“Museum of Communism†- "WOOT"!
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Willmeister
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Communism was driven by equality. The leadership of any system rarely is. Power structures never really believe this sh*t they're peddling anyway, since power serves itself. They just tell us what we want to hear, then set about subverting it in the shadows to further their own material gain.
It's much easier to demonize Nazism anyway, and it really doesn't revolve around anti-Semitism. Why would the Christian world care about dead Jews (and others)? It was the idea that modern technology was to better human life, not as a means for wholesale decimation. The Nazi death industry, which the Communists never implemented (mass starvation was their method), was a very rational undertaking. You can see it in the paperwork. They even knew what they were doing was unacceptable, because if they did, they would not have hidden their actions behind misleading labels. I think the modern world reacts to Nazi crimes because, I think, people feel the Nazis betrayed the idea of technology. You can look back on the exstatic behaviour people had for technology. Many believed that technology was innately 'good'; the Nazis reminded us that technology is neither moral or immoral; it's amoral. Like any other tool, it depends on the (genuine) intentions of the user.
Also, the Christian world tends to see itself as the only civilized society on the planet, even today though not as bad as 50 or 100 years ago. I think the Nazi atrocities really were a wakeup call for many people.
Just guessing here (as I've never read any of their works), but I suspect that Marx and Engels didn't advocate the mass slaughter of their own people as carried out by the aforementioned Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot etc. In fact, their ideas were intended to help the working man.
The slaughter of millions under communist rule had nothing to do with communism as a theory but rather was due to the people in power who were, to put it bluntly, murdering bastards.
Communism as a theory is not too bad in my opinion but history has shown that it is unworkable in practice due to the usual flaws in human nature.
The slaughter of millions under communist rule had nothing to do with communism as a theory but rather was due to the people in power who were, to put it bluntly, murdering bastards.
Communism as a theory is not too bad in my opinion but history has shown that it is unworkable in practice due to the usual flaws in human nature.
Legion said:
I fully agree. Communisms in of itself is an ideology that is not any more "evil" then let's say capitalism. Unlike capitalism, however, it has tiny flaw: IT DOES NOT WORK AND NEVER WILL. The attempts to "make it work" have cost tens if not hundreds of million of people's lives. When that many people die in the name of ideology it deserved negative connotations, no matter how good/peaceful/whatever it is in theory.
Willmeister said:
You've got it exactly backwards. The nazis were naturalists, romanticized purity and nature, derived from the anti-Enligthenment irrational Romanticism of Germany (is it a coincidence that both Nazism and the Green movement started there?). Nazi's associated Jews with urban/modernism, and they even tried a "back to rural/nature" "rurban" policy in the early years. Germans believed that the german people had a special bond with nature. When Nazi military industrialization caused harm to the environment, they blamed it on the Jews.
Nazis would have been in perfect agreement with many of the modern Green causes. Preserving forests, anti-GMO (yes, Nazis would abhor messing with the purity of the gene pool by transfering foreign genes. Eugenics was about breeding out the impuries caused by miscegenation) Nazis were anti Change, pro Animal rights, anti-hydroelectric power, etc. Many early Nazi thinkers authored pro-conservation essays, e.g. Heidegger.
When Germany annexed Poland, Himmler issued a decree to preserve nature when German citizens moved in.
It is a typical plot of leftists to try and associate urbanism, industrialism, and technology with the Nazis, but Nazi idealogy was firmly rooted in naturalism. The green movement's arch-conservative anti-change belief system has the same roots in german romanticism/naturalism as Nazism did.
Nazi's were in many ways, the first real political environmentalists.
Taking this discussion slightly off topic briefly, I must admit I've never encountered the term 'leftist' before anywhere apart from this board! :?
Is this a term common in other parts of the world? I've can't say I've ever heard it before in the UK. Thinking about it, I suppose in this country we say someone is left-wing or right-wing in their opinions. Is 'rightist' ever used in the US?
Carry on with the rest of the discussion now.
Is this a term common in other parts of the world? I've can't say I've ever heard it before in the UK. Thinking about it, I suppose in this country we say someone is left-wing or right-wing in their opinions. Is 'rightist' ever used in the US?
Carry on with the rest of the discussion now.
Mariner said:
hmm, never gave it much thought really, just seems fitting. Anyhow it is a fairly common term used to discribe left wingers.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=leftist&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
I have seen capitalism, democracy and other forms of government fail all the time.
In Australia we run a democracy. It has failed on so many occasions I could throw up. No form of government has ever worked.
How many people suffer under republicans? How many suffer under democrats?
There will always be someone suffering under any form of government, regardless of numbers, it just goes to show that no form of government works like it is stated in theory.
So hence, they all fail and always will fail. Attempts to make any form of government to work has taken its toll on citizens.
I don't even want to state how many times this has happened in history. It isn't a communist only thing either.
In Australia we run a democracy. It has failed on so many occasions I could throw up. No form of government has ever worked.
How many people suffer under republicans? How many suffer under democrats?
There will always be someone suffering under any form of government, regardless of numbers, it just goes to show that no form of government works like it is stated in theory.
So hence, they all fail and always will fail. Attempts to make any form of government to work has taken its toll on citizens.
Geeforcer said:
I don't even want to state how many times this has happened in history. It isn't a communist only thing either.
Willmeister
Newcomer
Is this leftist plot any more typical of rightwingers attempting to associate granola eaters and tree huggers to other undesirables, from Nazis to Communists? Are you not trying to hitch anti-GMO protestors to the Nazi bandwagon? Are you attempting some 'image transfer', as they call it in the PR industry?
You're definitely wrong here about the Nazis promoting 'conservation'. The German factory towns were cesspools of soot and garbage before, during, and after the Nazis. Germany was to take it's rightful place by any means necessary; that was their primary obsession.
Of course the Nazis weren't going to 'fess up about any pollution they were causing. No power structure will ever address true costs while they're peddling something. Who wants to see pollution on a poster? They want to see happy kids playing in nice green open areas...
Naziism was about power, nor urbanism, industrialization, nationalism, racism, purity or what have you. The very early Nazi party (the Nationalists) had little time for any anti-Semitism. Those -isms I mentioned above are just the public face of the true prize which is control. By associating yourself with a deep-seated desire the populace has, the easier it is to get them to shed their power. You just have to generate the perception that you share their wants and desires and they'll let you lead them, even over a cliff.
As for the idea of just how glorified industrialization was, you really only have to look at the rhetoric of both the Axis and Allies. Together, they both glorified industry in most of the propaganda that didn't involve the military. Industrialization was new, exciting and held promise for a better future. Nazis believed in it, capitalists believed in it, Marxists believed in it. Heck, you'd be hard pressed to find ANYONE who cannot see the merits of industrialization. The standard bearers of any ideology are like used car salesmen, they won't tell you the problems of a car without serious effort. Any bad news doesn't go well with their utopian sales pitches. Again, tell the public what they want to hear, and they'll let you lead them.
The Germans were romantic, I'll give you that, with all their tales of Teutonic Knights, but that was just for show. But I'd argue the British were even more Romantic because Germans have always been much more utilitarian than the most other Western Europeans. Just compare German and French architecture, for example.
Movies like Triumph of the Will, their proclamations of love were little more than parlor tricks to keep the rot from boiling over too much into the public conciousness, lest dissension be allowed to increase. The Nazis were always probably on the lookout for threats and it is historical fact that they cut it out sharply. They genuinely knew the power of a mob. There is nothing of substance in Triumph at all, and that's the way it had to be. They used King Learean professions to instill just enough doubt to create public inaction. We can easily see this now with hindsight, but it's happening today as well, but just done in a much more polished manner.
They were 'for' any policy which would preserve their power, that's almost a given if you take a step back and look at any power system ever devised. They licked their fingers and stuck it into the air to see the general direction of the crowd and began to work with what they were given. So, all the while, they may have been preaching 'conservatism', they were paving over their forests and devoting time and effort to large scale death, but on the other side of town, with great fanfare, they promoted the glories of an employed and productive workforce as they key to a prosperous future for Germany.
Again, the modern view of technology was very much the same as the medieval world saw Christianity, and that was inheriently good. Certain writers challenged this idea such as Mary Shelly and Aldus Huxley. In the case of Huxley, his dysutopia was largely ignored by the mainstream until after the war. The Holocaust was the modern equivalent to the Crusades. Something that was largely inevitable. I'm genuinely torn by the issue regarding this whole idea of 'inevitability'. But that's something I don't want to get into.
Oh, as for Himmler's policy of 'protecting' Poland. That was little more than a sham excuse to remove people of their property that the Nazis covetted. A somewhat legimate pretense for their actions they didn't want people to see in it's true colours. As dubious as it was, stunts like this generally works to prevent people from making it a long-term annoyance for the elite. Wars and invasions are all about theft, almost never about ideology.
Basically, in a nutshell, the Nazis told the populace what they wanted to hear in order to get into power. They used the truth, lies, whatever, to do it.
Any ideology that forms the basis of some kind of power structure can be put into a museum with its historical fauilures and successes. And they should. I like museums and they are very educational...
Museum of capitalism room#1: Nestle. In the 70's and 80's after developping the babay formula 'similac' the companies African division took advantage of lack of education and common knowledge and gave out free baby milk to millions of mothers but only for the first few months until the mothers own breast were unable to produce new milk (due to a natural reaction to not feeding a baby). The mothers were then asked to pay for the similac but due to the very low incomes in those countries in the tune of about 2-300$ a year at the time most were unable to buy. Millions of babies starved to death and a worldwide boycott of Nestle was undertaken by activists... Nestle apologized and fired its african executives. About 2 years later it was found to have done the same thing again with some other 3rd world countries...
Room#2: GM sues the US gov in the 1960's over the bombing during ww2 of its German Opel truck plants and wins with accrued interest the cost of rebuilding them after the war. Tho the trucks were used to ferry ammunition and supplies for the Nazies the courts still found the US gov liable for damages incurred to the US based corp as GM argued it was not responsible for the use or misuse of their plants by the nazis at the time...
Tho it'd be more accurate to describe it as a museum of corporatism which communism was a form of... Quite a few nice books on the subject to provide more such horrors...
Museum of capitalism room#1: Nestle. In the 70's and 80's after developping the babay formula 'similac' the companies African division took advantage of lack of education and common knowledge and gave out free baby milk to millions of mothers but only for the first few months until the mothers own breast were unable to produce new milk (due to a natural reaction to not feeding a baby). The mothers were then asked to pay for the similac but due to the very low incomes in those countries in the tune of about 2-300$ a year at the time most were unable to buy. Millions of babies starved to death and a worldwide boycott of Nestle was undertaken by activists... Nestle apologized and fired its african executives. About 2 years later it was found to have done the same thing again with some other 3rd world countries...
Room#2: GM sues the US gov in the 1960's over the bombing during ww2 of its German Opel truck plants and wins with accrued interest the cost of rebuilding them after the war. Tho the trucks were used to ferry ammunition and supplies for the Nazies the courts still found the US gov liable for damages incurred to the US based corp as GM argued it was not responsible for the use or misuse of their plants by the nazis at the time...
Tho it'd be more accurate to describe it as a museum of corporatism which communism was a form of... Quite a few nice books on the subject to provide more such horrors...
Willmeister said:
You were the one who tried to associate industrialization and technology with the Nazis . But like previous threads, you start with an outrageous claim, and then back off when confronted. (e.g. Enron vs Violence thread) The Nazis, like the Japanese, British, French, Americans, and everyone else were all into industrialization, technology, and science. Your statement would be visibly asburd if you simply substitute "Shintoists" for "Nazis"
I should have invoked Godwin's law on you, since it is hard for people to discuss Nazis rationally, especially when they offer up the typical preconceived notions. Nazi and Fascist are throwaway swear words often for leftists to assign to people that disagree with them, e.g. Republicans.
Your lack of knowledge of the nazification german conservation movement is telling..
The Historian said:
Are you also aware that Nazis passed anti vivisection laws, some of the first animal rights directives, and disallowed the transplanation of foreign plants onto german soil, paralleling green philsophy today? And how do you explain volkisch idealogy, which had a heavy component of body purity from the artificial and sanctity of the land? Ring any bells, you know, the modern nutcase greens who scream about "toxins" in their bodies, rever the ecology on an almost spiritual level, and eat ridiculous supplements from health food stores? Don't you know about the Reich's directives to industry to be environmentally sensitive?
Whether the top of the Nazi party was paying lip service to environmentalist beliefs of their electorate, or they really belived it is irrelevent. The german people themselves were conservationists, and they formed the basis of the country during that time, and of the Nazi party.
You can't associate a movement as large and complex the Nazis with a simple concept, "power". It doesn't boil down like that. These things develop over a long period of time from a diverse collection of human desires and fears, and it is a mistake to try to simplify it down, because by oversimplifying it, you fail to understand it, and stop it from repeating.
Saying it was just about power is like saying it was about evil. A simple minded George Bush level black and white view of the world.
Because only an IDIOT could not see the OVERWHELMING merits of it. And industrialization isn't "sold" to be as an an idealogy. People are offered products to buy and jobs to work it in factories.
Do you really think industrialists went around to the average person and said "Hey, there's this new concept called industrialization. It has these features. Do you want to join the pro-industrialist party?" An enpreneur simply said "I am opening up a new plant, workers wanted"
Philosophical pieces are written afterwords, usually by non-industrialists. Same with the internet boom. I was on the internet from 1987. No one talked about IT, "New Economy", etc. By the time people started talking about "new economyism", the new economy was already here, and almost gone.
These categorizations are done in retrospect.
France was the last place Romanticism took hold. They were Enlightenment holdouts. Although Romanticism took hold in Britian as well, in Germany it had a decidely naturalistic and nationalistic bent, whereas the British equivalent was more individualist.
Technology isn't a philosophy to which people have to "believe in". It is an arbitrary category into which people lump any new physical creation that has never existed before. When people invent new ideas, we call it philosophy, science, and mathematics. When they invent new perceptions, we call it art, and when they invent new physical devices, we call it technology. Your statement is like saying people belive "art is inherently good" and "knowledge is inherently good". Neither has been strictly believed since antiquity.
Frankenstein to me demonstrated the opposite of what people traditionally think it means. The rejection of the monster by its creator (and in some versions) by the towns people because of the way it looks, because it is a new creation, is the real tragedy, and the cause of the monster's violence.
Frankenstein to me symbolizes people's IGNORANCE and INTOLERANCE of diversity and of the unknown. And it is perfect that greens call GMO Frankenfood, because their rejection of it, but acceptance of hybridization, transplanation, grafting, and other agricultural improvements merely symbolizes their profound ignorance of biotechnology.
So you basically admit that the populace, electorate, and bulk of the lower levels of the party believed in environmental conservation then. Even if you claim the party's platform was "lipservice", the fact is, the German people at the time were profoundly associated with Green ideas today.
Greens today are profoundly conservative, afraid of change, and yearn for determinism in the world, instead of uncertainty. Purification is a common theme. All the same old irrationalities.
Your claims about industrialism and technology merely represent a childish view of them and other people's viewpoints -- that they are "belief systems" (they are not), and that other people aren't capable of seeing them in anything but binary terms: good and bad.
Apparently not many of you even know what Communism is. Unfortunately, few do these days, to our potential future regret.
Communism is a political philosophy whose axioms can and have been used to rationalize the most horrible injustices in human history. It is based on the marriage of two social philosophies: materialism and the Hegelian dialectic.
To oversimplify, materialism is the belief that human beings are nothing but organic machines, with no intrinsic value other than what each is able to produce and consume. The opposing belief, idealism, comprising most Western religions, individualism, and even capitalism, holds that each human has intrinsic value and certain individual, inalienable rights.
The Hegelian dialectic is the German sociologist Frederick Hegel's theory of social change. It postulates that social change occurs via the meeting of the thesis and the antithesis. The thesis is generally a widely held belief, or way of doing things. The antithesis is a new, competing paradigm. The antithesis rises to challenge the thesis, overcomes it in a violent synthesis, and becomes the new thesis. According to Communism, capitalism is the thesis, socialism is the antithesis, and pure communism is what socialism will evolve into once capitalism is overcome.
So far, so mostly harmless. Communism appears to be a roadmap to a better world in which people no longer work for their own benefit but for the benefit of everyone except themselves. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," would the fruits of each person's labor be distributed.
However, it is human nature for some people to want to work only for themselves and not for others. This is especially true among those people who are able to produce a great deal more wealth than the average human. Why would such people subscribe to Communism when they can significantly enrich themselves on their own?
Such people pose the largest problem for Communism. How do you create a greedless society with such people in it? Simple. You use similar methods to those of animal husbandry to eradicate such people from your society. For example, on a cow farm, cows that catch mad cow disease are instantly killed and removed in order to protect the rest of the cows from catching that disease. And in communist society, people who are diseased with capitalism are dealt with similarly. If they are deemed to be too diseased, and too likely to spread their disease through the rest of society, they are murdered outright. Others may be deemed diseased, but not highly contagious, so they are put to work in labor camps where every last ounce of productivity is extracted from them before they die. Finally, some may be deemed diseased but "curable", so they are brainwashed using methods of pyschological programming originally developed by Pavlov in his experimentation with dogs.
Materialist philosophy comes into play here because it allows the communists to rationalize the murders of countless people who don't appear to 'fit' their society. According to materialism, human beings no more or less valuable than cattle, dogs, or even fruitflies. We are all just organic machines, and if some of us are faulty or diseased, we must simply be disposed of to prevent our malady from spreading to the rest.
This is the true horror of communism. It is not "driven by equality", it is not "unworkable", and it is by no means ammoral. It is the systematic, scientific dehumanization of the human race, and rationalization of mass murder. So, when you say that the ideology of communism is not evil, you say that with no knowledge of how that idealogy is put into practice by the communists.
Willmeister
Newcomer
How did I associate Enron with violence? Please elaborate. I was comparing one type of crime that might impact a few, to crimes that impact millions directly and virtually instantly. I also took the precaution of excluding violent crime. People are so scared of being robbed by men in ski masks they don't realize how they're being robbed by men in three-piece suits...
It would be, but note that I did not. To me, the pursuit of industrialization by those above is a statement of fact, not opinion. Industrialization was used to achieve certain policy goals.
I actually agree about Godwin's Law, but the Nazis are such a good example of 'say one thing, do another.' It's also much less obsure. Everyone knows Hitler. How many people are up on the Five-Year plans in the early Soviet Union?
Like the term 'Liberal' maybe...
You actual believe the professions of love from the Nazis? So what if they passed 'laws'? They were autocrats; if they had a law that interfered, they'd just remove it or simply even just ignore it (which is what they more than likely did).
Their ascent to power was a total LIE. Then they gassed and/or killed millions of people, basically tried to cover up their actions with clever vocabulary, and you believe anything they say? C'mon. Their actions betray their words... Again, if you lie once, how can anyone believe any word you say. And when I mean lie, I don't mean, a kind of 'oops, I never knew that' type of lie, I'm talking bold-face, look-you-in-the-eye lie.
The Nazis could say anything they wanted to, they could lie any time they wanted to. Their lies made their rule possible, which is why I always base my criticism of the Nazis on what they did, not what they said.
Sure, the Nazis passed popular laws. Bush passed new directives gutting emission standards for polluters while still calling it a crackdown; I can't think of a better word at the moment. Nazis do one thing. Nazis did another. A hallmark of any politcal regime that cares only for itself. It's shows disregard for the public weal. It's a betrayal. And it's this sense of betrayal that I argued that is behind the hatred of the Nazis. They took tools that we assumed would only produce good and perverted it. I think the Holocaust has had a much larger impact on our collective concience than people assume.
Yes, I did. If Hitler were alive today, he'd no doubt be a Skinny Puppy fan.
Hitler was a vegetarian and thought meat was cruel. He was also a health nut. Cruelty to animals: bad. Cruelty to humans: acceptable. It's like Hitler was refusing to see this. I really think he had to have taken steps to avoid coming to this rather obvious conclusion...So, the Nazis lied about policy, but that's irrelevant. Clinton lies about a blowjob between consenting adults, but that's not irrelevant. Of course, any lie is relevant. You open that door just a crack with a single tiny lie and it forever haunts you... I think these lies go directly to the heart of credibility.
Nazis were about power. All revolutions and realizable (excluding true anarchy) political structures are about power. This is the state of the world...
I have to disagree. Everything usual ends up as ideology because anything can be used by clever people. I think it's a general flaw in mankind. People are by nature lazy and will follow any banner that requires that person to do as little as possible.
It's not a proper philosphy, it's more of a conception, but the masses had the same view medieval Christians had of religion. Technology bumped religon from it's thrown because it was more concrete. It made superstition irrelevant. You didn't have to dance for rain because math showed you how to irrigate...
But it is sold, as ideologies are. To have to have people buy into your arguments. So in order to get them to support you, you have to basically sell your arguments.
We know quite a bit about biotechnology and all the half-truths and manipulations that are being used, but that's another thread. And if one company gets caught playing fast and loose with the truth, it smears all the others whether deserved or not. I believe biotechnology is largely just another quick-fix in our quick-fix-obsessed society. Virtually everywhere, there is no lack of food. Most of the time (Russia and India are two good example) it's poor distribution and infrastructure rather than production.
You haven't been paying very close attention to 'Green' platforms have you? They talk of change all the f*cking time. You're making them sound Amish when they're clearly not. You can always count on people to bring up points people may ignore or just miss.
Humans for millenia have always lived in societies that speak of good versus evil. It's a hard habit to break. It's also requires less effort to view the world in 'good' and 'evil' terms. Duality is common in virtually all societies, so we all can't be 'childish' now can we? Or are you simply above the din of the rabble?
I've been following this writer (Radley Balko) for two years now, he's one of my favorites and I've talked to him on his site before. Great guy, very smart fellow. His site is http://www.theagitator.com.
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