How Socialism Works (not for the faint hearted)

antrobus

Voyager2002 wrote: »

... Some of my friends were detained in a concentration camp before managing to leave Chile. .....

As it happens, back in the day, I helped with the settlement of Chilean refugees in the UK, so I know (or at least once knew) quite a bit about the kind of !!!! that went down. But really. Pinochet killed about 3,200 people, which is about 3,200 too many, but in the context of the 'horrors' of the 20th C..... well, we killed about 10 times that number of civilians when we bombed Dresden, there are 20,000 murders every year in Venezuela.

Voyager2002 wrote: »

....The horrors were very real, and it is not easy to find modern "left-wing" governments that behaved in a comparable manner: the list basically begins and ends with Kampuchea, and of course North Korea. .....

Really?? So the Chinese Great Leap Forward did not kill 45 million people? The Soviet Union did not have concentration camps, no one was executed, Katyn Wood never happened, Masaryk jumped out of that window all by himself, no one was ever shot for ever trying to get over the Berlin Wall, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan never killed anyone....

Voyager2002 wrote: »

....Cuba has no place in such a list: your mention of Cuba in this context suggests a total lack of knowledge and understanding in relation to Latin America (the region that was the subject of my PhD)....

I'm sorry, I do apologise, I forgot that the Cuban Revolution was an entirely bloodless affair. There were no firing squads, no mass executions of Batista supporters, no political opponents were ever imprisoned, and no one ever drowned trying to flee the country, and any Cuban emigre who says otherwise is clearly nothing more than an agent of American imperialism.

(Rewriting history indeed.:))

lvader

The flip side of the coin is that there is probably a higher percentage of people in north Korea content with theirs lives than in the UK.

Voyager2002

lvader wrote: »

The flip side of the coin is that there is probably a higher percentage of people in north Korea content with theirs lives than in the UK.

Indeed: try asking (with the help of a friendly soldier to translate) and you will probably record more than a hundred per cent satisfaction...

Voyager2002

antrobus wrote: »

As it happens, back in the day, I helped with the settlement of Chilean refugees in the UK, so I know (or at least once knew) quite a bit about the kind of !!!! that went down. But really. Pinochet killed about 3,200 people, which is about 3,200 too many, but in the context of the 'horrors' of the 20th C..... well, we killed about 10 times that number of civilians when we bombed Dresden, there are 20,000 murders every year in Venezuela.



Really?? So the Chinese Great Leap Forward did not kill 45 million people? The Soviet Union did not have concentration camps, no one was executed, Katyn Wood never happened, Masaryk jumped out of that window all by himself, no one was ever shot for ever trying to get over the Berlin Wall, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan never killed anyone....



I'm sorry, I do apologise, I forgot that the Cuban Revolution was an entirely bloodless affair. There were no firing squads, no mass executions of Batista supporters, no political opponents were ever imprisoned, and no one ever drowned trying to flee the country, and any Cuban emigre who says otherwise is clearly nothing more than an agent of American imperialism.

(Rewriting history indeed.:))

It is a fact that Comrade Chairman Mao Tse Tung was the greatest mass-murderer in history, followed by Stalin and Hitler (in that order).

My post used the word "modern", which I understood broadly as since the death of Mao.

lvader

Voyager2002 wrote: »

Indeed: try asking (with the help of a friendly soldier to translate) and you will probably record more than a hundred per cent satisfaction...

Not needed, when everyone has the same level of existence and you don't know any better why would you get upset about it? That is communism in a nutshell.

Generali

Kennyboy66 wrote: »

Embarrassing yourself here Gen.

I don't know about that. I find it interesting that it's always the communists that this happens to and that so many people crawl out of the woodwork to say that it's the exception or that the Americans are just as bad.

This has been pretty widely reported and comes from a highly respected source.

Joe_Bloggs

Might I suggest that description 'Totalitarian' defines the North Korean government as opposed to socialist.
I will kow tow to generali to help him look for his marbles which are clearly lost.


J_B.

Voyager2002

lvader wrote: »

Not needed, when everyone has the same level of existence and you don't know any better why would you get upset about it? That is communism in a nutshell.

Hardly!

The people interviewed for the report linked by the OP knew that things were wrong. More generally, hunger, malnutrition and emotional abuse are felt as wrong, even by people who don't know anything different.

Actually, an information black-out works in the opposite direction. When I was teaching in the Seychelles, at the time when it had a near-Marxist government, one of my colleagues used news broadcasts from the USA in his lessons. Like me he was a socialist and took satisfaction from the way this material opened the eyes of our students to the failings of the US economy and the suffering of the poor there -- until the authorities stopped him from using this material! And in Cuba, I was struck by the discontent of many of the people I met, and their belief that things were better elsewhere -- in reality the levels of public health and well-being there put Britain to shame and are outstanding for what is still a poor country: had it not been for the revolution, conditions there would doubtless be comparable with those in the Dominican Republic, which are miserable for most people.

tomterm8

Joe_Bloggs wrote: »

Might I suggest that description 'Totalitarian' defines the North Korean government as opposed to socialist.
I will kow tow to generali to help him look for his marbles which are clearly lost.


J_B.

Communism is an inherantly totalitarian ideology. You simply can't have communism without the revolution, and you can't have revolution without mass murder.

It's one of the very clear and obvious differences between british socialism and communism: when British socialists lose an election they lose, when communists lose an election they shoot the other side...

Kennyboy66

Generali wrote: »

I don't know about that. I find it interesting that it's always the communists that this happens to and that so many people crawl out of the woodwork to say that it's the exception or that the Americans are just as bad.

This has been pretty widely reported and comes from a highly respected source.

Does anyone really dispute the horrors of North Korea ?

Even North Korea doesn't describe itself as communist these days.

It's pretty hard to think of another hereditary dictatorship to compare it with, it probably is close to Pol Pot's regime in many ways and if you had to label it you could equally describe it as Fascism as Communism, but then the outcome of those 2 extremes are predictably dire.

I'm not really sure if you actually find it "interesting", or prefer just to use desperate tragedies to score juvenile debating points over anyone who doesn't subscribe to laissez-faire capitalism and a state limited to enforcing property rights.

I know this is a forum for debate and all sorts of nonsense gets posted by all posters, but if you are really proud of starting this one then feel free to keep digging, digger.