I just realised, I can’t post anything on lemmy.ml

So, I checked https://lemmy.ml/modlog, there’s a new moderator.

All posts and comments talking about China, Jinping, Russia, and Putin have been deleted and users banned

  • MinekPo1 [She/Her]English
    3223·
    9 months ago

    I don’t think comparing communism with fasism, at least when it comes to exterminating ethnic minorities is accurate. this is an opinion shared by academics, including coauthors of “The Black Book of Communism” (the book which claims communism killed 80M-100M people, though the upper end of the range is the one which has more attention. this number is disputed, again also by coauthors)

    I could explain why I believe you shouldn’t do this in my own words, but I will use the words of Nicolas Werth, one of the three main coauthors who distanced themselves from the book:

    Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union.

    and

    The more you compare Communism and Nazism, the more the differences are obvious.

    Another quote I will give is from Amir Weiner an American historian and associate professor of Soviet history at Stanford University who wrote:

    [w]hen Stalin’s successors opened the gates of the Gulag, they allowed 3 million inmates to return home. When the Allies liberated the Nazi death camps, they found thousands of human skeletons barely alive awaiting what they knew to be inevitable execution.

    I sourced these quotes from Wikipedia: “The Black Book of Communism”, references 19 and 14.

    My point isn’t to say the Soviet Union, or other states which had or have Marxist-Leninist governments are without critique, but that comparing them to the III Reich, at the very least diminishes the crimes committed by Nazis and makes analysis of the aforementioned States more muddy.

    • gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1921·
      9 months ago

      Authoritarianism is bad regardless of the ideology behind it and leads to people with reasonable beliefs (communism could help people that capitalism harms) doing unreasonable things (denying active genocides being carried out by governments that have historically been pro-communism because… cognitive dissonance?) like the subject of this post.

      • MinekPo1 [She/Her]English
        243·
        9 months ago

        I’m not attempting to argue communism is not bad in my comment, I believe this is even more true if you believe communism is bad.

        I am strictly saying comparing Nazism and communism does not give a full picture, which is, AFAIK, something that experts in Soviet history, some of which I quoted, agree with.

        What I’m trying to say is that comparing the two you risk either reducing the weight of crimes committed by Nazis, which are worse than those committed in any communist state, I hope you’ll agree and also risk loosing the detail distinguishing the two.

        I would elaborate further, but I want to make this comment shorter to make what I’m saying a bit more accessible.