(Note OP use the Chinese hammer and sickle, suggesting the straw man supports China, as they see them as a reflection of their ideology, contradicting their argument)
(Note OP use the Chinese hammer and sickle, suggesting the straw man supports China, as they see them as a reflection of their ideology, contradicting their argument)
The fact that the Eastern Bloc did not yet meet all of communism’s criteria is such an elementary and obvious observation that I very rarely mention it anymore. It’s much more interesting to talk about (for example) how and why the Soviet Union was able to industrialize so rapidly: prioritizing use value over exchange value. That would be a meaningful discussion.
Instead, anticommunists just want to reference ‘commulist atrocities’ as rapidly as possible. They don’t even want to discuss why communists resorted to them. All you need to know is that commulism doesn’t work and that Lenin/Stalin/Máo were obsessed with increasing ‘their power’ as much as possible. That’s it. Mystery solved; lesson over.
I think that this quote is very telling of their mentality:
This tendency of theirs to boneheadedly force Third Reich analogies into everything can reveal more about themselves than anything else. If they don’t give a shit about why an atrocity happened, then they can’t do anything to prevent another from happening either, and that speaks volumes about how seriously they actually take these matters.