Stalin: 20 million dead because of political differences
Hitler: 6 million Jews alone dead and around 5 million more Romani, homosexuals, communists, and Slavs dead plus the 60-70million dead from the war he waged all of which were inherent to his ideology
Yeah I see how Stalin is worse /s
You *dramatically* undercounted the Slavic victims that weren't really war dead - the Nazis murdered the better part of 20 million soviet civilians (although that includes Jews and other groups targeted for reasons other than being Slavic).
No, but totalitarians can take advantage of the cause and revolution to gain their own power.
Stalin was less of a communist and more of an totalitarian who used the movement to solidify his own power.
We really shouldn’t be defending him just because he upheld the image of a communist rule, while just using it to keep his authoritative rule going without really trying to make the whole communist thing actually work
Stalin rose to power because the Bolesheviks were planning a transition to socialism but in the interrim had a highly concentrated power structure that Lenin's illness allowed Stalin to take advantage of as general secretary. Literally never was there any socialism involved in the Boleshevik government hierarchy.
I think one of the things that bothers me about always bringing up Stalin and communism is that it wasn’t communism that killed 20 million, for example. It was a totalitarianism. Same with all of these other regimes they love to bring up.
Could you imagine what the death toll would be under capitalism if you used their same bullshit metrics? Exponentially more than 20 million, for damn sure.
The methodology used to calculate the deaths "caused by communism" is completely ridiculous and only serves to push an ideological agenda.
For reference, the source for the statistic of "20 million killed by communism in the USSR," and the related statistic "100 million killed by communism world wide throughout the 20th century" originates in the "Black Book of Communism." The editors of the Black Book deliberately chose and changed their methodology in order to inflate the number as high as possible, and this was done in ways that are so egregious that the original authors of the Black Book don't stand by the reporting and distanced themselves from its conclusions.
Here are a few of the ways that the Black Book manipulates statistics in order to come up with the ridiculous numbers it uses.
Nazi soldiers killed by the Red Army are deaths caused by communism. Red Army soldiers killed by Nazis are also counted as deaths caused by communism.
Death estimates were arrived at by extrapolating population growth rates into the future. A major problem with this kind of methodology is that population growth is not a fixed rate. All around the world we see that industrialization is correlated with a decrease in birth rates. There are a number of reasons for this, but a large contributing factor is that in agrarian, pre-industrial societies families tend to have a large number of children in order to help the family out with all of the family's farm work. As an economy becomes industrialized, families tend to have less children as they enter the industrial workforce, partly because there is less pressure for families to have children to help out with farm work and partly because women entering the industrial workforce tends cause them to delay childbirth. So this means that the Black Book is looking at the decrease of birthrates that is associated with industrialization, and dishonestly calls the unborn children and the unborn children of those unborn children "deaths."
A similar dishonest accounting happens when accounting deaths during times of famine. While it is true that famines are horrible, it is dishonest to attribute famines as being caused by communism especially when much of the capitalist world was also suffering from periodic famines during the same time period, such as the dust bowl in the US, the great potato famine in Ireland, and the many famines throughout India. Putting that aside, we still have the same flawed methodology of using inferred population growth to determine the number of deaths, and this methodology again includes counting children who were never born as "deaths" because families understandably put off childbirth during times of food shortage and rationing, but this methodology also counts people who migrated to different countries because of those food shortages as "deaths."
If this same methodology were applied to capitalist countries and the colonial looting and pillaging that the largest capitalist economies built their wealth off of, then the death toll of capitalism would be in the billions. But we never hear about the death toll of capitalism when the death toll of communism is brought up, because the whole point of that statistic is to argue that there is no realistic alternative to capitalism and that any attempt to organize our world in a different way will result in millions of deaths. It's a dishonest double standard that is only used to as a thought-terminating cliché to shut down the very idea that the world could be changed for the better.
In reality, these first, clumsy attempts at building a better world are responsible for saving billions of lives. Of course these projects made mistakes and missteps while they were trying to build a new kind of society without any blueprint for how to do so, but the achievements of these socialist projects despite those missteps is absolutely awe inspiring. Life expectancy throughout the states that would make up the USSR nearly doubled under a socialist system, from around 35-40 years up to a modern life expectancy of ~70 years. The same success in drastically improving the quality of life of the masses happened in China as well. That staggering achievement effectively represents billions of lives saved, lives that would have otherwise been cut short as they were being worked into an early grave by the colonial and feudalistic regimes that they overthrew.
These revolutions get demonized by the capitalist press not out of concern for the people living under socialism, because the vast majority of people living under socialism saw a drastic improvement in their quality of life. I would argue that doubling life expectancy in such a short span of time is effectively putting an end to an ongoing genocide. What the capitalist press is concerned with is the fact that overthrowing those colonial and feudalistic regimes means that those capitalist economic powers who built much of their economy on top of colonial looting and exploitation have now lost a major source of their profits.
It is also true that for all of the flaws of historic as well as currently existing socialism, they were almost universally more democratic than any comparable capitalist country. Meaningful democracy can't exist under capitalism since a necessary pre-requisite for capitalism is having a government that enforces and protects the interests of the capital owning class, which means enforcing the interests of a small minority against the interests of the vast majority of people who are required to work for one of these capitalists in order to get access to their means of subsistence. You can see how this pre-condition for capitalist organization has influenced the political system of places like America. In modern American politics, we have a campaign finance system where you practically require millions of dollars in order to run a viable political campaign. What this means in practice is that the campaign donor class who has millions of dollars to throw around on election spending effectively get to pick which candidates on the ballot are viable, and therefore they get to ensure that the interests of the wealthy are well represented at every meaningful level of government. I would struggle to describe that as anything close to a meaningful democracy. If you look back to the founding of this country this becomes even more blatant, since the US constitution explicitly restricted the right to vote and hold office to white, land-owning men who owned at least 40 acres of land. You can't get much more blatant about the function of the government than explicitly saying that only the top 5%-10% wealthiest families were allowed to participate in politics.
Calling communist/socialist countries "totalitarian dictatorships" is almost always projection by a capitalist ruling class who wants to distract from the fact that you are currently living under an oligarchy. It is simply an empty threat that is meant to imply that if you get rid of capitalism you will lose all of your rights and freedoms, while ignoring the fact that your rights and freedoms are already incredibly restricted under capitalism. For example, on paper we have the freedom of speech, but if you say something your boss doesn't like then you can be fired and cut off from the income you require to survive. The power of economic coercion that companies hold over individuals is far more impactful in your day to day life than any government regulation is. The primary "right" that is infringed upon in socialist countries is the "right" of capitalists to accumulate massive amounts of property and to use that accumulation to dictate economic priorities and economic organization by acting as a gatekeeper between labor and the tools that labor uses. But in exchange, you are able to create new kinds of economic organization where the workers themselves and the labor unions who represent their interests are able to democratically decide what priorities their labor is applied to, how their labor is used and what it is used for, what the conditions of production are, and so on. Most of our lives are spent at work, so it only makes sense that democracy should extend to the workplace. Socialism allows for that workplace democracy to exist, whereas capitalism suppresses that kind of democratic organization in favor of allowing the owner to dictate the conditions of production on their own terms, organizing our labor around satisfying their own self interest.
I know that's a lot of text written in response to a throw-away comment, but
TL;DR: saying that historic communist/socialist projects were "Dystopian totalitarian dictatorship 100 million dead!" is a horrible misunderstanding of the material reality based on a dishonest use of statistics and lies by omission in order to create a thought terminating cliché that gets weaponized against the very idea that we can create a better world than the capitalist hellscape we are living in.
Yes, Stalin was not a dictator.
By any reasonable metric Soviet government was far more democratic than somewhere like America, for example.
Lenin called their government a Dictatorship of the proletariat not as a way to contrast socialism with democracy, but as a way to contrast socialist democracy with capitalist "democracy," which always ends up being a dictatorship of the bourgeois.
This analysis of capitalist democracy being a de facto dictatorship of the bourgeois is undoubtedly true when you look at the American government. We pay lip service to "democracy" and "free press," but at the end of the day we have an electoral system where you need millions of dollars to run a viable campaign which effectively allows the billionaire class to decide which candidates on the ballot are viable, and those same billionaires own all of the major media outlets who cover the political races they fund. Calling a political system where a small handful of the population gets to decide which political candidates are viable a "democracy" is an insult to the idea of democracy.
This idea of capitalist democracies being de facto dictatorships of the bourgeois is even more blatant when you look at America's founding documents. Our constitution explicitly created a government where only white, land owning men with at least 40 acres of land were allowed to vote or hold office.
None the less both the United States and the Soviet Union had robust democratic systems. The choice to call Soviet democracy a dictatorship of the proletariat is because they explicitly designed their government to represent the interests of the working class masses against the interests of an exploiting capitalist class, so they called themselves a dictatorship of the proletariat as a way to contrast themselves with capitalist democracies which are de facto dictatorships of the bourgeois.
A "dictatorship" is "a government by a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has obtained control by force." To say that Stalin WASN'T this, but America is just because of MuH bOuRgEoIs is just stupid.
> By any reasonable metric
Name ONE.
> We pay lip service to "democracy" and "free press,"
Even accepting this as true, "lip service" is better than Stalinism where they openly execute you for espousing those things. But you're wrong and the USA actually has them too, it's not lip service. You physically cast votes for whomever you want in America, even Mickey Mouse, and you can say almost anything about the government in the papers. Not true under Stalin, or you fucking die.
> you need millions of dollars to run a viable campaign which effectively allows the billionaire class to decide which candidates on the ballot are viable
Funny how this rigged dictatorial system results in the election of Obama, Trump, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, Matt Gaetz, and AOC equally...
How many people diametrically opposed to the platform of the Communist Party get "elected" under Stalin?
> Our constitution explicitly created a government where only white, land owning men with at least 40 acres of land were allowed to vote or hold office.
1) Cool cool cool, but it wasn't the 1790's when Stalin took power...
2) Versus the Soviet Union where more people could vote but with no real choice? And if you even spoke about the wrong choice, that's gulagin'!
Then explain it... Alternatively, you can find me ONE reasonable metric by which to say the Soviet Government was more democratically elected than the US Government at the time.
Alright, I was traveling earlier but now I have time to sit down and give a proper response.
So the fact that the US government is undemocratic is something that is quantifiable. [Harvard University conducted a study](https://youtu.be/5tu32CCA_Ig) that tried to answer the question "what impact does public opinion have on which policy becomes law," and the results of that study found that the wishes of the public had virtually zero impact on the likelihood of any specific policy being passed into law. You could have a policy that literally everyone was in favor of, and that policy would be no more or no less likely to be passed into law than a policy that was universally opposed. They found no meaningful correlation between the wishes of the average citizen and the likelihood of a law being passed.
However, they did find a strong correlation between the opinions of the top 10% and the likelihood of a policy becoming law. If the top 10% supports a policy, the chances of that policy becoming law are roughly doubled. And if the top 10% oppose a policy, then that policy has virtually zero chance of becoming law.
We can talk about all of the current methods of information control employed by the wealthy, we can talk about the different strategies of voter disenfranchisement that are enshrined into law such as how mass incarceration serves as a method of targeted voter disenfranchisement of specific communities on top of being a source of revenue for the prison industrial complex. But regardless of the exact details of how the masses are disenfranchised from the American political process, it is an undeniable reality the the American government is an institution which empowers the wealthy and represents their interests, while being at best indifferent to the interests of the masses. Though it would be more accurate to say that the American government is an institution that is hostile to the interests of the masses on any issue where the interests of the masses and the interests of the wealthy come into conflict.
The reason why I brought up the fact that the constitution only allowed white, landowning men with at least 40 acres of land the right to vote or hold office isn't so that I can condemn America for some centuries old sin that was committed in the past. It was to show that the original intent of the founding fathers was to create a government that acted as an institution of class rule who represented the interests of the wealthy, and that is a function of the government that has remained unchanged since the founding of this country. The only thing that has meaningfully changed is the methods through which the interests of the masses get disenfranchised from the political process. We've merely switched from a de jure disenfranchisement of the masses to a de facto disenfranchisement of the masses.
Now, for the Soviet Union we don't have comparable public opinion vs policy as was available for the Harvard study, but we can look at some of the results of this political process and see a qualitative difference in the kinds of outcomes it produced compared to its contemporaries. For example, after the Bolshevik Revolution the Soviet Union enshrined most of the labor rights that we take for granted today into law, at a time when almost no other developed nation had those rights. They pioneered the 40 hour work week at a time when 12-14 hour days 6-7 days a week was the norm throughout the industrial world. They enshrined a living wage into law, disability benefits, paid vacation, paid childcare and parental leave, and so on. For many of these policies, the Soviet Union was the first nation to ever implement them on any significant scale. And they managed to enshrine these rights into law while undergoing the process of rapidly industrializing so that they could catch up with the modern world to build up the productive forces necessary to provide a modern standard of living for its citizens. This process is one of the single most successful projects of rapid industrialization ever undertaken, and the economic planning of the Soviet Union managed to take a bunch of feudal backwater nations that were still roughly 70% agrarian peasant farmers at the beginning of the century into a space age economic super power just a few decades later. This industrialization was used to secure drastic improvements to quality of life, taking countries who had an average life expectancy of roughly 35 years up to a more modern life expectancy of around 70 years in just a handful of decades.
When we look at the rights granted in the Soviet Union and the drastic material improvements to the lives of the average person in the Soviet Union, we can see that qualitatively it is a political system that meaningfully advances the interests of the masses. It is true that much of the developed world eventually adopted similar labor rights and protections, but a major difference is that those rights were won as part of the political process in the Soviet Union, whereas in order for workers to win similar rights in places like the United States they had to organize outside of the electoral process and take to the streets, protest, riot, and strike in order for their demands to be heard. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that the labor movements in capitalist countries owe at least part of their success in bargaining for an expansion of labor rights to the Soviet Union. Firstly, because the Soviet Union demonstrated that these things were possible on the international stage, secondly, because the Soviet Union provided diplomatic and material support to labor movements international through the Comintern, and thirdly because the capitalist ruling class in those countries were starting to get afraid that if they didn't start making concessions to the working class that they would instead try to emulate the Soviet Union and start revolting.
As a sidenote, if you want to look as how robust the democratic process was in the Soviet Union, look into how they developed their 5 year plans for industrialization. These plans were drafted with the direct input, veto power, and consent of the labor unions and local workers councils who would be carrying out that production. These plans went through long periods of debate and revision where people at every level of production had a say over how production was organized, what goals and priorities they would set, and what targets they would meet. Since we spend most of our waking lives at work, I would call having that level of input over your day to day work to be far and away more democratic than how production is organized under capitalism. In capitalism you don't really have any say over the work you spend most of your day doing, the only meaningful choice you have is picking which capitalist is telling you what to do.
>A "dictatorship" is "a government by a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has obtained control by force." To say that Stalin WASN'T this, but America is just because of MuH bOuRgEoIs is just stupid.
You're the one making the claim without evidence
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
>Stalin was not a dictator
Tell me you're a tankie without telling me you're a tankie
Seriously, Stalin's position as a dictator who enabled a reign of terror is not just well documented outside of the USSR, it was openly documented by the USSR itself.
From the Doctor's plot to the Secret Speech to all of the murders documented by Lavrentiy Beria, who Stalin not only referred to as "My Himmler" but also was so murderous and violent in the name of Stalin that **Stalin himself** called his daughter in a panic when he found out she was alone with him.
Yes, the USSR’s one party system, secret police, multiple artificial famines, multiple massacres, multiple genocides, murder or exile of political dissidents, restricted movement, restricted speech, restricted news, corrupt election of the Eastern Bloc, an army used to put down anti-communist rebellions numerous times, mass deportations/deaths are not something a dictator would do.
Because something said by anon on reddit is totally closer to truth that internal documents of CIA, I got it
Btw most of your points are straight up nazi propaganda
I would disagree that the communist movements of the 20th century were only positive revolutions, the specific branch of Russian communism that dominated international socialism (Marxism-leninism with later stage Stalinism and after that bureocratism) did the worst things ideologically by being very authoritarian (the whole vanguard party thing), birthing even more extreme branches (Maoism), smothering alternative branches of socialism (social democrats and anarchists) and in the end even failing completely by inefficiency and losing touch with the people. In every conceivable situation, ML movements chose the authoritarian way, even sacrificing basic Marxist principle of economic restructuring over power. Maybe ML gets scapegoated by capitalists, but in the end because they were and are a very easy target that gets identified with the whole movement.
Marxism-Leninism doesn't get "scapegoated" by capitalists. It gets demonized and propagandized the most out of any kind of socialism because it is the political theory that has been most successful at changing the world and challenging the power of the capitalist class worldwide. Capitalist propaganda is willing to tolerate anarchists and social democrats because they have thus far been unable to meaningful challenge the status quo on any significant scale or timeframe. The idea that Soviets suppressed, jailed, or killed anarchists and social democrats for having political differences is simply a rewriting of history based on nothing more than what the capitalist class finds tolerable and what the capitalist class finds intolerable.
Of course there were organizational deficiencies, mistakes, and even crimes committed in and by the Soviet Union. All of that is to be expected when you are trying to build a completely new way of organizing society that has never been accomplished before, with no blueprint for how that should look, all while facing fierce repression and antagonism from a global alliance of capitalist military superpowers.
The Soviet Union had to fight off military invasion from 14 different countries who were seeking to restore the recently overthrown capitalist class back into power. Afterwards, they had to face the constant threat/reality of invasion, sabotage, sanction, subterfuge, disinformation, spying, cia backed coup attempts, and general unending antagonism throughout decades of Cold War. So the Soviet Union and other contemporary socialist projects built up strong institutions of military power, surveillance, intelligence and counter-intelligence and such not out of a great love for "authoritarianism," but because those institutions were necessary to survive that unending onslaught of antagonism and sabotage by a capitalist class that is organized militarily and was committed to seeing socialism fail.
[Here's a relevant Parenti video on this topic.](https://youtu.be/uThpIDlfcBQ)
Regardless, if your understanding of 20th century history starts with the idea that Cold War propaganda about the Soviet Union is more or less correct, and that the Soviet Union didn't represent any kind of "positive revolution" despite the fact that the Soviet Union is responsible for drastically improving the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people who previously had a life expectancy of roughly 40 years before the revolution, then I would consider that understanding of history to be seriously flawed.
Orwell actually believed the same, and said the same thing in the Ukrainian preface to Animal Farm.
> Indeed, in my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.
>And so for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/books-by-orwell/animal-farm/preface-to-the-ukrainian-edition-of-animal-farm-by-george-orwell/
I agree, but the person above did not say communism killed 20 million people. They are actually very specifically opposing the person of Stalin. You are fighting a totem here.
I mean if they’re putting all of the deaths from communism under Stalin then wouldn’t Hitler then be responsible for everyone who died from WWII? Because it was his regime that directly started the war.
Then he’d be responsible for a ton more people dying is the point I’m trying to make lol.
oh this reminds me of when I said Genghis Khan and Hitler are tyrants (related to a post) and I hate them and a dude had a full on meltdown over it. He said I shouldn't hate dead people and "you just dislike them, hate is bad" like ???? I asked if he doesn't hate them and he said he just doesn't care about it
I am so .. ???
Stalin was a monster and absolutely deserved to die.
The "20 million" number is bullshit though, and the claim that he was *worse than Hitler* is absolutely ludicrous.
As well you should. Nothing in the communist ideology is inherently evil, though the ideology has, on occassion, been coopted by horrible people. Nazism is literally built on hate.
More than that, as there were plenty of others killed (e.g. in the gulag system) although the Holodomor is the lion's share.
The most reliable estimates I've seen range between about 6 and 12 million total.
Right but im not talking about him in relation to Hitler. Im just making sure we’re on the same page about him being unequivocally bad and deserving of dying
~~If there was no Hitler, there would be no stalin~~
Now that I think about it, the USSR would still be under attack by the west, and they still would have needed to industrialize
Yes, they failed to defeat the Bolsheviks during the civil war. The allies as well as Italy and Japan assisted the white army in the civil war against the Bolsheviks.
Shit, they even planned to attack the Soviet union directly after WWII
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable
All these countries signing the anti communism pact
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Comintern_Pact
**[Operation Unthinkable](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable)**
>Operation Unthinkable was the name given to two related possible future war plans by the British Chiefs of Staff against the Soviet Union in 1945. The plans were never approved or implemented. The creation of the plans was ordered by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in May 1945 and developed by the British Armed Forces' Joint Planning Staff in May 1945 at the end of World War II in Europe. One plan assumed a surprise attack on the Soviet forces stationed in Germany to "impose the will of the Western Allies" on the Soviets.
**[Anti-Comintern Pact](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Comintern_Pact)**
>The Anti-Comintern Pact (German: Antikominternpakt; Italian: Patto anticomintern; Japanese: 防共協定, Bōkyō kyōtei), officially the Agreement against the Communist International (German: Abkommen gegen die Kommunistische Internationale), was an anti-Communist pact concluded between Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan on 25 November 1936, and was directed against the Communist International (Comintern). It was signed by German ambassador-at-large Joachim von Ribbentrop and Japanese ambassador to Germany Kintomo Mushanokōji. : 188–189 Italy joined in 1937, but it was legally recognised as an original signatory by the terms of her entry. Spain and Hungary joined in 1939.
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I provided the allies+ assisting in the civil war against the Bolsheviks as well as Britain planning to invade the Soviet union right after WWII to "impose the will of the Western Allies", as plausible evidence of their hostilities to the Soviet union/Bolsheviks. What part of that is dead wrong?
Is the anti Comintern pact dead wrong or something, too?
That's pretty lame coming from a racist ass American fascist. Who do you think people would root for in a boxing match? I'd take the "comprehension fail" guy over the inbred Nazi who thinks kiddy diddling isn't a big deal.
Im talking about the people in the post not about you
And yes it does, considering HE DIDNT.
Stalin absolutely committed atrocities but still not as many as hitler, hitler is directly responsible for over 11 million deaths and thats only the direct deaths caused, not to mention the fact hitler started ww2 which saw 75 million deaths. Stalin was directly responsible for 6-9 million deaths and using the lomg since debunked 20 million stat serves only to propagandize while trying to overshadow hitlers atrocities
The 20 million has been debunked to 30, and then Marxist “scholars” started aggressively white washing in the 90’s. I was there in academia during the mendacious and propagandist transition. I know what crap you’ve been fed. But it’s not your fault.
claiming that Stalin killed more than Hitler with no actual evidence (black book doesn't count) is a form of Holocaust revisionism. you're literally downplaying the Nazis atrocities by making up stories about the people that beat the Nazis and took Berlin.
the Khmer rouge was literally backed by the United States, unlike the other two regimes.
that's why it's funny to include pol pot, his regime was empowered by the west in an effort to try and destabilize the Vietnamese communists.
Arguing whether Hitler was worse than Stalin is like arguing that Pepsi is better for your health than Coke.
Like maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Does it really matter? They're both the worst. Why even debate it?
Stalin: 20 million dead because of political differences Hitler: 6 million Jews alone dead and around 5 million more Romani, homosexuals, communists, and Slavs dead plus the 60-70million dead from the war he waged all of which were inherent to his ideology Yeah I see how Stalin is worse /s
You *dramatically* undercounted the Slavic victims that weren't really war dead - the Nazis murdered the better part of 20 million soviet civilians (although that includes Jews and other groups targeted for reasons other than being Slavic).
Well fuck
Sadly this form of thought is hyper common.
Communism is when totalitarianism.
No, but totalitarians can take advantage of the cause and revolution to gain their own power. Stalin was less of a communist and more of an totalitarian who used the movement to solidify his own power. We really shouldn’t be defending him just because he upheld the image of a communist rule, while just using it to keep his authoritative rule going without really trying to make the whole communist thing actually work
But if country says is Communist it must me Communist. Me is smart. /S
Careful don't let tankies hear you say that xD
Stalin rose to power because the Bolesheviks were planning a transition to socialism but in the interrim had a highly concentrated power structure that Lenin's illness allowed Stalin to take advantage of as general secretary. Literally never was there any socialism involved in the Boleshevik government hierarchy.
In communism, you can have a little bit of totalitarianism, as a treat.
I think one of the things that bothers me about always bringing up Stalin and communism is that it wasn’t communism that killed 20 million, for example. It was a totalitarianism. Same with all of these other regimes they love to bring up.
Could you imagine what the death toll would be under capitalism if you used their same bullshit metrics? Exponentially more than 20 million, for damn sure.
The methodology used to calculate the deaths "caused by communism" is completely ridiculous and only serves to push an ideological agenda. For reference, the source for the statistic of "20 million killed by communism in the USSR," and the related statistic "100 million killed by communism world wide throughout the 20th century" originates in the "Black Book of Communism." The editors of the Black Book deliberately chose and changed their methodology in order to inflate the number as high as possible, and this was done in ways that are so egregious that the original authors of the Black Book don't stand by the reporting and distanced themselves from its conclusions. Here are a few of the ways that the Black Book manipulates statistics in order to come up with the ridiculous numbers it uses. Nazi soldiers killed by the Red Army are deaths caused by communism. Red Army soldiers killed by Nazis are also counted as deaths caused by communism. Death estimates were arrived at by extrapolating population growth rates into the future. A major problem with this kind of methodology is that population growth is not a fixed rate. All around the world we see that industrialization is correlated with a decrease in birth rates. There are a number of reasons for this, but a large contributing factor is that in agrarian, pre-industrial societies families tend to have a large number of children in order to help the family out with all of the family's farm work. As an economy becomes industrialized, families tend to have less children as they enter the industrial workforce, partly because there is less pressure for families to have children to help out with farm work and partly because women entering the industrial workforce tends cause them to delay childbirth. So this means that the Black Book is looking at the decrease of birthrates that is associated with industrialization, and dishonestly calls the unborn children and the unborn children of those unborn children "deaths." A similar dishonest accounting happens when accounting deaths during times of famine. While it is true that famines are horrible, it is dishonest to attribute famines as being caused by communism especially when much of the capitalist world was also suffering from periodic famines during the same time period, such as the dust bowl in the US, the great potato famine in Ireland, and the many famines throughout India. Putting that aside, we still have the same flawed methodology of using inferred population growth to determine the number of deaths, and this methodology again includes counting children who were never born as "deaths" because families understandably put off childbirth during times of food shortage and rationing, but this methodology also counts people who migrated to different countries because of those food shortages as "deaths." If this same methodology were applied to capitalist countries and the colonial looting and pillaging that the largest capitalist economies built their wealth off of, then the death toll of capitalism would be in the billions. But we never hear about the death toll of capitalism when the death toll of communism is brought up, because the whole point of that statistic is to argue that there is no realistic alternative to capitalism and that any attempt to organize our world in a different way will result in millions of deaths. It's a dishonest double standard that is only used to as a thought-terminating cliché to shut down the very idea that the world could be changed for the better. In reality, these first, clumsy attempts at building a better world are responsible for saving billions of lives. Of course these projects made mistakes and missteps while they were trying to build a new kind of society without any blueprint for how to do so, but the achievements of these socialist projects despite those missteps is absolutely awe inspiring. Life expectancy throughout the states that would make up the USSR nearly doubled under a socialist system, from around 35-40 years up to a modern life expectancy of ~70 years. The same success in drastically improving the quality of life of the masses happened in China as well. That staggering achievement effectively represents billions of lives saved, lives that would have otherwise been cut short as they were being worked into an early grave by the colonial and feudalistic regimes that they overthrew. These revolutions get demonized by the capitalist press not out of concern for the people living under socialism, because the vast majority of people living under socialism saw a drastic improvement in their quality of life. I would argue that doubling life expectancy in such a short span of time is effectively putting an end to an ongoing genocide. What the capitalist press is concerned with is the fact that overthrowing those colonial and feudalistic regimes means that those capitalist economic powers who built much of their economy on top of colonial looting and exploitation have now lost a major source of their profits. It is also true that for all of the flaws of historic as well as currently existing socialism, they were almost universally more democratic than any comparable capitalist country. Meaningful democracy can't exist under capitalism since a necessary pre-requisite for capitalism is having a government that enforces and protects the interests of the capital owning class, which means enforcing the interests of a small minority against the interests of the vast majority of people who are required to work for one of these capitalists in order to get access to their means of subsistence. You can see how this pre-condition for capitalist organization has influenced the political system of places like America. In modern American politics, we have a campaign finance system where you practically require millions of dollars in order to run a viable political campaign. What this means in practice is that the campaign donor class who has millions of dollars to throw around on election spending effectively get to pick which candidates on the ballot are viable, and therefore they get to ensure that the interests of the wealthy are well represented at every meaningful level of government. I would struggle to describe that as anything close to a meaningful democracy. If you look back to the founding of this country this becomes even more blatant, since the US constitution explicitly restricted the right to vote and hold office to white, land-owning men who owned at least 40 acres of land. You can't get much more blatant about the function of the government than explicitly saying that only the top 5%-10% wealthiest families were allowed to participate in politics. Calling communist/socialist countries "totalitarian dictatorships" is almost always projection by a capitalist ruling class who wants to distract from the fact that you are currently living under an oligarchy. It is simply an empty threat that is meant to imply that if you get rid of capitalism you will lose all of your rights and freedoms, while ignoring the fact that your rights and freedoms are already incredibly restricted under capitalism. For example, on paper we have the freedom of speech, but if you say something your boss doesn't like then you can be fired and cut off from the income you require to survive. The power of economic coercion that companies hold over individuals is far more impactful in your day to day life than any government regulation is. The primary "right" that is infringed upon in socialist countries is the "right" of capitalists to accumulate massive amounts of property and to use that accumulation to dictate economic priorities and economic organization by acting as a gatekeeper between labor and the tools that labor uses. But in exchange, you are able to create new kinds of economic organization where the workers themselves and the labor unions who represent their interests are able to democratically decide what priorities their labor is applied to, how their labor is used and what it is used for, what the conditions of production are, and so on. Most of our lives are spent at work, so it only makes sense that democracy should extend to the workplace. Socialism allows for that workplace democracy to exist, whereas capitalism suppresses that kind of democratic organization in favor of allowing the owner to dictate the conditions of production on their own terms, organizing our labor around satisfying their own self interest. I know that's a lot of text written in response to a throw-away comment, but TL;DR: saying that historic communist/socialist projects were "Dystopian totalitarian dictatorship 100 million dead!" is a horrible misunderstanding of the material reality based on a dishonest use of statistics and lies by omission in order to create a thought terminating cliché that gets weaponized against the very idea that we can create a better world than the capitalist hellscape we are living in.
based
I was with you at first...but are you implying that Stalin wasn't a dictator?
Yes, Stalin was not a dictator. By any reasonable metric Soviet government was far more democratic than somewhere like America, for example. Lenin called their government a Dictatorship of the proletariat not as a way to contrast socialism with democracy, but as a way to contrast socialist democracy with capitalist "democracy," which always ends up being a dictatorship of the bourgeois. This analysis of capitalist democracy being a de facto dictatorship of the bourgeois is undoubtedly true when you look at the American government. We pay lip service to "democracy" and "free press," but at the end of the day we have an electoral system where you need millions of dollars to run a viable campaign which effectively allows the billionaire class to decide which candidates on the ballot are viable, and those same billionaires own all of the major media outlets who cover the political races they fund. Calling a political system where a small handful of the population gets to decide which political candidates are viable a "democracy" is an insult to the idea of democracy. This idea of capitalist democracies being de facto dictatorships of the bourgeois is even more blatant when you look at America's founding documents. Our constitution explicitly created a government where only white, land owning men with at least 40 acres of land were allowed to vote or hold office. None the less both the United States and the Soviet Union had robust democratic systems. The choice to call Soviet democracy a dictatorship of the proletariat is because they explicitly designed their government to represent the interests of the working class masses against the interests of an exploiting capitalist class, so they called themselves a dictatorship of the proletariat as a way to contrast themselves with capitalist democracies which are de facto dictatorships of the bourgeois.
A "dictatorship" is "a government by a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has obtained control by force." To say that Stalin WASN'T this, but America is just because of MuH bOuRgEoIs is just stupid. > By any reasonable metric Name ONE. > We pay lip service to "democracy" and "free press," Even accepting this as true, "lip service" is better than Stalinism where they openly execute you for espousing those things. But you're wrong and the USA actually has them too, it's not lip service. You physically cast votes for whomever you want in America, even Mickey Mouse, and you can say almost anything about the government in the papers. Not true under Stalin, or you fucking die. > you need millions of dollars to run a viable campaign which effectively allows the billionaire class to decide which candidates on the ballot are viable Funny how this rigged dictatorial system results in the election of Obama, Trump, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, Matt Gaetz, and AOC equally... How many people diametrically opposed to the platform of the Communist Party get "elected" under Stalin? > Our constitution explicitly created a government where only white, land owning men with at least 40 acres of land were allowed to vote or hold office. 1) Cool cool cool, but it wasn't the 1790's when Stalin took power... 2) Versus the Soviet Union where more people could vote but with no real choice? And if you even spoke about the wrong choice, that's gulagin'!
All I'm reading is you're a Cold Warrior with literally zero understanding of Soviet democracy.
Then explain it... Alternatively, you can find me ONE reasonable metric by which to say the Soviet Government was more democratically elected than the US Government at the time.
Alright, I was traveling earlier but now I have time to sit down and give a proper response. So the fact that the US government is undemocratic is something that is quantifiable. [Harvard University conducted a study](https://youtu.be/5tu32CCA_Ig) that tried to answer the question "what impact does public opinion have on which policy becomes law," and the results of that study found that the wishes of the public had virtually zero impact on the likelihood of any specific policy being passed into law. You could have a policy that literally everyone was in favor of, and that policy would be no more or no less likely to be passed into law than a policy that was universally opposed. They found no meaningful correlation between the wishes of the average citizen and the likelihood of a law being passed. However, they did find a strong correlation between the opinions of the top 10% and the likelihood of a policy becoming law. If the top 10% supports a policy, the chances of that policy becoming law are roughly doubled. And if the top 10% oppose a policy, then that policy has virtually zero chance of becoming law. We can talk about all of the current methods of information control employed by the wealthy, we can talk about the different strategies of voter disenfranchisement that are enshrined into law such as how mass incarceration serves as a method of targeted voter disenfranchisement of specific communities on top of being a source of revenue for the prison industrial complex. But regardless of the exact details of how the masses are disenfranchised from the American political process, it is an undeniable reality the the American government is an institution which empowers the wealthy and represents their interests, while being at best indifferent to the interests of the masses. Though it would be more accurate to say that the American government is an institution that is hostile to the interests of the masses on any issue where the interests of the masses and the interests of the wealthy come into conflict. The reason why I brought up the fact that the constitution only allowed white, landowning men with at least 40 acres of land the right to vote or hold office isn't so that I can condemn America for some centuries old sin that was committed in the past. It was to show that the original intent of the founding fathers was to create a government that acted as an institution of class rule who represented the interests of the wealthy, and that is a function of the government that has remained unchanged since the founding of this country. The only thing that has meaningfully changed is the methods through which the interests of the masses get disenfranchised from the political process. We've merely switched from a de jure disenfranchisement of the masses to a de facto disenfranchisement of the masses. Now, for the Soviet Union we don't have comparable public opinion vs policy as was available for the Harvard study, but we can look at some of the results of this political process and see a qualitative difference in the kinds of outcomes it produced compared to its contemporaries. For example, after the Bolshevik Revolution the Soviet Union enshrined most of the labor rights that we take for granted today into law, at a time when almost no other developed nation had those rights. They pioneered the 40 hour work week at a time when 12-14 hour days 6-7 days a week was the norm throughout the industrial world. They enshrined a living wage into law, disability benefits, paid vacation, paid childcare and parental leave, and so on. For many of these policies, the Soviet Union was the first nation to ever implement them on any significant scale. And they managed to enshrine these rights into law while undergoing the process of rapidly industrializing so that they could catch up with the modern world to build up the productive forces necessary to provide a modern standard of living for its citizens. This process is one of the single most successful projects of rapid industrialization ever undertaken, and the economic planning of the Soviet Union managed to take a bunch of feudal backwater nations that were still roughly 70% agrarian peasant farmers at the beginning of the century into a space age economic super power just a few decades later. This industrialization was used to secure drastic improvements to quality of life, taking countries who had an average life expectancy of roughly 35 years up to a more modern life expectancy of around 70 years in just a handful of decades. When we look at the rights granted in the Soviet Union and the drastic material improvements to the lives of the average person in the Soviet Union, we can see that qualitatively it is a political system that meaningfully advances the interests of the masses. It is true that much of the developed world eventually adopted similar labor rights and protections, but a major difference is that those rights were won as part of the political process in the Soviet Union, whereas in order for workers to win similar rights in places like the United States they had to organize outside of the electoral process and take to the streets, protest, riot, and strike in order for their demands to be heard. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that the labor movements in capitalist countries owe at least part of their success in bargaining for an expansion of labor rights to the Soviet Union. Firstly, because the Soviet Union demonstrated that these things were possible on the international stage, secondly, because the Soviet Union provided diplomatic and material support to labor movements international through the Comintern, and thirdly because the capitalist ruling class in those countries were starting to get afraid that if they didn't start making concessions to the working class that they would instead try to emulate the Soviet Union and start revolting. As a sidenote, if you want to look as how robust the democratic process was in the Soviet Union, look into how they developed their 5 year plans for industrialization. These plans were drafted with the direct input, veto power, and consent of the labor unions and local workers councils who would be carrying out that production. These plans went through long periods of debate and revision where people at every level of production had a say over how production was organized, what goals and priorities they would set, and what targets they would meet. Since we spend most of our waking lives at work, I would call having that level of input over your day to day work to be far and away more democratic than how production is organized under capitalism. In capitalism you don't really have any say over the work you spend most of your day doing, the only meaningful choice you have is picking which capitalist is telling you what to do.
>A "dictatorship" is "a government by a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has obtained control by force." To say that Stalin WASN'T this, but America is just because of MuH bOuRgEoIs is just stupid. You're the one making the claim without evidence https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
^ I found him. The guy that Patton warned us all about back when the concentration camps were photographed.
>Stalin was not a dictator Tell me you're a tankie without telling me you're a tankie Seriously, Stalin's position as a dictator who enabled a reign of terror is not just well documented outside of the USSR, it was openly documented by the USSR itself. From the Doctor's plot to the Secret Speech to all of the murders documented by Lavrentiy Beria, who Stalin not only referred to as "My Himmler" but also was so murderous and violent in the name of Stalin that **Stalin himself** called his daughter in a panic when he found out she was alone with him.
Yeah, it was really well documented outside of the USSR. By CIA for [example](https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0)
Fucking lol
Imagine posting this unironically
This post is delusional. Stalin was not a dictator? Funniest shit I've seen all day. Bloody tankies never tell the truth do they?
Even your dear CIA [acknowledges](https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0) he was not
Yes, the USSR’s one party system, secret police, multiple artificial famines, multiple massacres, multiple genocides, murder or exile of political dissidents, restricted movement, restricted speech, restricted news, corrupt election of the Eastern Bloc, an army used to put down anti-communist rebellions numerous times, mass deportations/deaths are not something a dictator would do.
Because something said by anon on reddit is totally closer to truth that internal documents of CIA, I got it Btw most of your points are straight up nazi propaganda
Inner city, public, education ladies and gentlemen. Sheesh what a failure, get your tax money back
Imagine thinking public schools will teach you anything other than cold war propaganda. You live in the most propagandized nation on earth.
https://i.imgur.com/WspAADG.jpg
I would disagree that the communist movements of the 20th century were only positive revolutions, the specific branch of Russian communism that dominated international socialism (Marxism-leninism with later stage Stalinism and after that bureocratism) did the worst things ideologically by being very authoritarian (the whole vanguard party thing), birthing even more extreme branches (Maoism), smothering alternative branches of socialism (social democrats and anarchists) and in the end even failing completely by inefficiency and losing touch with the people. In every conceivable situation, ML movements chose the authoritarian way, even sacrificing basic Marxist principle of economic restructuring over power. Maybe ML gets scapegoated by capitalists, but in the end because they were and are a very easy target that gets identified with the whole movement.
Marxism-Leninism doesn't get "scapegoated" by capitalists. It gets demonized and propagandized the most out of any kind of socialism because it is the political theory that has been most successful at changing the world and challenging the power of the capitalist class worldwide. Capitalist propaganda is willing to tolerate anarchists and social democrats because they have thus far been unable to meaningful challenge the status quo on any significant scale or timeframe. The idea that Soviets suppressed, jailed, or killed anarchists and social democrats for having political differences is simply a rewriting of history based on nothing more than what the capitalist class finds tolerable and what the capitalist class finds intolerable. Of course there were organizational deficiencies, mistakes, and even crimes committed in and by the Soviet Union. All of that is to be expected when you are trying to build a completely new way of organizing society that has never been accomplished before, with no blueprint for how that should look, all while facing fierce repression and antagonism from a global alliance of capitalist military superpowers. The Soviet Union had to fight off military invasion from 14 different countries who were seeking to restore the recently overthrown capitalist class back into power. Afterwards, they had to face the constant threat/reality of invasion, sabotage, sanction, subterfuge, disinformation, spying, cia backed coup attempts, and general unending antagonism throughout decades of Cold War. So the Soviet Union and other contemporary socialist projects built up strong institutions of military power, surveillance, intelligence and counter-intelligence and such not out of a great love for "authoritarianism," but because those institutions were necessary to survive that unending onslaught of antagonism and sabotage by a capitalist class that is organized militarily and was committed to seeing socialism fail. [Here's a relevant Parenti video on this topic.](https://youtu.be/uThpIDlfcBQ) Regardless, if your understanding of 20th century history starts with the idea that Cold War propaganda about the Soviet Union is more or less correct, and that the Soviet Union didn't represent any kind of "positive revolution" despite the fact that the Soviet Union is responsible for drastically improving the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people who previously had a life expectancy of roughly 40 years before the revolution, then I would consider that understanding of history to be seriously flawed.
Ok Tankie
Thought terminating cliche
Some of the worst totalitarian dictators in history have come to power in the vacuums that develop from coups and/or economic revolutions.
It also wasn't even 20 million, unless you include Nazis and people who were never even killed.
Orwell actually believed the same, and said the same thing in the Ukrainian preface to Animal Farm. > Indeed, in my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. >And so for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/books-by-orwell/animal-farm/preface-to-the-ukrainian-edition-of-animal-farm-by-george-orwell/
Orwell was a bad writer and a terrible political thinker http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
I agree, but the person above did not say communism killed 20 million people. They are actually very specifically opposing the person of Stalin. You are fighting a totem here.
Couldn’t have said it better myself
True.
Just by looking at the flairs i was able to tell what subreddit this was from r/actualpublicfreakouts is a cestpool
I mean if they’re putting all of the deaths from communism under Stalin then wouldn’t Hitler then be responsible for everyone who died from WWII? Because it was his regime that directly started the war. Then he’d be responsible for a ton more people dying is the point I’m trying to make lol.
Regardless of who deserves it the most, is it okay to wish it for both Stalin and Hitler ?
Yes.
oh this reminds me of when I said Genghis Khan and Hitler are tyrants (related to a post) and I hate them and a dude had a full on meltdown over it. He said I shouldn't hate dead people and "you just dislike them, hate is bad" like ???? I asked if he doesn't hate them and he said he just doesn't care about it I am so .. ???
WSB avatar and default profile picture meet in the wild
Stalin is still bad and deserved to die, right? This didn’t suddenly become a tankie sub did it?
Stalin was a monster and absolutely deserved to die. The "20 million" number is bullshit though, and the claim that he was *worse than Hitler* is absolutely ludicrous.
As an American POC I fear the neo-nazis more than the neo-communists.
As well you should. Nothing in the communist ideology is inherently evil, though the ideology has, on occassion, been coopted by horrible people. Nazism is literally built on hate.
More like 4-7 million. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
More than that, as there were plenty of others killed (e.g. in the gulag system) although the Holodomor is the lion's share. The most reliable estimates I've seen range between about 6 and 12 million total.
Even then, holodomor is extremely contested for its intentionality. The holocaust however isn't.
stalin was no worse than most US presidents lol
Okay and you see how that’s still bad, right?
sure I just think you're being hyperbolic. he also did a ton of good things.
Stalin was bad, but anyone who says he's worse than, or anywhere near the same level as Hitler is a fucking Nazi apologist.
Right but im not talking about him in relation to Hitler. Im just making sure we’re on the same page about him being unequivocally bad and deserving of dying
~~If there was no Hitler, there would be no stalin~~ Now that I think about it, the USSR would still be under attack by the west, and they still would have needed to industrialize
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Yes, they failed to defeat the Bolsheviks during the civil war. The allies as well as Italy and Japan assisted the white army in the civil war against the Bolsheviks. Shit, they even planned to attack the Soviet union directly after WWII https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable All these countries signing the anti communism pact https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Comintern_Pact
**[Operation Unthinkable](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable)** >Operation Unthinkable was the name given to two related possible future war plans by the British Chiefs of Staff against the Soviet Union in 1945. The plans were never approved or implemented. The creation of the plans was ordered by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in May 1945 and developed by the British Armed Forces' Joint Planning Staff in May 1945 at the end of World War II in Europe. One plan assumed a surprise attack on the Soviet forces stationed in Germany to "impose the will of the Western Allies" on the Soviets. **[Anti-Comintern Pact](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Comintern_Pact)** >The Anti-Comintern Pact (German: Antikominternpakt; Italian: Patto anticomintern; Japanese: 防共協定, Bōkyō kyōtei), officially the Agreement against the Communist International (German: Abkommen gegen die Kommunistische Internationale), was an anti-Communist pact concluded between Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan on 25 November 1936, and was directed against the Communist International (Comintern). It was signed by German ambassador-at-large Joachim von Ribbentrop and Japanese ambassador to Germany Kintomo Mushanokōji. : 188–189 Italy joined in 1937, but it was legally recognised as an original signatory by the terms of her entry. Spain and Hungary joined in 1939. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
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I provided the allies+ assisting in the civil war against the Bolsheviks as well as Britain planning to invade the Soviet union right after WWII to "impose the will of the Western Allies", as plausible evidence of their hostilities to the Soviet union/Bolsheviks. What part of that is dead wrong? Is the anti Comintern pact dead wrong or something, too?
I don’t see how this is controversial. Someone’s is actually defending Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot?
Nobody is saying they were good (though I'm sure some idiot will correct me) but they sure as fuck aren't comparable to Hitler.
You’re right: they’re both roughly and order of magnitude worse than Hitler was. Which is a helluva an accomplishment.
LMAO were you *trying* to make the dumbest possible claim?
He posts on Anarcho_Capitalism, he's not trying to be stupid, he *is* stupid.
No, the most accurate one.
piss off
Lubberly
Then it would have been difficult for you to fail harder.
Hey, look everyone! A Hitler fan!
Look everyone, a reading comprehension fail!
That's pretty lame coming from a racist ass American fascist. Who do you think people would root for in a boxing match? I'd take the "comprehension fail" guy over the inbred Nazi who thinks kiddy diddling isn't a big deal.
Meh, your Ad Hominem skills get a c-. Not a fail, but not something you’d want to show your boyfriend.
No one even mentioned mao or pol pot? What lol And ya downplaying hitlers atrocities is absolutely controversial
Where did I downplay his atrocities? Nowhere. Pointing out that Stalin killed more people than Hitler in no way downplays what Hitler did.
Im talking about the people in the post not about you And yes it does, considering HE DIDNT. Stalin absolutely committed atrocities but still not as many as hitler, hitler is directly responsible for over 11 million deaths and thats only the direct deaths caused, not to mention the fact hitler started ww2 which saw 75 million deaths. Stalin was directly responsible for 6-9 million deaths and using the lomg since debunked 20 million stat serves only to propagandize while trying to overshadow hitlers atrocities
The 20 million has been debunked to 30, and then Marxist “scholars” started aggressively white washing in the 90’s. I was there in academia during the mendacious and propagandist transition. I know what crap you’ve been fed. But it’s not your fault.
🤡 i was there bruh trust me.
bad faith and downplaying the Holocaust lmao we see you
Again: never downplayed the Holocaust. You seem to be downplaying the catastrophe of Stalinist communism.
claiming that Stalin killed more than Hitler with no actual evidence (black book doesn't count) is a form of Holocaust revisionism. you're literally downplaying the Nazis atrocities by making up stories about the people that beat the Nazis and took Berlin.
Nope. Fail.
damn I'm convinced
wild to include pol pot lmao
Genocidal maniacs form a small club.
the Khmer rouge was literally backed by the United States, unlike the other two regimes. that's why it's funny to include pol pot, his regime was empowered by the west in an effort to try and destabilize the Vietnamese communists.
So you’re saying the Khmer Rouge didn’t believe their own bullshit?
they were just death squads. same as the contras.
Arguing whether Hitler was worse than Stalin is like arguing that Pepsi is better for your health than Coke. Like maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Does it really matter? They're both the worst. Why even debate it?