Good news from Venezuela

michaels

Looks like socialism in Venuzuea has led to many more deaths than dictatorship in Chile ever did. I know the right-on revolutionaries of Islington will not think about this but perhaps they should.

Generali

michaels wrote: »

Looks like socialism in Venuzuea has led to many more deaths than dictatorship in Chile ever did. I know the right-on revolutionaries of Islington will not think about this but perhaps they should.

It is a source of constant amazement that Socialism remains not only a mainstream political force but that people proudly announce their socialism. Really it should be regarded in exactly the same way as fascism; both are a bunch of extremists that have killed millions, in fact far more people have died at the hands of socialists than fascists.

Stalin alone managed to kill more people than fascism. Pol Pot managed to kill a quarter of the population of Cambodia.

westernpromise

Ecofascism is even worse.

michaels

Generali wrote: »

It is a source of constant amazement that Socialism remains not only a mainstream political force but that people proudly announce their socialism. Really it should be regarded in exactly the same way as fascism; both are a bunch of extremists that have killed millions, in fact far more people have died at the hands of socialists than fascists.

Stalin alone managed to kill more people than fascism. Pol Pot managed to kill a quarter of the population of Cambodia.

And of course the shadow chancellor quotes from Mao's little red book :eek:

Generali

westernpromise wrote: »

Ecofascism is even worse.

Why so? I'm not sure the Greens have had much chance to kill anyone much at all. Also, at least they have a point in that externalities need to be addressed although they have some dumb ideas about how to do it.

michaels wrote: »

And of course the shadow chancellor quotes from Mao's little red book :eek:

Imagine someone seriously using Mein Kampf as their inspiration in politics. I believe I'm right to say that Mao was the worst of the lot in terms of absolute deaths although Pol Pot was worse when you look at proportion of population killed.

westernpromise

Generali wrote: »

Why so? I'm not sure the Greens have had much chance to kill anyone much at all.

You must be kidding, surely. Green policies have killed millions and continue to do so every day. The campaign against DDT is the obvious example, but the Green campaign against cheap energy means deaths due to poverty and indoor air pollution all over the third world. The Green hostility to lead in petrol and carbon emissions is why we have much dirtier diesel engined cars instead and the worst city air quality in decades. The Green goal of shrinking the world economy and reducing its population requires perpetual recession and much lower life expectancy.

Vote green for mediaeval levels of infant mortality.

Generali

westernpromise wrote: »

You must be kidding, surely. Green policies have killed millions and continue to do so every day. The campaign against DDT is the obvious example, but the Green campaign against cheap energy means deaths due to poverty and indoor air pollution all over the third world. The Green hostility to lead in petrol and carbon emissions is why we have much dirtier diesel engined cars instead and the worst city air quality in decades. The Green goal of shrinking the world economy and reducing its population requires perpetual recession and much lower life expectancy.

Vote green for mediaeval levels of infant mortality.

You have a very excellent point IMHO regarding DDT: if people in New York and London were catching malaria then there is absolutely no way that DDT would have been banned.

HornetSaver

Generali wrote: »

It is a source of constant amazement that Socialism remains not only a mainstream political force but that people proudly announce their socialism. Really it should be regarded in exactly the same way as fascism; both are a bunch of extremists that have killed millions, in fact far more people have died at the hands of socialists than fascists.

Stalin alone managed to kill more people than fascism. Pol Pot managed to kill a quarter of the population of Cambodia.

Struggling to understand your argument here. Is it that the world needs more fascists relative to the number of communists? Or that the democracies should declare war on all communist governments in the world right now?

But to the thread as a whole: the problem is not socialism, it's socialism at any cost (that's ultimately what Communism is), and the same goes for any ideologies, including capitalism and democracy. For an example of the latter, consider what Northern Ireland would be like today if it weren't for the power-sharing agreement between unionists and republicans. And yet, the power sharing agreement is capable of creating situations where the democratic winners do not get in.

China - which can be accurately accused of almost anything except being right wing - somewhere along the line realised that Maoism to the exclusion of even considering the beneficial elements of capitalism was self-defeating, and lo and behold they've made huge economic progress in recent decades. They still have a lot of the bad stuff associated with Stalin and Mao (one party state, heavy censorship, political detentions, suppression of minorities etc), but the situation is infinitely better than it would have been were they not at least willing to open their eyes to changes which might improve the situation. For proof of that just take North Korea, and consider that China's policies were almost indistinguishable from theirs as recently as the 1980s.

The same goes for Britain. The NHS is an unmistakeably socialist policy, as is the state pension. The practise of politicians railroading through things that they weren't elected on and that even their own parties are uncomfortable about, by force of personality and by dividing and conquering, has more than a whiff of fascism about it.

Taking elements from other, inferior methods of government does not change the fact that we are still a capitalist democracy at our core. Indeed, all of the examples I mention above could be argued to have ultimately strengthened it. Those examples do not change the overall picture, that in Britain decent people, as well as mainstream politicians, reject both the hard-left and far-right.

But to attack one extreme ideology more heavily than another because it is associated more strongly with your political opponents (and indeed to go out of the way to associate your political opponents with them, as many others on this thread have done) puts a lot of you only a few steps above extremism, to put it mildly and politely.

antrobus

HornetSaver wrote: »

Struggling to understand your argument here.......

I'm struggling to understand your argument. Well, it's not really an argument per se, more of a primer in logical fallacies.

Generali

HornetSaver wrote: »

Struggling to understand your argument here. Is it that the world needs more fascists relative to the number of communists? Or that the democracies should declare war on all communist governments in the world right now?

My point, made somewhat ineloquently, is that people are rightly repudiated for being fascists but Communists, whose actions are just as bad, are widely lauded by the bien pensants.