, the worst part has to be when you decide you can’t take the living conditions anymore, attempt to get the hell out, and get shot in the back for your effort.
Yes, you are right-communism resulted in pretty lousy economic performance. the funny thing was, it was promoted as being “scientific”-uncer communism, things were supposed to be super-efficient. As we all learned, do away with markets, and you do away with stuff like:
-individual initiative
-innovation
-the knowledge that prices bring
So, communism was a huge failure!
Yeah, but how much of this is attributable to Tito’s leadership and how much is just wholesale ethnic slaughter in the anarchy that befell Yugoslavia after the collapse and withdrawal of the Axis powers? Rummel’s numbers as cited all seem high, or at least at the high end of accepted estimates, anyway; Stalin is usually credited with 20-25 million, depending on how you count up the numbers and estimates the death tolls from relocation of whole peoples. (The Soviet Union always inflated reported population numbers anyway.)
Certainly not; life in Yugoslavia was not as bad as East Bloc nations (part of this had to do with Tito’s advocation of “market socialism” and trade with the West, which created a dramatic gradient in the quality of life of Yugoslavia versus that described by *Liberal), but many basic freedoms were also denied and economic and social opportunities were probably less than in many Western nations. Zastava made great cars in comparison to AtvoVAZ or Trabant, but in the Western Europe and the United States they were regarded as mediocre cars strictly for the low end economy segment. The point isn’t that Yugoslavia is an example of Communism done good–if anything, it demonstrates that even when operated in economic and social moderation it is still only marginally functional in comparison to semi-regulated or free market democracies–but that not all Communist nations engaged in the murderous destruction characteristic of the worst of them, as asserted previously, an uncategorical statement that undermines its own claim by counterexample.
What, you want to leave our socialist workers’ paradise for the degenerate West? We must shoot you for your own good, comrade, so that others may observe your example and realize the true benefits of our centrally planned economy and bountiful agricultural yields.
The fact that all Communist-run nations have had to either impose such strictures or compromise Marxist socioeconomic principles in order not to have people fleeing over the border and abandoning their home nation by itself tends to indicate the manifest failures of extreme economic socialism or dogmatic Marxism. And that the revolution and imposed oligarchy that presages “true” Communism often devolves into a self-feeding personality cult autocracy doesn’t give much hope for the viability of the method even if the result were as desirable as advertised.
Communists had a little bit of influence in American labor before the war. After the war, most labor leadership turned decidedly anti-Communist, and labor unions were decertified if they were too leftist. The AFL-CIO leadership enthusiastically supported this, replacing radical unions with their own moderate ones with the support of industry.
George Meany hated Communists. So did Walter Reuther. So did Lane Kirkland. Ronald Reagan emerged from this labor environment a dedicated anti-Communist, and would take this conviction to a couple of other jobs.
Because it sounds plausible. It seems to be a natural human failing to think that prices are something that can be set by fiat. Add to that the habit of assuming that middlemen play no useful role in the economy and that risk management is a worthless pursuit, and “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” starts to sound good. Especially since it is so obvious that I need everything I want.
So you just pass a law that says such-and-such has to sell for so much, where “so much” is less than whatever it sells for now. And then you discover there are all sorts of things that you didn’t take into account when setting the price lower - especially the near-inescapable tendency to slough off if you don’t profit by an increase in effort.
Sure, maybe you get shot if you don’t meet quota. So you meet quota (or doctor the books so it looks like you do, or just crank out your quota but each unit of production is crap that nobody wants anyway - if you have to produce a thousand pairs of shoes, and the soles fall off after a month, so what? You made quota).
Or you make quota and find you can make a bit selling na levo. So you do that.
That’s easy - the gigantic disparity of cheap, popular consumer goods in the West vs. the bleak and threadbare Soviet Union of the seventies and eighties.
P.J. O"Rourke said it - we didn’t win the Cold War with bombs - we did it with blue jeans and cars and popular music. You can’t do that kind of thing with a Communist economy, at least not if there is a non-Communist economy kicking your ass nine ways from Sunday. The Great Leap Forward was a huge disaster. It was a huge effort for the old Soviet Union to try to keep up with the West militarily, and they didn’t even come close with a consumer economy. We did both - the military roughly as well, and with consumer goods it wasn’t even close.
I’d also like to mention some reasons the American Communist movement was very ineffective politically, despite having a lot of theoretical allies.
First off, Communism arrived on these shores in the form of immigrants. Unlike most other immgrants, Communists stayed that way. They didn’t assimilate their organizations. Furthermore, they showed very early on that they were willing to purge and mess with natives who wanted to join. For some 80 years, Communist newsletters were rarely in English because the readership couldn’t speak it. Plus, the foreigners dominated, discriminated against, and cheated the Americans, keeping them out of any positions on influence by hook or by crook. Marx was personally involved with this effort or some ungodly reason.
(The man is beloved in some circles as a saint and even his enemies don’t usually ascribe personal motives, but he definitely had a large manipulative and dishonest streak, and was something of a demogague himself.)
Even as it eventually became a little more native, the movement kept taking orders from foreign powers (namely Russia). The continual purges weakened its influence and made a lot of enemies. Additionally, their practice of infiltrating and then destroying other movments earned them a very bad reputation among other leftist circles. That’s also what turned unions against them.
Of course, a lot of this is the just the practical result of cultural clashes.