[Gorm]

funny this liberal thing. A Liberal is very very far from a communist/socialist. But not in the US as I get, there liberal equals som kind of communist/socialist. Why is that?

[Quinny]

Confuses me too. It does make me wonder at the level of political debate over there. I know true political debate is stifled in Europe by the repression of the left, but the American political spectrum seems to end right of centre.

[Bas]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Gorm', 'f')unny this liberal thing. A Liberal is very very far from a communist/socialist. But not in the US as I get, there liberal equals som kind of communist/socialist. Why is that?

[jbrovont]

You're poking at a fundamental difference between a reactionary and proactive methodology. Some people look at a crime problem and think "Hmm - we need more police and stricter laws" while others think "What's causing people to turn to crime?"

It's a better question, to ask "Why do we have a government, and what purpose does it need to serve?" I've written several essays and delivered some speeches dealing with this socialist/capitalist dichotomy, and to examine this question you need to first define what, if any, purpose being an organized society is supposed to serve - why do we choose to organize a government?

Any government program is by definition a socialist program, paid for by the members of society and providing a service to them. Our highway system is a socialist program, as are our mail system, public school system and even our military. Organization takes a net energy input to accomplish and that energy comes from a little work from many individuals to do something they can't do as individuals, and so "governments" arise - out of need.

The question then becomes, if an individual amasses some kind of power, does that come with a responsibility to the system that allowed them to do so? At one end you have the "social responsibility" camp that says yes, power comes with a responsibility to protect the system upon which your success lies. At the other extreme you have the "sociopathic" (a person, as a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience; dictionary.com), who believe that their only responsibility is to themselves.

The single most successful organism on the planet is 100% communistic, but people aren't happy as ants. Balance is key. Food for thought.

[Gorm]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jbrovont', 'Y')ou're poking at a fundamental difference between a reactionary and proactive methodology. Some people look at a crime problem and think "Hmm - we need more police and stricter laws" while others think "What's causing people to turn to crime?"

[TreeFarmer]

I'll throw in a cople of ideas as to why communism (wealth redistribution) is appealing to young people:

-They have not yet seen enough of human nature to have the appropriate level of cynacism.
-They don't understand that the vast majority of rich people, who are 55+ btw, started out young and poor just like them.
-They don't understand the part of human nature where you need to work hard, do without, and finally succeed in order to appreciate what you have and really feel good about yourself.

TF

[Chief]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TreeFarmer', 'I')'ll throw in a cople of ideas as to why communism (wealth redistribution) is appealing to young people:

-They have not yet seen enough of human nature to have the appropriate level of cynacism.
-They don't understand that the vast majority of rich people, who are 55+ btw, started out young and poor just like them.
-They don't understand the part of human nature where you need to work hard, do without, and finally succeed in order to appreciate what you have and really feel good about yourself.

[galacticsurfer]

it may seem simplistic but I have learned generational theory and the geneation of young adults and youth now up and coming fit in the cycle archetype called HERO, liket h GI generation that fought the world war II. This archetype in the cycle is always team oriented, socialistic. So generation X were money hungry cynics, loners. The boomers were impractical idealists against authority. It all depends on when one comes of age what one believes. To make a comparison, if Obama were raisd in the Kenyan vilalge of his father in dire poverty he would have turned out quite differently. On a societal level socialism makes sense to people who grow up under idealistic parents (boomers or similar) in an era when everything begins to fall apart slowly(unraveling 80s-90s). Going into the crisis, when everybody is losing their jobs or starving and a war is almost inevitable the HERO generation is optimally oriented toward a socialist experiment (or right or left wing persuasion).

[deMolay]

First off I think you need to factually examine the history of Communism. Practicing countries murdered hundreds of millions of their own citizens. Those are facts. Another fact, the wealth created by the west is shared in the hundreds of Billions with the 3rd world. The Communists helped people by putting their boot upon peoples necks, stealing all their property and murdering them for not complying. Look at the insanities of Mao. www.ninecommentaries.com The whole argument between Communism and Capitalism in my mind boils down to this, who is the rightful owner of my property which I have gained morally and legally by my own efforts, and who owns my labour. Me or some nameless faceless bureacrat. Don't confuse Capitalism with Corporatism. They are vastly different. Have any of you actually known people who fled Communist regimes and talked to them. The upper levels of the Communist Party were just as corrupt and greedy as the worst of the Capitalist system without any controls or laws whatsoever. It was nothing more than pure Gang Leadership, in a proletariat uniform. Behind the scenes the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Communists were huge and never really even to this day dealt with, openly. Mostly because many of the leftwing in the west were very sympathetic from a distance. Not having to suffer the effects themselves. And as we all know, most of the MSM in the west are very left leaning. So many of these young people at first not knowing the facts and the history incline to believe the propaganda foisted upon them by the glowing leftwing so called intelligensa of our schools and media who never suffered a day under a butcher like Mao or a Uncle Joe Stalin.

[VMarcHart]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('deMolay', 'C')ommunism as in Russia or China usually ended up murdering an awful lot of their own citizens. In the hundreds of millions.

[kokoda]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Gorm', 'W')ell. communism is definitly in the stricter laws, more punishment category, one can get shot fore almost anything, for exampel, in the 60´s some were shot in in the soviet union for selling jeans on the black market, witch were illegal as an example.

[Gorm]

well, they did exexute them anyway.

[Gorm]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('VMarcHart', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('deMolay', 'C')ommunism as in Russia or China usually ended up murdering an awful lot of their own citizens. In the hundreds of millions.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Gorm', 'f')unny this liberal thing. A Liberal is very very far from a communist/socialist. But not in the US as I get, there liberal equals som kind of communist/socialist. Why is that?

[deMolay]

Stalin starved to death millions of Ukerainians with his fabricated famine. here is some of the history of his Gulag system...... History of the Soviet Russian Gulag
The history of the Soviet Russian Gulags, forced labor camps that killed millions of people.

In the late 1920’s Stalin felt that a canal linking the White Sea to the Baltic Sea would be highly beneficial to the developing USSR. In 1931 well over one hundred thousand workers picked up pickaxes, shovels, and wheelbarrows in order to construct the 227 kilometer canal. Completed by 1933, the canal took only twenty months to finish. Tens of thousands of men lost their lives in the construction project. At its conclusion, sailing on the steamship Anokhin, Stalin surveyed the canal. He concluded with disappointment that the canal was too narrow and shallow. By 1936 plans to widen the canal were completed. This expansion project would have cost many more lives. These lives, like the lives lost in the original project, were bartered from the Russian system of forced labor camps, called the Gulag.

The Gulag system was a network of forced labor camps that, at its peak, consisted of over four hundred official prisons and held millions of inmates. First begun in 1919, the system really did not flourish until the 1930’s when Stalin used it with extreme regularity. The Gulag system is believed to be responsible for millions of deaths. That is more than the amount of Americans that have been killed in all wars combined. That amounts to almost three times the amount of people that live in the New York City area. It is truly a gruesome part of Soviet history that has routinely been overlooked or ignored.

The prisoners that were sentenced to spend time in these camps were murderers, thieves, and other common criminals. In the Stalin era, the prison population became increasing enemies who did not subscribe to his political, religious, or economic teachings. Between the years 1929 and 1934 the prisoner population increased by twenty-three times. Stalin used the vast amount of prisoners to his advantage. Turning them into virtual slave laborers, prisoners completed huge architectural projects including, the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line, numerous hydroelectric stations, and hundreds of roads and industrial complexes in highly remote regions of Siberia and northern Russia. The prisoners were also used in the extraction of coal, copper, and gold from dangerous mines and in the lumbering industries of the vast Siberian forests. Stalin constantly increased the number of domestic projects, which increased the need for more prisoners from the Gulag. The prisoners were even contracted out to private industries. In the end hundreds of thousands of men lost their lives in these economic and domestic projects.

Surrounded by walls of barbed wire, the camps were secretive and the conditions were extremely harsh. Prisoners received inadequate food rations and insufficient clothing, which made it extremely difficult to survive the bitterly cold winters and the long working hours. A single day often included fourteen to eighteen hours of work. Prisoners were often not told why they had been arrested and most were not allowed to ever see or hear from loved ones. The guards also abused the inmates. As a result, the death rate from exhaustion and disease in camps was high. If prisoners were not killed working on one of the many dangerous social projects, they were killed in the camps by sickness, cold, or starvation.

The Solovetsk Special Camp, while not the first nor the most brutal forced labor camp, is often considered as the mother of the Gulag system. Starting as three isolated monasteries on a remote island in the White Sea, Solovetsk became a part of the Gulag system in the early 1920’s. This camp soon became an experiment. Security measures, living conditions, production norms for prisoners, and all possible methods of repression were first developed and fine-tuned at Solovetsk. Between the years of 1923 to 1939, the height of the Gulag system, it is believed that over half a million people lost their lives inside the walls of the Solovetsk camp. In 1936 an attempt was made to convert to labor camp into a political prison. However, that failed. In 1939, due to mounting military concerns, the prison was shut down and demolished to make way for a new naval base. Today about one thousand people live in a small community built upon the same soil that absorbed the blood of hundreds of thousands of people.

The Russian Gulag system of forced labor camps became a symbol of tyranny and oppression. Millions of people were imprisoned and even more lost their lives. The silent and foreboding barbwire walls of the Gulag affected a generation of Russian men, women, and children. Men were taken from the beds, arrested in the streets, and beaten in their homes, and were never told why. The silent force of the Soviet regime created, built, and populated a nation of persecution and despotism and hid it behind the walls of their camps. In the 1990’s, under the leadership of Gorbachev, the camps’ populations of diminished substantially. Political prisoners and prisoners of conscience have almost ceased to exist. Today the Gulag system is a correctional institution rather than a slave labor concentration camp. However, despite these changes, the Gulag remains a dramatic bloodstain on Russian history. The memory of its horrors will never be able to be washed away.

[deMolay]

http://www.osaarchivum.org/gulag/e.htm

[deMolay]

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/ukra.html

[deMolay]

http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/courtois.html

[Quinny]

A lot of tosh talked about communism (I am not one BTW). Most people fleeing communism were economic refugees wanting more of the american dream. Take USSR - made up of Russia a long established relatively rich nation and areas like Siberia/ Kazachstan etc. A massive melting pot of races and areas that were basically third world. When you average out the wealth across such a massive area there are obviously winners and losers. Thats why the outer reaches of the USSR were the areas where many of the elite Red Army corps originated, they could see how communism benefitted their areas. If you look at the overall USSR and the type of regions it covered the traditionally poor rural areas didn't do that badly under communism.

If you compare it with America, the land of the 'free' market, the average wealth wasn't that much different. The disparity of wealth however was much greater. You have nations like Haiti not that far from USA where the poverty under a US supported dictator put the nation at the bottom of world poverty inidices. Similarly in Mexico the poverty just across the border was unbelievable and drove Mexicans in their thousands across the border for work. Central America is poverty stricken and the US government actively supported right wing military coups that kept the people down for decades. If you also encompass South America, the role of the US in what were relatively sophisticated democratic societies was disgraceful. The treatment of Chile and Allende is often overlooked, but in my opinion is worse than any of the US atrocities in Iraq.

If you took the Americas as a whole and looked at the poverty levels and compared it with the USSR including all the Asian parts, I don't think you'd see much difference. If you look at neigbouring states under the different systems, and compare the difference between say USA and Mexico under capitalism and then Afghanistan and Uzbekistan it gives you a different view of how the systems work.

[deMolay]

How about the benevolent Communist Chinese program of organ harvesting from live members of the Falun Gong. Going on as we speak today in China. http://www.clearharmony.net/articles/200702/38053.html