Zam-Zam
Senator
Facts no communist wants you to be aware of:
15 Brutal Facts About Communism
15 Brutal Facts About Communism | TheRichest
15 Brutal Facts About Communism
15 Brutal Facts About Communism | TheRichest
Communism & Oppression
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EatTheRich
President
Let's see, shall we?
15Some Communist States Still Imprison Political Opponents
If you think communism is already in the past and what’s left of it is just a scary story in the history books, you’ll be completely wrong. The truth is that in the 21st century, more people live in countries with a communist or near-communist regime than at any point in history. What is even more alarming is the fact that in these countries, people continue to be persecuted and arrested for speaking up or acting against the government.
Currently, there are 51 political prisoners in Cuba, and about 10 - 12,000 such in North Korean labor camps. Despite its prosperous present and promising future, China is not falling behind. As of 2015, there are over 6,000 recorded cases of prisoners who either died in prison, or have escaped. And in Vietnam, they are not kidding at all – they still arrest political rebels at gunpoint.
China is a capitalist state that has mostly imprisoned people resisting the reintroduction of capitalism. Many of those imprisoned in N. Korea are also leftist critics of the government who are more politically aligned with communism than the government imprisoning them. Cuban "political prisoners"? Name one.
"Political rebels"? You mean people attempting to overthrow the government? They are arrested anywhere, including the United States.
Anyway, last time I checked Leonard Peltier was still in prison, along with Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, Sundiata Acoli, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jalil Muntaqim, Ed Poindexter, Chelsea Manning, and several members of Pussy Riot.
15Some Communist States Still Imprison Political Opponents
If you think communism is already in the past and what’s left of it is just a scary story in the history books, you’ll be completely wrong. The truth is that in the 21st century, more people live in countries with a communist or near-communist regime than at any point in history. What is even more alarming is the fact that in these countries, people continue to be persecuted and arrested for speaking up or acting against the government.
Currently, there are 51 political prisoners in Cuba, and about 10 - 12,000 such in North Korean labor camps. Despite its prosperous present and promising future, China is not falling behind. As of 2015, there are over 6,000 recorded cases of prisoners who either died in prison, or have escaped. And in Vietnam, they are not kidding at all – they still arrest political rebels at gunpoint.
China is a capitalist state that has mostly imprisoned people resisting the reintroduction of capitalism. Many of those imprisoned in N. Korea are also leftist critics of the government who are more politically aligned with communism than the government imprisoning them. Cuban "political prisoners"? Name one.
"Political rebels"? You mean people attempting to overthrow the government? They are arrested anywhere, including the United States.
Anyway, last time I checked Leonard Peltier was still in prison, along with Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, Sundiata Acoli, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jalil Muntaqim, Ed Poindexter, Chelsea Manning, and several members of Pussy Riot.
EatTheRich
President
14Communism’s Little Black Book Of Mass Murders
Truth be said, communism per se hasn’t killed anyone as it is just an economic theory, which was supposed to be harmless and beneficial to society. However, some people claiming to be communists have killed millions. The historical figures are terrifying. The highest death tolls documented in communist states occurred in the Soviet Union under Stalin – 20 million non-combatants were killed during his totalitarian regime. Other communist leaders, however, were not less fierce than Stalin. 65 million civilians were murdered in China under Mao Zedong, 2 million in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1 million in the Eastern Bloc, and 1 million in Vietnam. In summary, there has been recorded a death toll between 85 and 100 million people in the Communism’s Black Book of Mass Murders.
The numbers are mostly exaggerated, but that's not the main reason this claim is disingenuous and made in bad faith. There is a tremendous distinction between "some people claiming to be communists" and the political movement of international communist revolution, which Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were very clearly enemies of.
Not to mention that everyone who starved to death in a socialist country or under Pol Pot's capitalist regime is counted as a "victim of communism," but the millions who starve to death every year to make capitalism possible aren't counted as victims of capitalism to give a death toll numbering in the many hundreds of millions, without counting the many who perished in the Native American genocide, two world wars and the Holocaust, the Indonesian massacres, the wars on Korea and Vietnam, the Congo Wars, and the list goes on and on.
Truth be said, communism per se hasn’t killed anyone as it is just an economic theory, which was supposed to be harmless and beneficial to society. However, some people claiming to be communists have killed millions. The historical figures are terrifying. The highest death tolls documented in communist states occurred in the Soviet Union under Stalin – 20 million non-combatants were killed during his totalitarian regime. Other communist leaders, however, were not less fierce than Stalin. 65 million civilians were murdered in China under Mao Zedong, 2 million in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1 million in the Eastern Bloc, and 1 million in Vietnam. In summary, there has been recorded a death toll between 85 and 100 million people in the Communism’s Black Book of Mass Murders.
The numbers are mostly exaggerated, but that's not the main reason this claim is disingenuous and made in bad faith. There is a tremendous distinction between "some people claiming to be communists" and the political movement of international communist revolution, which Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were very clearly enemies of.
Not to mention that everyone who starved to death in a socialist country or under Pol Pot's capitalist regime is counted as a "victim of communism," but the millions who starve to death every year to make capitalism possible aren't counted as victims of capitalism to give a death toll numbering in the many hundreds of millions, without counting the many who perished in the Native American genocide, two world wars and the Holocaust, the Indonesian massacres, the wars on Korea and Vietnam, the Congo Wars, and the list goes on and on.
EatTheRich
President
13Being Gay Is Criminal
Our old friend Marx commented rarely on sexuality in general, so we won’t be hearing much of him on the gay issue. However, in 1933, Joseph Stalin added an article to the Soviet Union criminal code, making homosexuality a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Similar laws were passed in many countries of the Eastern Bloc, and the consequences for the “offenders” were no less severe. For example, in Bulgaria, people who were engaged in same-sex sexual intercourse would get a penalty of up to three years imprisonment. In Yugoslavia, gay people were labeled by communists as “enemies of the system” and were prohibited from joining the Communist party. It seems, though, that it was worst to be gay in Romania – if you were caught or even suspected of having sexual relations with a person of the same sex, you’d risk spending up to five years in jail! And keep in mind that it wasn’t the 1930s, but the 70s!
The hypocrisy here is astounding! It is true that in 1933 Stalin made homosexuality a crime ... what they don't tell you is that this was after Lenin's government legalized homosexuality, which had been illegal in capitalist Russia, making this one of many examples of Stalin reversing Lenin's communist course and reintroducing capitalist methods and values. Nor that homosexuality was illegal at the time in every capitalist country except France (a legacy of that country's radical left-wing capitalist revolution in the 18th century). Nor that following Stalin's betrayal, E. Germany became the 2nd country in Europe to legalize homosexuality, which was still illegal in W. Germany under the Nazi-era legal code that remained in effect. Nor that while you risked a sentence of 5 years for homosexuality in Romania in the 1970s, you could be sentenced to hard labor for life in the UK or to life imprisonment in Idaho, nor that you can be sentenced to death for homosexuality in 10 countries today (2022). Nor that not only gay sex, but same-sex marriage, is legal in Vietnam.
Our old friend Marx commented rarely on sexuality in general, so we won’t be hearing much of him on the gay issue. However, in 1933, Joseph Stalin added an article to the Soviet Union criminal code, making homosexuality a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Similar laws were passed in many countries of the Eastern Bloc, and the consequences for the “offenders” were no less severe. For example, in Bulgaria, people who were engaged in same-sex sexual intercourse would get a penalty of up to three years imprisonment. In Yugoslavia, gay people were labeled by communists as “enemies of the system” and were prohibited from joining the Communist party. It seems, though, that it was worst to be gay in Romania – if you were caught or even suspected of having sexual relations with a person of the same sex, you’d risk spending up to five years in jail! And keep in mind that it wasn’t the 1930s, but the 70s!
The hypocrisy here is astounding! It is true that in 1933 Stalin made homosexuality a crime ... what they don't tell you is that this was after Lenin's government legalized homosexuality, which had been illegal in capitalist Russia, making this one of many examples of Stalin reversing Lenin's communist course and reintroducing capitalist methods and values. Nor that homosexuality was illegal at the time in every capitalist country except France (a legacy of that country's radical left-wing capitalist revolution in the 18th century). Nor that following Stalin's betrayal, E. Germany became the 2nd country in Europe to legalize homosexuality, which was still illegal in W. Germany under the Nazi-era legal code that remained in effect. Nor that while you risked a sentence of 5 years for homosexuality in Romania in the 1970s, you could be sentenced to hard labor for life in the UK or to life imprisonment in Idaho, nor that you can be sentenced to death for homosexuality in 10 countries today (2022). Nor that not only gay sex, but same-sex marriage, is legal in Vietnam.
EatTheRich
President
12There Is An Active Effort To Eliminate Job Incentives
Yes, communism is a fun enterprise, which, however, has always failed to work for one fundamental reason: it contradicts human nature. Here is a very lucid example: In a communist country, there is a deliberate lack of incentives. All citizens get equal share of what a few people have worked hard to provide. Since the extra incentives are hugely reduced (let’s say, no higher pay is available for the best doctors, architects, etc.), the industrious and more diligent workers eventually lose their motivation. The logical result is a society of lousy workers, which brings serious damage to all spheres of life. What is more, the poorly motivated professionals are likely to rebel against the government for refusing to recognize their efforts. Actually, the communist regime in many states has fallen exactly because of the population growing bitter on their governments for not getting what they think they deserve by right.
What "communist country" gives everyone an equal share? Don't the capitalist countries, which verifiably have more unemployment and more need for brutal repression of popular rebellion, also have the problem that the need to reward investment rather than productivity punishes the producers?
What did Marx write about it? Did he say that everyone would get an equal share, or is anyone who advocates such calling for an un-communist standard?
Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.
Hence, equal right here is still in principle – bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.
In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.
But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
Yes, communism is a fun enterprise, which, however, has always failed to work for one fundamental reason: it contradicts human nature. Here is a very lucid example: In a communist country, there is a deliberate lack of incentives. All citizens get equal share of what a few people have worked hard to provide. Since the extra incentives are hugely reduced (let’s say, no higher pay is available for the best doctors, architects, etc.), the industrious and more diligent workers eventually lose their motivation. The logical result is a society of lousy workers, which brings serious damage to all spheres of life. What is more, the poorly motivated professionals are likely to rebel against the government for refusing to recognize their efforts. Actually, the communist regime in many states has fallen exactly because of the population growing bitter on their governments for not getting what they think they deserve by right.
What "communist country" gives everyone an equal share? Don't the capitalist countries, which verifiably have more unemployment and more need for brutal repression of popular rebellion, also have the problem that the need to reward investment rather than productivity punishes the producers?
What did Marx write about it? Did he say that everyone would get an equal share, or is anyone who advocates such calling for an un-communist standard?
Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.
Hence, equal right here is still in principle – bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.
In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.
But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
EatTheRich
President
11Creativity Is Discouraged
Unfortunately for the communist elite, not all the citizens are happy wiping floors or working on the assembly line. Now and then, a person is born with a rare artistic talent, which they yearn to give an expression to. However, communism considers the jobs of painters and poets useless and even ridiculous. All that matters is building super-power factories and forming a nation of uniform-thinking voters. In order for that ultimate goal to be achieved, all attempts of pursuing artistic fulfillment need to be crushed. The communist policy towards art is a policy of no compromise. Art has only one aim and that is to be didactic and critical of capitalism. In the Soviet Union, artists who dared to disobey the Word of the Party were imprisoned, killed, or died of starvation in the Siberian camps.
Another example of Stalin's Soviet Union applying capitalist methods ("When I hear 'Culture' ... I release the safety catch on my Browning," as they said in the notorious capitalist regime ofAdolf Hitler), for which it was critiqued by Trotsky, the leading communist figure in the politics of the time. "Interesting" that the Soviet Union nevertheless managed to give the world the works of Sergei Eisenstein and Anna Akhmatova and Cuba the works of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Buena Vista Social Club, while Bertholt Brecht and Dean Reed fled to E. Germany to escape censorship and persecution in the United States.
Unfortunately for the communist elite, not all the citizens are happy wiping floors or working on the assembly line. Now and then, a person is born with a rare artistic talent, which they yearn to give an expression to. However, communism considers the jobs of painters and poets useless and even ridiculous. All that matters is building super-power factories and forming a nation of uniform-thinking voters. In order for that ultimate goal to be achieved, all attempts of pursuing artistic fulfillment need to be crushed. The communist policy towards art is a policy of no compromise. Art has only one aim and that is to be didactic and critical of capitalism. In the Soviet Union, artists who dared to disobey the Word of the Party were imprisoned, killed, or died of starvation in the Siberian camps.
Another example of Stalin's Soviet Union applying capitalist methods ("When I hear 'Culture' ... I release the safety catch on my Browning," as they said in the notorious capitalist regime ofAdolf Hitler), for which it was critiqued by Trotsky, the leading communist figure in the politics of the time. "Interesting" that the Soviet Union nevertheless managed to give the world the works of Sergei Eisenstein and Anna Akhmatova and Cuba the works of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Buena Vista Social Club, while Bertholt Brecht and Dean Reed fled to E. Germany to escape censorship and persecution in the United States.
EatTheRich
President
10Censorship Is The Main Tool For Keeping The Country Isolated
No two opinions about that – North Korea is currently the most censored country in the world. If you want to set your foot on another planet, it wouldn’t take that much, really. You just visit North Korea and you will find yourself in the deepest information void there is. Travellers to capital Pyongyang claim it almost feels as if you were on another planet! There are no independent journalists in communist North Korea, and all TV sets sold on the territory of the country are locked to frequencies specified by the government.
And here is another striking example of the nearest past. For over 40 years – until 1991 – Albania was completely shut out from the rest of the world and a person's life was controlled by the regime of Enver Hoxha. He ruled the country with an iron fist in a way very similar to North Korea today. Needless to say, during that period, Albania was the poorest country in Europe and the third poorest in the world.
Since communism is famously an internationalist movement ("workers of the world, unite"), it could not be more clear that today's N. Korea and Enver Hoxha's Albania had profoundly un-communist leaderships. Of course, in this particular case the regimes pursuing autarchy ... already inclined by the influence of Stalin's counterrevolution to put the narrow interests of the ruling bureaucracy ahead of the communist (working class) influence ... were compelled toward this course by the U.S.-led mass slaughter of Koreans and military aggression against N. Korea on one hand, and the aggression of capitalist Italy and Germany and Stalinist USSR and Yugoslavia toward Albania on the other, further confirmation of Trotsky's thesis that the displacement of working-class political power (as in the USSR under Lenin) by a privileged ruling bureaucratic caste (as in the USSR under Stalin) represented the retrogression, in the face of anti-communist reaction, of the communist advance from the heights it had conquered.
No two opinions about that – North Korea is currently the most censored country in the world. If you want to set your foot on another planet, it wouldn’t take that much, really. You just visit North Korea and you will find yourself in the deepest information void there is. Travellers to capital Pyongyang claim it almost feels as if you were on another planet! There are no independent journalists in communist North Korea, and all TV sets sold on the territory of the country are locked to frequencies specified by the government.
And here is another striking example of the nearest past. For over 40 years – until 1991 – Albania was completely shut out from the rest of the world and a person's life was controlled by the regime of Enver Hoxha. He ruled the country with an iron fist in a way very similar to North Korea today. Needless to say, during that period, Albania was the poorest country in Europe and the third poorest in the world.
Since communism is famously an internationalist movement ("workers of the world, unite"), it could not be more clear that today's N. Korea and Enver Hoxha's Albania had profoundly un-communist leaderships. Of course, in this particular case the regimes pursuing autarchy ... already inclined by the influence of Stalin's counterrevolution to put the narrow interests of the ruling bureaucracy ahead of the communist (working class) influence ... were compelled toward this course by the U.S.-led mass slaughter of Koreans and military aggression against N. Korea on one hand, and the aggression of capitalist Italy and Germany and Stalinist USSR and Yugoslavia toward Albania on the other, further confirmation of Trotsky's thesis that the displacement of working-class political power (as in the USSR under Lenin) by a privileged ruling bureaucratic caste (as in the USSR under Stalin) represented the retrogression, in the face of anti-communist reaction, of the communist advance from the heights it had conquered.
EatTheRich
President
9The Worst Despots Are Seen As Cool Guys
Only in a communist country is it possible for someone who killed 45 million of his own people to be admired and even proclaimed a national hero and martyr. Numerous totalitarian dictators, especially in the Eastern Bloc following World War II, promoted their own cult of personality. Stalin, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Josip Broz Tito and others were idolized as flawless, godlike creatures. Their portraits adorned every public building and private homes, and the country’s artists had as their supreme duty to produce works of art idolizing the cool leader. In fact, the term “cult of personality” is coined by Karl Marx, the Prussian philosopher and revolutionary socialist, who is considered the ideological father of communism and socialism. He talked about the “superstitious worship of authority”, which he deliberately developed around his own personality in the late 19th century.
Of course, Marx, in criticizing the "superstitious worship of authority" adapted from the typical methods of the primitive societies he wanted to overhaul, was calling for people to become independent thinkers, and specifically for his followers to test the truth of every statement he made for themselves, in other words, to remake themselves as the sorts of people (creative, incisive, and independent) suited for a communist world.
Stalin was able to establish his cult of personality (one absent under the communist Lenin, as much as it could be prevented, in primitive Soviet Russia, by a party and government that tried to urge, rather than compel) only after systematically rooting out the communist voice in that party and government. And for this he was LOVED by the entire capitalist world's ideologists as the "moderate" alternative to the "radical" Lenin and Trotsky, expressing the truth that his political departure consisted of an effort to find a compromise between their communist course and the trajectory of capitalist politics. Walter Duranty of The New York Times, seeking to advance his liberal politics at the expense of the fascism in which he saw only a negation of its liberal politics, not the destination the capitalists behind both him and Franco were inevitably leading the capitalist world toward, cynically helped cover up Stalin's Ukrainian genocide in his efforts to urge Stalin to lend more of his country's military and economic power to defeating Nationalist Spain (even if it meant brutal speedup in the factories and gulags, and the ruthless crushing of prolabor dissent). Later, the Roosevelt government, seeking Stalin's help against Germany and Japan using the same approach, went so far as to censor movies that were deemed too critical of the Stalin regime, while a wing of the conservative (sellout aka counterrevolutionary) labor bureaucracy pinkwashed themselves and their alliance with Roosevelt at the expense of the unions and the fight to overthrow the capitalist state by glomming onto the authority of Stalin and his foreign ventriloquists' dummies like Earl Browder of the Communist Party USA for the course that Stalin urged ... the inevitable sabotage of communist revolution that occurs when the political step back from communism into Stalinism is taken. Of course, a few years earlier, when Stalin was flaunting his faux-radicalism trying to poke Roosevelt (until he was willing to accept an anti-German alliance with the USSR), the regime of Adolf Hitler ... one, like every fascist regime, propelled into power by a movement of antilabor finks ... itself deemed Stalin's regime an ally.
Hoxha was praised by the contras for his sectarian opposition to the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. And the radicals he inspired in the labor movement were sometimes encouraged by the union bosses who wanted them as allies against the communist opposition fractions in the union locals. Hoxhaist rebels in Ethiopia (including occupied Eritrea) were organized by the capitalist regimes of the U.S. and Somalia in order to break that country's alliance with the USSR.
Ceausescu was widely praised (by anticommunist ideologists) as the most critical Warsaw Pact leader of the Soviet Union, and for his pro-Israel intervention during the Lebanese Civil War and his friendliness with imperial Ethiopia, Zaïre under CIA agent Mobutu Sese Seko, Iran under the shah (for which he was praised in one part of the capitalist world) and the ayatollah (for which he was praised in another part), and fascist Chile.
Tito vied with Ceausescu for the title of "most moderate socialist leader" in the capitalist press, being widely praised for his support of the UN invasion of Korea, his critiques from a right-wing perspective of every other socialist country (for which he was singled out for praise by Ieng Sary, the Hitler-praising, openly anti-Marx and anti-Lenin foreign minister of Pol Pot's regime), and his encouragement of market competition, pricing, and distribution mechanisms.
Speaking of the Pol Pot regime: the author would have included it on the list (although his cult of personality surpassed in "superstitious worship of authority" that of any leader on this list and his brutality easily surpassed that of Ceausescu or Hoxha, much less Tito) , but the author forgot to pretend to think the regime was communist. But they sure came in for plenty of praise, not just from ultra-leftists (pinko finks and goons) like the Communist Party of Kampuchea, but also from folks like the Prince (now King) of Cambodia, the official head of state of that regime, whose royal title was inherited from ancestors who had been installed in power as puppets by the comprador bourgeoisie (that is, merchants betting on a more powerful state against their own) backed by the military of semi-feudal Vietnam. Or Henry Kissinger, who successfully urged President Ford to back him as an ally against the pro-Vietnam, pro-Soviet junta that had driven him from power, and as part of Kissinger's efforts to promote an alliance with Red (Light Pink, anyway) China against the USSR. Or the other leaders of SEATO who did the same, like Thailand which sent troops (with American advisors) who cooperated with guerrillas backed by Pol Pot and Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, against the Vietnamese and the Vietnam-backed regime. Never mind that people like Pol Pot were calling for race war against the Vietnamese and Thai the whole time ... because being too "leftist" for civilized society is one thing, but class war is just, as Pol Pot put it in his thesis praising capitalist revolutionary Robespierre over socialist revolutionary Lenin, so inimical to democracy.
Only in a communist country is it possible for someone who killed 45 million of his own people to be admired and even proclaimed a national hero and martyr. Numerous totalitarian dictators, especially in the Eastern Bloc following World War II, promoted their own cult of personality. Stalin, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Josip Broz Tito and others were idolized as flawless, godlike creatures. Their portraits adorned every public building and private homes, and the country’s artists had as their supreme duty to produce works of art idolizing the cool leader. In fact, the term “cult of personality” is coined by Karl Marx, the Prussian philosopher and revolutionary socialist, who is considered the ideological father of communism and socialism. He talked about the “superstitious worship of authority”, which he deliberately developed around his own personality in the late 19th century.
Of course, Marx, in criticizing the "superstitious worship of authority" adapted from the typical methods of the primitive societies he wanted to overhaul, was calling for people to become independent thinkers, and specifically for his followers to test the truth of every statement he made for themselves, in other words, to remake themselves as the sorts of people (creative, incisive, and independent) suited for a communist world.
Stalin was able to establish his cult of personality (one absent under the communist Lenin, as much as it could be prevented, in primitive Soviet Russia, by a party and government that tried to urge, rather than compel) only after systematically rooting out the communist voice in that party and government. And for this he was LOVED by the entire capitalist world's ideologists as the "moderate" alternative to the "radical" Lenin and Trotsky, expressing the truth that his political departure consisted of an effort to find a compromise between their communist course and the trajectory of capitalist politics. Walter Duranty of The New York Times, seeking to advance his liberal politics at the expense of the fascism in which he saw only a negation of its liberal politics, not the destination the capitalists behind both him and Franco were inevitably leading the capitalist world toward, cynically helped cover up Stalin's Ukrainian genocide in his efforts to urge Stalin to lend more of his country's military and economic power to defeating Nationalist Spain (even if it meant brutal speedup in the factories and gulags, and the ruthless crushing of prolabor dissent). Later, the Roosevelt government, seeking Stalin's help against Germany and Japan using the same approach, went so far as to censor movies that were deemed too critical of the Stalin regime, while a wing of the conservative (sellout aka counterrevolutionary) labor bureaucracy pinkwashed themselves and their alliance with Roosevelt at the expense of the unions and the fight to overthrow the capitalist state by glomming onto the authority of Stalin and his foreign ventriloquists' dummies like Earl Browder of the Communist Party USA for the course that Stalin urged ... the inevitable sabotage of communist revolution that occurs when the political step back from communism into Stalinism is taken. Of course, a few years earlier, when Stalin was flaunting his faux-radicalism trying to poke Roosevelt (until he was willing to accept an anti-German alliance with the USSR), the regime of Adolf Hitler ... one, like every fascist regime, propelled into power by a movement of antilabor finks ... itself deemed Stalin's regime an ally.
Hoxha was praised by the contras for his sectarian opposition to the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. And the radicals he inspired in the labor movement were sometimes encouraged by the union bosses who wanted them as allies against the communist opposition fractions in the union locals. Hoxhaist rebels in Ethiopia (including occupied Eritrea) were organized by the capitalist regimes of the U.S. and Somalia in order to break that country's alliance with the USSR.
Ceausescu was widely praised (by anticommunist ideologists) as the most critical Warsaw Pact leader of the Soviet Union, and for his pro-Israel intervention during the Lebanese Civil War and his friendliness with imperial Ethiopia, Zaïre under CIA agent Mobutu Sese Seko, Iran under the shah (for which he was praised in one part of the capitalist world) and the ayatollah (for which he was praised in another part), and fascist Chile.
Tito vied with Ceausescu for the title of "most moderate socialist leader" in the capitalist press, being widely praised for his support of the UN invasion of Korea, his critiques from a right-wing perspective of every other socialist country (for which he was singled out for praise by Ieng Sary, the Hitler-praising, openly anti-Marx and anti-Lenin foreign minister of Pol Pot's regime), and his encouragement of market competition, pricing, and distribution mechanisms.
Speaking of the Pol Pot regime: the author would have included it on the list (although his cult of personality surpassed in "superstitious worship of authority" that of any leader on this list and his brutality easily surpassed that of Ceausescu or Hoxha, much less Tito) , but the author forgot to pretend to think the regime was communist. But they sure came in for plenty of praise, not just from ultra-leftists (pinko finks and goons) like the Communist Party of Kampuchea, but also from folks like the Prince (now King) of Cambodia, the official head of state of that regime, whose royal title was inherited from ancestors who had been installed in power as puppets by the comprador bourgeoisie (that is, merchants betting on a more powerful state against their own) backed by the military of semi-feudal Vietnam. Or Henry Kissinger, who successfully urged President Ford to back him as an ally against the pro-Vietnam, pro-Soviet junta that had driven him from power, and as part of Kissinger's efforts to promote an alliance with Red (Light Pink, anyway) China against the USSR. Or the other leaders of SEATO who did the same, like Thailand which sent troops (with American advisors) who cooperated with guerrillas backed by Pol Pot and Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, against the Vietnamese and the Vietnam-backed regime. Never mind that people like Pol Pot were calling for race war against the Vietnamese and Thai the whole time ... because being too "leftist" for civilized society is one thing, but class war is just, as Pol Pot put it in his thesis praising capitalist revolutionary Robespierre over socialist revolutionary Lenin, so inimical to democracy.
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EatTheRich
President
8Forced Collectivization
In a country, where everyone shares everything and nothing is owned, it can get very ugly at some point. The idea behind the land reforms carried out in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries was to maximize the use of the countryside production for the industrial needs of the urban areas. The industry was just taking off, and huge quantities of food were needed to feed the laborers. In the Soviets, between 1928 and 1933, many landowners would refuse to let go of their farms, livestock and land. This led to unthinkable acts of atrocity – many farmers were executed and their families were destined to starvation. The same happened also in communist China twenty years later, when 33 million people starved to death because of the state’s requisitions of family-owned farmland and crops.
An innovation by Stalin that had been denounced in advance, in no uncertain terms, by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, in no uncertain terms. Adapted from the land reform methods of merchant-backed (capitalist or precapitalist) political powers, for example the violent confiscation of landholdings of the Catholic Church under Henry VIII, Cromwell, Robespierre, or Napoleon, the ethnic cleansing to facilitate colonial (or in reference to internal colonies) penetration, and of course the brutal suppression of communal property forms, from Rome's wars against barbarian Germans and Gauls, to the vagrant hangings and (literal and metaphorical) witch hunts that accompanied the suppression of precapitalist communal land rights from England to Russia, to the genocides of the Native Americans, Prussians, Balts, Herero and Nama, and other primitive-communist societies.
And why was Stalin so desperate to achieve rapid industrialization? Well, the economic program he successfully won party support for (signaling the party's retreat from communism), over the program of the United Opposition led by the communist Trotsky, called for fewer material incentives to promote the voluntary formation of agricultural and labor cooperatives, less development of industry, and more of a focus on lowering prices for consumer goods. It called for encouragement of private small-scale production, trade, and investment in order to decrease reliance on state planning and encourage private-public partnerships. And it stressed a conciliatory attitude toward the capitalist powers that made international revolution take a back seat to friendly foreign relations. This was an understandably popular program following the world war, massive capitalist invasion, civil war with capitalist elements, and depredations of the anarchist far left (allied, like Pol Pot's far left capitalist regime, with international imperialism) with whom Trotsky's factional ally Zinoviev sympathized, which had left the country ruined. But Trotsky (with his keen original application of tried-and-true Marxist theory) forecast that the effects would be ruinous, and the communist opposition staked its future in the party on this issue. To defeat the communists, Stalin had to send tens of thousands, including the vast majority of the active organizers of the Russian revolution, into the gulags. But Trotsky turned out to be right. Try as he might to ingratiate himself to the capitalist world, Stalin had found himself unable to overcome the communist defense of the change in property relations achieved by the social revolution led by Lenin, and the imperialist world swore eternal enmity to the Soviet Union ... at the time the only socialist state ... for it. Meanwhile, the compromises with capitalism that Stalin was able to push through promoted the growth of capitalist property forms, and with them a large class of wealthy peasants, merchants, entrepreneurs, and party functionaries, and a well-off layer of working-class professionals with capitalist aspirations, who organized (using the dirtiest Stalinist politics imaginable) a fight for a quick transition to capitalism, which the ruling class (the workers) whose socialist economic rights gave them a commanding position in the state despite the concessions they were obliged to make to Stalin's counterrevolution which had taken control of the government apparatus could not permit, touching off Stalin's life-or-death political fight with the Right Opposition, which he had to fight by brutal administrative means (those of the capitalist Executive he aspired to be) lest an appeal for active, uncoerced labor support awaken the communist power of the workers menacing him on his left. With a rising current of fascism (buoyed by Stalin's sabotage of international communist revolution, lest he imperil his friendly relations with the capitalist powers), the capitalist world rocked by the Russian Revolution regaining its political confidence and demanding ever-further market reforms as the price of toleration, and a right-wing opposition eager to ally with imperialism and fascism, and a military weakened by the priority given to production for market sale over industrialization, the Stalin regime was obliged to push for production at a breakneck pace given to the reliance on the same desperate methods to boost capitalist production for the naval competitions of the British and the Spanish, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the Russo-Japanese War (and in general Japan's race to catch up to the Great Powers in industrialization), or WWI ... ethnic cleansing, terror, and class-based democide.
In a country, where everyone shares everything and nothing is owned, it can get very ugly at some point. The idea behind the land reforms carried out in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries was to maximize the use of the countryside production for the industrial needs of the urban areas. The industry was just taking off, and huge quantities of food were needed to feed the laborers. In the Soviets, between 1928 and 1933, many landowners would refuse to let go of their farms, livestock and land. This led to unthinkable acts of atrocity – many farmers were executed and their families were destined to starvation. The same happened also in communist China twenty years later, when 33 million people starved to death because of the state’s requisitions of family-owned farmland and crops.
An innovation by Stalin that had been denounced in advance, in no uncertain terms, by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, in no uncertain terms. Adapted from the land reform methods of merchant-backed (capitalist or precapitalist) political powers, for example the violent confiscation of landholdings of the Catholic Church under Henry VIII, Cromwell, Robespierre, or Napoleon, the ethnic cleansing to facilitate colonial (or in reference to internal colonies) penetration, and of course the brutal suppression of communal property forms, from Rome's wars against barbarian Germans and Gauls, to the vagrant hangings and (literal and metaphorical) witch hunts that accompanied the suppression of precapitalist communal land rights from England to Russia, to the genocides of the Native Americans, Prussians, Balts, Herero and Nama, and other primitive-communist societies.
And why was Stalin so desperate to achieve rapid industrialization? Well, the economic program he successfully won party support for (signaling the party's retreat from communism), over the program of the United Opposition led by the communist Trotsky, called for fewer material incentives to promote the voluntary formation of agricultural and labor cooperatives, less development of industry, and more of a focus on lowering prices for consumer goods. It called for encouragement of private small-scale production, trade, and investment in order to decrease reliance on state planning and encourage private-public partnerships. And it stressed a conciliatory attitude toward the capitalist powers that made international revolution take a back seat to friendly foreign relations. This was an understandably popular program following the world war, massive capitalist invasion, civil war with capitalist elements, and depredations of the anarchist far left (allied, like Pol Pot's far left capitalist regime, with international imperialism) with whom Trotsky's factional ally Zinoviev sympathized, which had left the country ruined. But Trotsky (with his keen original application of tried-and-true Marxist theory) forecast that the effects would be ruinous, and the communist opposition staked its future in the party on this issue. To defeat the communists, Stalin had to send tens of thousands, including the vast majority of the active organizers of the Russian revolution, into the gulags. But Trotsky turned out to be right. Try as he might to ingratiate himself to the capitalist world, Stalin had found himself unable to overcome the communist defense of the change in property relations achieved by the social revolution led by Lenin, and the imperialist world swore eternal enmity to the Soviet Union ... at the time the only socialist state ... for it. Meanwhile, the compromises with capitalism that Stalin was able to push through promoted the growth of capitalist property forms, and with them a large class of wealthy peasants, merchants, entrepreneurs, and party functionaries, and a well-off layer of working-class professionals with capitalist aspirations, who organized (using the dirtiest Stalinist politics imaginable) a fight for a quick transition to capitalism, which the ruling class (the workers) whose socialist economic rights gave them a commanding position in the state despite the concessions they were obliged to make to Stalin's counterrevolution which had taken control of the government apparatus could not permit, touching off Stalin's life-or-death political fight with the Right Opposition, which he had to fight by brutal administrative means (those of the capitalist Executive he aspired to be) lest an appeal for active, uncoerced labor support awaken the communist power of the workers menacing him on his left. With a rising current of fascism (buoyed by Stalin's sabotage of international communist revolution, lest he imperil his friendly relations with the capitalist powers), the capitalist world rocked by the Russian Revolution regaining its political confidence and demanding ever-further market reforms as the price of toleration, and a right-wing opposition eager to ally with imperialism and fascism, and a military weakened by the priority given to production for market sale over industrialization, the Stalin regime was obliged to push for production at a breakneck pace given to the reliance on the same desperate methods to boost capitalist production for the naval competitions of the British and the Spanish, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the Russo-Japanese War (and in general Japan's race to catch up to the Great Powers in industrialization), or WWI ... ethnic cleansing, terror, and class-based democide.
EatTheRich
President
And Mao? He similarly paid for his right-wing policy, backed by Stalin (over the vehement opposition of Trotsky, who wrote that this was the biggest right-wing betrayal of communism in the foreign policy of the party while he was still a member), of defending the property interests of "patriotic" landlords, industrialists, or merchants ahead of the aspirations of the peasants for land and the efforts to turn the land and machines into socialist property, in order to preserve an alliance with the capitalist government of the Kuomintang. His policy also relied on military cooperation with the military policy (in the fight against Japan) of the Kuomintang (driven by U.S. military strategy and the interest in the preservation of private property, in the fight against Japan), which meant organizing a numerically great army with widely stretched supply lines, by making concessions on property questions to the better-off peasants and by substituting the knout for political education in building the army. To put it shortly, he put nationalism ahead of communist internationalism, to the applause of the bourgeoisie. To preserve the kind of extreme mobility needed to say "how high" every time the Kuomintang's Chiang Kai-shek told him to jump meant emphasizing the conspiratorial methods of the guerrilla over the communist approach of urban working-class insurrection led by a politically centralized vanguard party and based on industrial union power. This in turn meant damping down the revolutionary aspirations of the urban workers and purging the party and the unions of militants using gangster methods. The working-class opposition in the Chinese Communist Party, led by Trotsky's future ally P'eng Shu-tse, attempted to resist Mao's right-wing deviation from policy. As had Trotsky, P'eng forecast (before forced collectivization in the USSR or China, and without awareness of Trotsky's work, based on his application of Marxist theory) that the departure from communist praxis would inevitably lead to success for counterrevolution, followed by an ultraleft maneuver by the opportunist bureaucracy, forced collectivization, and untold misery for (in particular) the peasants. To preserve control of his party for his faction (backed by Stalin and by Stalin's then-dominant ally Bukharin, future leader of the Right Opposition to Stalin), Mao initiated a bloody purge of the communist left, which (along with his factional attacks on the anarchist militants) killed hundreds of the unions' and the party's most successful (due to their class-struggle approach) leaders. Then (at Washington's order) the Kuomintang turned on the Communist Party in the Shanghai massacre, killing tens of thousands more communists and Mao-style center-left politicians who couldn't fight communism fast enough to please the capitalist right. A faction in the Communist Party, emboldened by the blows dealt by Mao to the left, and backed by Stalin and Bukharin, called for a continued alliance with a left-wing opposition faction of the Kuomintang, and their thuggish efforts to provoke the Communist Party to that lunacy did further damage to communist influence over the Communist Party, unions, or People's Liberation Army, and the persecution of left-wing opponents of Mao (concentrated in the cities) continued at the expense of the fight against the Japanese and the Kuomintang and the organization and strengthening of the unions. The forced desperate retreat of the People's Liberation Army in the aftermath of the debacle brought on by Mao's temporizing with the capitalists strengthened the guerrillaist deviation from communist party-building with the attendant strengthening of the right and private property, and decreased the future potential for the People's Liberation Army to assist in industrialization by mobilizing military labor battalions. Meanwhile, Mao continued his search for alliances with "patriotic" capitalists and landlords, to pay for the mercenaries he substituted for political cadres who could organize a fight for class power culminating in a mutiny by the capitalist military, to cooperate strategically with (that is, subordinate the fight for communism to) their local warlords. This alliance came at the expense of land reform that empowered the peasant masses, and required further efforts to neuter the communist left. To cement his efforts to conciliate the bourgeoisie, Mao (advised by Stalin) organized (via the Fatherland Front and the People's Republic form of government), official systematic cross-class political collaboration.
Of course, in China, as in the Soviet Union, the right-wing, capitalist-conciliating policies of the Communist Party led to a strengthened and emboldened right, and a numerous bloc of private property owners sympathetic to that right and their efforts to supplant Mao with an even more subservient toady. With American troops at the Yalu River, tens of thousands of Tibetan mercenaries trained by the CIA, and India nipping at China's heels (which Mao dealt with in classical opportunist fashion largely by encouraging landlord-dominated Pakistan, at the expense of Indian revolution, international communism, and ultimately China) , and a powerful right-wing opposition, Mao was reluctantly obliged to begin pursuing nationalization of the major industries and the land merely to avoid industrial-scale assistance to his enemies. This of course provoked the furious resistance of the capitalists, and Mao, in his fear of reigniting the communism he had already stoked by deigning to preside over the social revolution, put all his eggs in one basket: the Soviet Union's protection. The other shoe dropped when Mao, realizing for the first time (like a guy who doesn't understand the ABCs of Marxist theory no matter how much he can regurgitate it) that the Soviet Union was more committed to the political and diplomatic objectives of Stalin, and then Malenkov and Khrushchev , than to his own, and that in practice that meant the Soviet Union proving its loyalty to the imperialists by backing a Chinese Communist Party faction pushing for greater reliance on market methods than the ruling (working) class could countenance. Still shrinking as much as he could from an alliance with the communist-anarchist labor opposition against the right (which threatened his regime with communist rectification on the left), Mao sought refuge in an alliance with first Yugoslavia, then Albania and the "Third World" (a theory invented to pinkwash the nationalist maneuvering), which accelerated China on its collision course with the Soviet Union. Now threatened by the possibility of a Soviet-American alliance against China, and again rejecting the communist solution to this problem (substituting class war for national ad hoc solutions), Mao found his deus ex machina in the hydrogen bomb, achieving which would give China a bargaining chip against the two threatening H-bomb-equipped superpowers. But achieving the mass regimentation of labor and industrial output to supply the infrastructure to build a hydrogen bomb in time to solve his foreign policy dilemma would require ridiculously rapid industrialization. Mao took the opportunity to reckon with his right-wing and left-wing political rivals alike by concentrating the gross exploitation needed to achieve such rapid industrialization in their political geographic bases, maximizing the pain involved and multiplying the death toll.
Of course, in China, as in the Soviet Union, the right-wing, capitalist-conciliating policies of the Communist Party led to a strengthened and emboldened right, and a numerous bloc of private property owners sympathetic to that right and their efforts to supplant Mao with an even more subservient toady. With American troops at the Yalu River, tens of thousands of Tibetan mercenaries trained by the CIA, and India nipping at China's heels (which Mao dealt with in classical opportunist fashion largely by encouraging landlord-dominated Pakistan, at the expense of Indian revolution, international communism, and ultimately China) , and a powerful right-wing opposition, Mao was reluctantly obliged to begin pursuing nationalization of the major industries and the land merely to avoid industrial-scale assistance to his enemies. This of course provoked the furious resistance of the capitalists, and Mao, in his fear of reigniting the communism he had already stoked by deigning to preside over the social revolution, put all his eggs in one basket: the Soviet Union's protection. The other shoe dropped when Mao, realizing for the first time (like a guy who doesn't understand the ABCs of Marxist theory no matter how much he can regurgitate it) that the Soviet Union was more committed to the political and diplomatic objectives of Stalin, and then Malenkov and Khrushchev , than to his own, and that in practice that meant the Soviet Union proving its loyalty to the imperialists by backing a Chinese Communist Party faction pushing for greater reliance on market methods than the ruling (working) class could countenance. Still shrinking as much as he could from an alliance with the communist-anarchist labor opposition against the right (which threatened his regime with communist rectification on the left), Mao sought refuge in an alliance with first Yugoslavia, then Albania and the "Third World" (a theory invented to pinkwash the nationalist maneuvering), which accelerated China on its collision course with the Soviet Union. Now threatened by the possibility of a Soviet-American alliance against China, and again rejecting the communist solution to this problem (substituting class war for national ad hoc solutions), Mao found his deus ex machina in the hydrogen bomb, achieving which would give China a bargaining chip against the two threatening H-bomb-equipped superpowers. But achieving the mass regimentation of labor and industrial output to supply the infrastructure to build a hydrogen bomb in time to solve his foreign policy dilemma would require ridiculously rapid industrialization. Mao took the opportunity to reckon with his right-wing and left-wing political rivals alike by concentrating the gross exploitation needed to achieve such rapid industrialization in their political geographic bases, maximizing the pain involved and multiplying the death toll.
EatTheRich
President
7It Is A Punishable Crime To Believe In God
Of all the restrictions communism imposes upon the citizens, this one is among the most ridiculous and is deeply offensive. All enigmatic communist ideologists and leaders, with Marx and Lenin being the most outstanding ones, view religion as negative to human development. The truth is that communist regimes consider religion a threat to the established totalitarian authority, as religion has the power to organize people. Therefore, all the countries that follow the Marxist-Leninist dogma are atheistic by default and everyone who dares to think otherwise is subject to persecution. Actually, Catholic Cuba never banned religion, BUT you could not join the Communist party if you declared yourself religious. Vietnam’s Constitution allows freedom of worship, BUT not organized religion. In other words, God, in all His forms, is pretty much banned from entering the communist temple.
On the contrary, communists view religion as a threat to the ability of humans to think for themselves, a means of brainwashing people with lies inimical to their freedom, and an obstacle to progress. Joining the Communist Party of Cuba is a privilege, not a right, and at any rate their ban on religious believers was dropped many years ago. While worship is the province of the alleged soul, organized religion belongs to the realm of Caesar (who was the Pontifex Maximus) , and is properly regulated the same way fortune tellers and dice games are. No, secular Cuba has never banned religion, and neither has Vietnam or any other socialist country besides Albania. To do so would violate the clear calls by Marx, Lenin, Engels, Trotsky, and many other communist leaders for a state that is completely neutral with respect to the religious beliefs of the public. The communist approach to religion taken by Lenin and his ally Yaroslavsky was clear: the vast hoarded wealth of the priesthoods was subject to forfeit, and if preserved this was only temporarily as a political maneuver; the party and the public schools encouraged critical thinking as opposed to religious thinking; but the private religious affairs of a person were their own business. The persecution of Jews, Muslims, and (to a lesser extent) Catholics and Protestants that were a typical feature of capitalist Russia came to an end.
Of all the restrictions communism imposes upon the citizens, this one is among the most ridiculous and is deeply offensive. All enigmatic communist ideologists and leaders, with Marx and Lenin being the most outstanding ones, view religion as negative to human development. The truth is that communist regimes consider religion a threat to the established totalitarian authority, as religion has the power to organize people. Therefore, all the countries that follow the Marxist-Leninist dogma are atheistic by default and everyone who dares to think otherwise is subject to persecution. Actually, Catholic Cuba never banned religion, BUT you could not join the Communist party if you declared yourself religious. Vietnam’s Constitution allows freedom of worship, BUT not organized religion. In other words, God, in all His forms, is pretty much banned from entering the communist temple.
On the contrary, communists view religion as a threat to the ability of humans to think for themselves, a means of brainwashing people with lies inimical to their freedom, and an obstacle to progress. Joining the Communist Party of Cuba is a privilege, not a right, and at any rate their ban on religious believers was dropped many years ago. While worship is the province of the alleged soul, organized religion belongs to the realm of Caesar (who was the Pontifex Maximus) , and is properly regulated the same way fortune tellers and dice games are. No, secular Cuba has never banned religion, and neither has Vietnam or any other socialist country besides Albania. To do so would violate the clear calls by Marx, Lenin, Engels, Trotsky, and many other communist leaders for a state that is completely neutral with respect to the religious beliefs of the public. The communist approach to religion taken by Lenin and his ally Yaroslavsky was clear: the vast hoarded wealth of the priesthoods was subject to forfeit, and if preserved this was only temporarily as a political maneuver; the party and the public schools encouraged critical thinking as opposed to religious thinking; but the private religious affairs of a person were their own business. The persecution of Jews, Muslims, and (to a lesser extent) Catholics and Protestants that were a typical feature of capitalist Russia came to an end.
EatTheRich
President
6Gender Equality Is A Fallacy
In the glorious days of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, every aspect of life was saturated with images of robust looking women standing on a scaffolding and holding hammers, or reaping grain with a sickle. The communist propaganda enforced the image of the economically and socially active woman in order to emphasize her mission to sacrifice herself for the common good and for the “bright future” of the system. Formally, gender equality ruled. But, in fact, there were huge gender disproportions, such as gap in payment between men and women. The inspiring image of the communist virile female worker turned out to be a total flop. Women’s identities served the priorities of the totalitarian state at the expense of their self-realization. Put in simpler words, it pretty much sucked to be a girl in those years.
Perhaps they did not make as much progress as they should have, especially when the Stalinist counterrevolution solidified the disguise of the capitalist past as the socialist future. But the Soviet Union was the first country to legalize abortion, one of the first to legalize no-fault divorce, and one of the first to extend the right to vote to women. The first to put a woman in space too, and it awarded a greater percentage of Ph.D.'s in chemistry to women in 1962 than the U.S. did 50 years later. Married women were not allowed to open bank accounts in the U.S. until the 1970s, and marital rape was not banned in every state until the 2000s. This was never the situation in the USSR. The Chinese revolution eliminated foot binding and dowries. Romania had the world's first female foreign minister. The Soviet Union and E. Germany were among the first countries to legalize homosexuality. Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union had, respectively, the greatest and 2nd-greatest percentage of women employed.
As for the gender wage gap, in 1972 the USSR, Albania, N. Korea, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania all had lower gender wage gaps than the U.S., UK, or France.
In the glorious days of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, every aspect of life was saturated with images of robust looking women standing on a scaffolding and holding hammers, or reaping grain with a sickle. The communist propaganda enforced the image of the economically and socially active woman in order to emphasize her mission to sacrifice herself for the common good and for the “bright future” of the system. Formally, gender equality ruled. But, in fact, there were huge gender disproportions, such as gap in payment between men and women. The inspiring image of the communist virile female worker turned out to be a total flop. Women’s identities served the priorities of the totalitarian state at the expense of their self-realization. Put in simpler words, it pretty much sucked to be a girl in those years.
Perhaps they did not make as much progress as they should have, especially when the Stalinist counterrevolution solidified the disguise of the capitalist past as the socialist future. But the Soviet Union was the first country to legalize abortion, one of the first to legalize no-fault divorce, and one of the first to extend the right to vote to women. The first to put a woman in space too, and it awarded a greater percentage of Ph.D.'s in chemistry to women in 1962 than the U.S. did 50 years later. Married women were not allowed to open bank accounts in the U.S. until the 1970s, and marital rape was not banned in every state until the 2000s. This was never the situation in the USSR. The Chinese revolution eliminated foot binding and dowries. Romania had the world's first female foreign minister. The Soviet Union and E. Germany were among the first countries to legalize homosexuality. Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union had, respectively, the greatest and 2nd-greatest percentage of women employed.
As for the gender wage gap, in 1972 the USSR, Albania, N. Korea, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania all had lower gender wage gaps than the U.S., UK, or France.
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EatTheRich
President
5The Rich People Get Richer, The Poor Stay Poor
Remember the postulate that under the communist regime the goods are equally distributed among all members of society? It may be so on paper, but in reality the situation pretty much resembles George Orwell’s Animal Farm where “some animals are more equal than others.” In the second part of the 20th century, the poverty of the people in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries in Eastern Europe shattered the myth of the prosperous working class. In the 21st century, the People’s Republic of China is, in fact, the biggest exploiter of the working class in history. What is more, China has the second largest number of billionaires, being topped only by USA. The reason why this has been possible is that China, Vietnam, etc. aren’t actually communist in economic matters. Since the 1980s, most communist countries have been creating a form of state capitalism, which has enabled them to give way to global capitalism while still maintaining the one-party political system.
Indeed. The anticommunist road embarked on by Stalin and Mao ends in the atrocities of the Grozny Theater, Tiananmen Square, and the Chinese Olympics, and the workers are at long last terrorized into giving up their hard-won gains so that the money power can be restored.
Remember the postulate that under the communist regime the goods are equally distributed among all members of society? It may be so on paper, but in reality the situation pretty much resembles George Orwell’s Animal Farm where “some animals are more equal than others.” In the second part of the 20th century, the poverty of the people in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries in Eastern Europe shattered the myth of the prosperous working class. In the 21st century, the People’s Republic of China is, in fact, the biggest exploiter of the working class in history. What is more, China has the second largest number of billionaires, being topped only by USA. The reason why this has been possible is that China, Vietnam, etc. aren’t actually communist in economic matters. Since the 1980s, most communist countries have been creating a form of state capitalism, which has enabled them to give way to global capitalism while still maintaining the one-party political system.
Indeed. The anticommunist road embarked on by Stalin and Mao ends in the atrocities of the Grozny Theater, Tiananmen Square, and the Chinese Olympics, and the workers are at long last terrorized into giving up their hard-won gains so that the money power can be restored.
EatTheRich
President
4Marxist Economics Flushed Down The Toilet
With this one we are going into deep waters. But you don’t need to be a top-notch economist or a university professor to see where Karl Marx went totally wrong. Despite his monstrous intellect and broad philosophical thinking, his whole analysis was grounded on a conceptual fallacy, and that is: Value is an attribute of the object/thing itself. But nothing in this world, and we mean NOTHING at all has an intrinsic value. Value exists only in human minds. Now, picture over seven billion people living today – some of them will value diamonds the highest, while others – drinkable water. So, if we have to capture in one single sentence why communism is destined to fail, here it is: Marx was simply trying to analyze something that didn’t exist – true value.
A reader of this unfamiliar with Marx would be astonished to learn that Marx actually carefully distinguished use-value ... which depends on the objective needs, and to a lesser extent the subjective valuation, of the user ... and exchange-value, that is, market price relative to other commodities. The hypothesis, put forth by von Mises, that commodities' values do not reflect anything objective, is proudly declared unfalsifiable and naturally led to the efforts to control pricing by voluntarist means through the corporatist economics so conducive to fascism. Meanwhile Marx's labor theory of value, an improved version of the theory developed by Ricardo and Marx and accepted by the vast majority of mainstream economic thinkers before it became politically incorrect, was the foundation for his successful economic and political forecasts (declining rate of profit, growth of trusts, growth of capitalist bureaucracy, union and socialist organizing and politicization, growth of colonialism, outcomes of the 1848 revolutions, Austro-Sardinian War, American Civil War, and Crimean War, Dual Alliance, growth of German and French right and Russian left).
With this one we are going into deep waters. But you don’t need to be a top-notch economist or a university professor to see where Karl Marx went totally wrong. Despite his monstrous intellect and broad philosophical thinking, his whole analysis was grounded on a conceptual fallacy, and that is: Value is an attribute of the object/thing itself. But nothing in this world, and we mean NOTHING at all has an intrinsic value. Value exists only in human minds. Now, picture over seven billion people living today – some of them will value diamonds the highest, while others – drinkable water. So, if we have to capture in one single sentence why communism is destined to fail, here it is: Marx was simply trying to analyze something that didn’t exist – true value.
A reader of this unfamiliar with Marx would be astonished to learn that Marx actually carefully distinguished use-value ... which depends on the objective needs, and to a lesser extent the subjective valuation, of the user ... and exchange-value, that is, market price relative to other commodities. The hypothesis, put forth by von Mises, that commodities' values do not reflect anything objective, is proudly declared unfalsifiable and naturally led to the efforts to control pricing by voluntarist means through the corporatist economics so conducive to fascism. Meanwhile Marx's labor theory of value, an improved version of the theory developed by Ricardo and Marx and accepted by the vast majority of mainstream economic thinkers before it became politically incorrect, was the foundation for his successful economic and political forecasts (declining rate of profit, growth of trusts, growth of capitalist bureaucracy, union and socialist organizing and politicization, growth of colonialism, outcomes of the 1848 revolutions, Austro-Sardinian War, American Civil War, and Crimean War, Dual Alliance, growth of German and French right and Russian left).
EatTheRich
President
3The Missing Middle Class Paradox
OK, here is how modern society functions (in case you haven’t noticed yourself). There are three major classes – upper, middle, and lower. Those on the top are the wealthiest ones. The lower class, on the other hand, is constantly trying to make the two ends meet. The middle class is the pacifier between the other two. And if it happens to be missing, blood is shed. Although communist propagandists loudly proclaim that class struggle has been eliminated, what they really do is keep it going. Which, of course, is understandable because every group of people that is in charge enjoys its power and would hardly let go of it. By holding fast to their power, the communist leaders intentionally separate the population into two classes only – they, themselves represent the elite, and everyone else falls into the group of the disadvantaged lower class.
If the "communist leaders" are a class, that is, a group with de jure property rights that can be passed down from one generation to the next, then one has, as in China or Russia today, a capitalist regime, as noted in this article's point 5. And if a middle class has not been built in the meantime, that regime will be, as with Russia today, as unstable and autocratic as they come. But "The Richest" won't be criticizing that regime ... no, they save their ire for places where the poorest class IS, through the auspices of the state (one way or the other), constantly placed into direct confrontation with the richest, and (potentially) via successful class warfare constructing a future where classes have been abolished, along with the private property that makes them and the bureaucratic state possible.
OK, here is how modern society functions (in case you haven’t noticed yourself). There are three major classes – upper, middle, and lower. Those on the top are the wealthiest ones. The lower class, on the other hand, is constantly trying to make the two ends meet. The middle class is the pacifier between the other two. And if it happens to be missing, blood is shed. Although communist propagandists loudly proclaim that class struggle has been eliminated, what they really do is keep it going. Which, of course, is understandable because every group of people that is in charge enjoys its power and would hardly let go of it. By holding fast to their power, the communist leaders intentionally separate the population into two classes only – they, themselves represent the elite, and everyone else falls into the group of the disadvantaged lower class.
If the "communist leaders" are a class, that is, a group with de jure property rights that can be passed down from one generation to the next, then one has, as in China or Russia today, a capitalist regime, as noted in this article's point 5. And if a middle class has not been built in the meantime, that regime will be, as with Russia today, as unstable and autocratic as they come. But "The Richest" won't be criticizing that regime ... no, they save their ire for places where the poorest class IS, through the auspices of the state (one way or the other), constantly placed into direct confrontation with the richest, and (potentially) via successful class warfare constructing a future where classes have been abolished, along with the private property that makes them and the bureaucratic state possible.
EatTheRich
President
2Devastating Natural Environments
As things don’t usually look very bright for any communist country’s economy, the ruling elite try everything to compensate for the deficiency in the economic sector. And we mean, EVERYTHING, no matter the cost. In the 1960s, two major rivers were diverted for irrigation purpose on the territory of USSR. As a result, the Aral Sea, the former fourth largest lake in the world, which these rivers used to feed, has shrunk to ten percent of its normal size.
Just ten years ago, China became the largest source of carbon emissions. Daily, we use hundreds of cheap items produced in China. We may not care about the conditions they were produced in, but China’s quest for high production levels above all poisons the people of the republic. And the whole process is also highly toxic for the rest of the world. Literally!
Unlike the capitalist world, which has a stellar environmental record.
China, largely due to the powerful unions and labor party left over from the socialist period, has been considerably more aggressive about cutting emissions than, say, the U.S. But the production at the expense of the environment criticized by Marx (one of the world's first environmentalists) is the price paid for marginalizing the communist left by substituting capitalist-roader "production czars" for mobilizing the creative voluntary cooperation of the masses. Meanwhile Cuba, the government of which is more willing to flirt with communism, is the only country with development rated sustainable by the World Wildlife Fund ... and this with the highest standard of living in Latin America, despite an unprecedented barrage of relentless hostility by the most powerful empire in history.
As things don’t usually look very bright for any communist country’s economy, the ruling elite try everything to compensate for the deficiency in the economic sector. And we mean, EVERYTHING, no matter the cost. In the 1960s, two major rivers were diverted for irrigation purpose on the territory of USSR. As a result, the Aral Sea, the former fourth largest lake in the world, which these rivers used to feed, has shrunk to ten percent of its normal size.
Just ten years ago, China became the largest source of carbon emissions. Daily, we use hundreds of cheap items produced in China. We may not care about the conditions they were produced in, but China’s quest for high production levels above all poisons the people of the republic. And the whole process is also highly toxic for the rest of the world. Literally!
Unlike the capitalist world, which has a stellar environmental record.
China, largely due to the powerful unions and labor party left over from the socialist period, has been considerably more aggressive about cutting emissions than, say, the U.S. But the production at the expense of the environment criticized by Marx (one of the world's first environmentalists) is the price paid for marginalizing the communist left by substituting capitalist-roader "production czars" for mobilizing the creative voluntary cooperation of the masses. Meanwhile Cuba, the government of which is more willing to flirt with communism, is the only country with development rated sustainable by the World Wildlife Fund ... and this with the highest standard of living in Latin America, despite an unprecedented barrage of relentless hostility by the most powerful empire in history.
EatTheRich
President
1You Have Almost Zero Civil Rights
Most of the above entries are related by the premise that basic human freedoms and rights are more or less violated under communist regime. This one, however, is particularly about the drastic violation of civil rights. To start with, the idea of individual freedom is incompatible with the communist ideology. Speech rights, as well as the rights to freely access information and to protest, are as a rule refused by the ruling class to the civilians. Besides, citizens were given no other option but to vote for the only political party there is, which is the Communist party. The paradox here is that they have to fake voluntary voting, which, you have to agree, kind of kills the fun of the whole idea of abusing civil rights.
Individual freedom is at the heart of the communist ideology, and it can only become a reality when hunger and homelessness are no longer monkeys on our backs demanding to be fed by whatever means the wealthy decide fit to employ (use) us doing for them.
There are multiparty elections in China, Vietnam, and N. Korea, and formerly in E. Germany, Albania, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Also in the USSR in the early years, before conditions of Civil War made a one-party system (which greased the skids for Stalinist counterrevolution) the only means of preventing the overthrow of the government by the enemies of democracy, and in Nicaragua under the Communist Sandinistas, who gave up power after moving away from communism under the influence of Gorbachev and Jesse Jackson and being voted out of office. All elections in Cuba are nonpartisan, there is no requirement for Communist Party membership to be nominated, nominations are by democratic vote in mass meetings, and non-party members are elected in every election.
Cuba is the only country which (before this year, when the extent of the counterrevolution there was registered by a qualitative difference) never used the military to break up a demonstration ... and in fact its government has organized some of the largest protests in the history of the world. Free speech is guaranteed under its constitution as is true of many other socialist countries in history. And many dissidents, from Assata Shakur to Robert F. Williams to Matilde Zimmermann to Huey P. Newton, have fled there to escape persecution in the U.S.
As for the "right to freely access information," the most educated countries in the world are the socialist countries. When any capitalist country matches N. Korea's record literacy rate, their propagandists can start talking about depriving people of information.
Most of the above entries are related by the premise that basic human freedoms and rights are more or less violated under communist regime. This one, however, is particularly about the drastic violation of civil rights. To start with, the idea of individual freedom is incompatible with the communist ideology. Speech rights, as well as the rights to freely access information and to protest, are as a rule refused by the ruling class to the civilians. Besides, citizens were given no other option but to vote for the only political party there is, which is the Communist party. The paradox here is that they have to fake voluntary voting, which, you have to agree, kind of kills the fun of the whole idea of abusing civil rights.
Individual freedom is at the heart of the communist ideology, and it can only become a reality when hunger and homelessness are no longer monkeys on our backs demanding to be fed by whatever means the wealthy decide fit to employ (use) us doing for them.
There are multiparty elections in China, Vietnam, and N. Korea, and formerly in E. Germany, Albania, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Also in the USSR in the early years, before conditions of Civil War made a one-party system (which greased the skids for Stalinist counterrevolution) the only means of preventing the overthrow of the government by the enemies of democracy, and in Nicaragua under the Communist Sandinistas, who gave up power after moving away from communism under the influence of Gorbachev and Jesse Jackson and being voted out of office. All elections in Cuba are nonpartisan, there is no requirement for Communist Party membership to be nominated, nominations are by democratic vote in mass meetings, and non-party members are elected in every election.
Cuba is the only country which (before this year, when the extent of the counterrevolution there was registered by a qualitative difference) never used the military to break up a demonstration ... and in fact its government has organized some of the largest protests in the history of the world. Free speech is guaranteed under its constitution as is true of many other socialist countries in history. And many dissidents, from Assata Shakur to Robert F. Williams to Matilde Zimmermann to Huey P. Newton, have fled there to escape persecution in the U.S.
As for the "right to freely access information," the most educated countries in the world are the socialist countries. When any capitalist country matches N. Korea's record literacy rate, their propagandists can start talking about depriving people of information.
Zam-Zam
Senator
Lessons from a century of communism
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, which led to the establishment of a communist regime in Russia and eventually in many other nations around the world. It is an appropriate time to remember the vast tide of oppression, tyranny, and mass murder that communist regimes unleashed upon the world. While historians and others have documented numerous communist atrocities, much of the public remains unaware of their enormous scale. It is also a good time to consider what lessons we can learn from this horrendous history.
I. A Record of Mass Murder and Oppression.
Collectively, communist states killed as many as 100 million people, more than all other repressive regimes combined during the same time period. By far the biggest toll arose from communist efforts to collectivize agriculture and eliminate independent property-owning peasants. In China alone, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward led to a man-made famine in which as many as 45 million people perished – the single biggest episode of mass murder in all of world history. In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin’s collectivization – which served as a model for similar efforts in China and elsewhere – took some 6 to 10 million lives. Mass famines occurred in many other communist regimes, ranging from North Korea to Ethiopia. In each of these cases, communist rulers were well aware that their policies were causing mass death, and in each they persisted nonetheless, often because they considered the extermination of “Kulak” peasants a feature rather than a bug.
Complete text: Lessons from a century of communism - The Washington Post
There is no defense for communism, other than to lie about it.
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, which led to the establishment of a communist regime in Russia and eventually in many other nations around the world. It is an appropriate time to remember the vast tide of oppression, tyranny, and mass murder that communist regimes unleashed upon the world. While historians and others have documented numerous communist atrocities, much of the public remains unaware of their enormous scale. It is also a good time to consider what lessons we can learn from this horrendous history.
I. A Record of Mass Murder and Oppression.
Collectively, communist states killed as many as 100 million people, more than all other repressive regimes combined during the same time period. By far the biggest toll arose from communist efforts to collectivize agriculture and eliminate independent property-owning peasants. In China alone, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward led to a man-made famine in which as many as 45 million people perished – the single biggest episode of mass murder in all of world history. In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin’s collectivization – which served as a model for similar efforts in China and elsewhere – took some 6 to 10 million lives. Mass famines occurred in many other communist regimes, ranging from North Korea to Ethiopia. In each of these cases, communist rulers were well aware that their policies were causing mass death, and in each they persisted nonetheless, often because they considered the extermination of “Kulak” peasants a feature rather than a bug.
Complete text: Lessons from a century of communism - The Washington Post
There is no defense for communism, other than to lie about it.
EatTheRich
President
No attempt to address the detailed refutation of the first propaganda hit piece you cut and paste … just another cut and paste reiterating the same nonsense, when I have demonstrated that when you put it in context it becomes clear that the advance of communism has always saved lives and increased freedom compared with the capitalist baseline, while the retreat of the communist advance and revival of capitalistic methods is associated with the atrocities for which you blame the “communist” leaders whose attack on communism led to them.
That's pathetic. The advance of communism in all cases is by way of death. Millions of them. Downplaying is simply pathetic
