Reddit reviews The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

>As a result, "the security situation in Afghanistan has worsened to its lowest point since the toppling of the Taliban a decade ago and attacks on aid workers are at unprecedented levels."

False.

I'm assuming that Chomsky hasn't been to Afghanistan. I have, multiple times. The peak of violence was in 2007. And the Afghan people agree. (PDF link, page 24)

>The people of Afghanistan, teetering on the edge of starvation in September 2001, were deprived of much of the food and medical assistance from international aid that was keeping them alive because Coalition airstrikes destroyed infrastructure and made travel unsafe for aid trucks.

False.

There are fewer babies dying now, more hospitals than since before the invasion, and the average life expectancy has risen by almost 20 years.

>Chomsky laments that the US government largely dismissed these human-rights problems in its quest to "secure our interests."

False.

Hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people have been sent to Afghanistan to rebuild the medical, telecommunications, energy, and civil infrastructures of Afghanistan. The US didn't destroy it, decades of war with the Soviet Union and its subsequent neglect by the Taliban did. The reason you didn't see "Shock n'Awe 2001!™" with the US invasion was because there was hardly any infrastructure left to destroy.

>Chomsky was one of the few people in the United States at that time to publicly talk about how deeply the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in arming and training the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

False.

This is, and was, common knowledge. It was widely reported in the press in the 80s.

And before anyone goes on about how the CIA created Bin Laden, let me just put out that both "The Black Book of Communism" (Courtois, ed, 1997) and "The Sword and the Shield" (Mitrokhin, 1992) note that most of the ideological underpinnings of the modern-day jihad were put into place by the Soviet Union's attempts to eradicate Islam through violence, and that any US aid (none of which went to Bin Laden) was merely a confidence-boosting side show to the main conflict.

Not to mention the fact that in addition to the US, almost all of Europe, Saudi Arabia, and China, also gave aid to the Afghan Mujahideen.

>For example, the United States recently risked a major international conflict with a nuclear-armed nation, Pakistan, by assassinating an influential figure in one of its major cities.

If you think we are not already engaged in an international conflict with parts of the Pakistan government, I have a bridge to sell you.

But I suppose I'm just pissing into the wind.

This is the glorious Chomsky, after all. He is trapped so many decades back in political reality that he is probably still writing checks to the Sandinista National Liberation Front .

Seriously, read some history. Claiming that the violence attributed to socialism is a reaction from capitalists who are attempting to preserve the system is a vague claim that is unsupported by history. Again, read some real history.

May I suggest some reading for you, or anyone else interested in the matter?

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression -- by Mark Kramer, Jonathan Murphy, Stephane Courtois, and Jean-Louis Panne

Let History Judge -- by Roy Medvedev and George Shriver

I don't have any connection to Amazon (for which there are alternatives) and don't get paid to shill for them.

The economics in it is totally obsolete, still "labor theory of value", pre-marginal analysis, e.g. leaving as a mystery why diamonds have a higher price than water, even though they have a much lower value for staying alive.

For the "development of thought" it is significant, but you should read it in historical context, getting the thoughts that led into it, or you'll miss the boat in that regard. For that consider getting Mark Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect, which works through the entire chain of development of economic thinking. If you are a student it is in the library. (Or even if you aren't!)

Oh, and for the practical after-effects of the "masterpiece", do also read The Black Book of Communism.

> what they've become, considering their Marxist leanings.

You shouldn't be surprised. Marxists have always been intolerant. Stalin, Mao, Khmer Rouge murdered ~100 million people (book). Modern western Marxists just don't have enough power (yet).

> everytime purges, stalin, human nature, works on paper is mentioned we take a shot

This is actually how communists take care of dissenters.

Source

Here, try this. Let me know if you need help affording it.

Rickrolling, but linking P_K here instead.

>Dude, nu vreau sa apar pe nimeni in acez caz dar ai niste surse pentru "a ucis zeci de milioane de oameni"? Sincer, e prima data cand aud asa ceva si pe internet nu am gasit multe surse care imi zice cate a omorat el.

Desigur. Incepi cu Wikipedia.

>> In the 2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism it was stated that crimes committed under communism were often crimes against humanity, according to the definition developed in the Nuremberg Trials, and that the crimes committed under communism and National Socialism were comparable.

O Declaratie a crimelor comunismului exista si ea, dar e mai putin cunoscuta, din pacate. Parlamentul European nu a condamnat niciodata nici crimele regimurilor comuniste (avem nevoie de China si Rusia) nici pactul Ribbentrop-Molotov.

Pentru a citi despre crimele comunismului in cifre, incepi tot pe wikipedia, aici, unde este data o estimare (destul de vaga din pacate).

>>The highest death tolls that have been documented in communist states occurred in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, in the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by these three regimes alone range from a low of 21 million to a high of 70 million.

Fiecare articol are zeci de referinte care pot fi consultate, pentru documentare mai adanca. Mai exista si o semi-faimoasa Carte Neagra a Comunismului, care ofera detalii referitoare la atrocitatile comise in variatele regimuri comuniste.

Pentru referinte literare, cred ca Arhipelagul Gulag ofera o imagine de ansamblu asupra modului in care comunistii identificau "dusmanii de clasa" si in care se faceau arestarile "la norma". Literatura e vasta, poti adauga si Vasili Grossman, Paul Goma, Augustin Buzura (Fetele Tacerii in special), pentru a intelege cumva efectele comunismului la nivel uman, emotional, al vietii de zi cu zi.

In fine, avem si un Institut pentru Cercetarea Crimelor Comunismului, pe situl caruia se mai gasesc oarece informatii, legate strict de spatiul romanesc.

> Apropo. Chiar daca Che Guevarra era un comunist, la fel de bine poti si spune "Nu inteleg cum microbul asta (Nixon, Georg Bush, etc.) asta capitalist poate infecta minti, chiar daca a ucis zeci de milioane de oameni".

Desigur ca poti spune, dar asta nu este un argument. Aici discutam despre comunism si impactul lui devastator atat la nivel social cat si la nivel individual. Nu a luat nimeni apararea capitalismului, nazismului, etc. Te rog sa nu aduci "argumente" de genul "da de ce numai pe mine ma vezi si pe ala nu ?" , pentru ca asa ceva nu e rational, e o forma de manipulare.

Mai este, desigur inca o diferenta intre Capitalism si Comunism / Nazism. In timp ce primul este un model pur economic, ultimele doua sunt socio-economice, au o componenta sociala extremista. Nazismul era mai degraba pur social, economic fiind capitalism in toata regula. Aici nu luam apararea niciunuia, discutam doar despre comunism. Si oricat de rau este capitalismul (si este), nu a lasat zeci de milioane de morti in urma, si razboaie mondiale, precum nazismul si comunsimul. Asta nu inseamna ca imi doresc neaparat o societate cu capitalism salbatic, asa cum e cea americana.

> Zic doar asta pentru ca lumea nu e impartita intr-o parte buna si una rea, nu e impartita intr-o lume comunista rea si una capitalista buna, etc.

Daca ai fi citit comentariul la care ai dat reply, ai fi vazut ca discutam despre tarile nord-Europene care au reusit sa imbine o doza de capitalism (economie de piata) cu protectie sociala (doctrina de stanga). Exact despre faptul ca lumea nu e in alb si negru am scris.

is this a book?

it might not require a police state, but it sure does seem to enjoy having one

[1 edit to add links]
Why on Earth should the hired help (cops, etc.) be armed but not their employers -- the mass of citizens themselves?

Given the long history of mass-murder and war by governments, it is the height of insanity to let a heavily-armed government disarm the people it supposedly works for.

Refs: Death by Government by R. J. Rummel (or see his website, with updated figures showing 262 million murders by government in 20th century, in ADDITION to war) and The Black Book of Communism (100 million murders by Communist governments in the 20th century; see p. 4) -- by a group of left-wing European scholars, not Rush Limbaugh.

This UBI crap was posted to /r/Futurology a while back as Canada is dabbling with the idea. They act like Marxist redistribution of wealth is some new groundbreaking idea never considered before rather than the century old debunked economic model based on Marx; whose government model is responsible for more poverty and mass murder than any ideology in history before it. The author of that article seems to believe that adopting Marxism will reduce the size, scope, and cost of government. That's rich.

Over 100 million murdered by their own government detailed in the Black Book of Communism.

Buy the book here:
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

Or download it here:
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/blackbookcommunism.pdf

Read the Big Black Book of Communism.

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

> It's about getting rid of the people who have actually robbed and killed people

So you admit it is about "getting rid" of people. Who determines guilt? Or should people be murdered for the mere "crime" of property ownership.

If you don't think communism is about mass murder you need to study up on your history. Start here

Some of their evil stuff was even highly publicized by the Soviet Govt. The Western media was invited.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge

Some things were kept secret but transpired anyway. The Western left wing intelligentsia was ordered to attack and defame those who spoke about that. The very same intelligentsia wrote the history books and made the movies about that period and now those who were horrified seeing FDR supporting Stalin are branded as Fascists.

More here

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4758sBZLC5k&feature=related

make sure you watch this documentary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcQ2t5ix4Ug&feature=related

http://www.sovietstory.com/

This Washington Post article explains it beautifully.

>As if to prove Cummings’s point, the antifa movement responded with jackboots and clubs — because their definition of “fascist” includes not just neo-Nazis but also anyone who opposes their totalitarian worldview.
>
>And let’s be clear: Totalitarian is precisely what they are. Mark Bray, a Dartmouth lecturer who has defendedantifa’s violent tactics, recently explained in The Post, “Its adherents are predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists” who believe that physical violence “is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.” In other words, they are no different from neo-Nazis. Neo-Nazis are the violent advocates of a murderous ideology that killed 25 million people last century. Antifa members are the violent advocates of a murderous ideology that, according to “The Black Book of Communism,” killed between 85 million and 100 million people last century. Both practice violence and preach hate. They are morally indistinguishable. There is no difference between those who beat innocent people in the name of the ideology that gave us Hitler and Himmler and those who beat innocent people in the name of the ideology that gave us Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.

You remember how I brought up that they misfire and attack people who aren't even remotely associated with fascism? Yeah, kind of drives the point home. Innocent people are tired of being attacked by idiots to hold dangerous beliefs.

Ok you sent me a blog post, I have a book from Stanford Press signed by several eminent scholars.

The black book of communism

oh, so if they say they are communists but you say they are not, then it is okay. thanks for the clarification, i guess the whole "communist party" is not a good enough argument.

i do like how you rationalize away the whole millions of people killed by this ideology.

try reading this book and tell me that supporting communism and nazism are not the same...

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

its odd though, they keep calling them communists...

From Publishers Weekly
In France, this damning reckoning of communism's worldwide legacy was a bestseller that sparked passionate arguments among intellectuals of the Left. Essentially a body count of communism's victims in the 20th century, the book draws heavily from recently opened Soviet archives. The verdict: communism was responsible for between 85 million and 100 million deaths in the century. In France, both sales and controversy were fueled, as Martin Malia notes in the foreword, by editor Courtois's specific comparison of communism's "class genocide" with Nazism's "race genocide." Courtois, the director of research at the prestigious Centre Research National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and editor of the journal Communisme, along with the other distinguished French and European contributors, delivers a fact-based, mostly Russia-centered wallop that will be hard to refute: town burnings, mass deportations, property seizures, family separations, mass murders, planned faminesAall chillingly documented from conception to implementation. The book is divided into five sections. The first and largest takes readers from the "Paradoxes of the October Revolution" through "Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System" to "The Exit from Stalinism." Seeing the U.S.S.R. as "the cradle of all modern Communism," the book's other four sections document the horrors of the Iron Curtain countries, Soviet-backed agitation in Asia and the Americas, and the Third World's often violent embrace of the system. A conclusionA"Why?"Aby Courtois, points to a bureaucratic, "purely abstract vision of death, massacre and human catastrophe" rooted in Lenin's compulsion to effect ideals by any means necessary. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

Communism is responsible for over 100 Million people murdered by their own government. It does not work in practice. Feel free to start your own Kibutz though.

http://heatst.com/culture-wars/marxist-vegan-restaurant-closes-after-customers-no-longer-willing-to-wait-40-minutes-for-a-sandwich/

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Imagine that - you can try voluntary collectivism in a free society, but you can't try free market in a collectivist society.

Why Cuban cab drivers earn more than doctors

Sim.

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression

Mas parece que está tão requisitado que está out of stock

Here's a book explaining it. https://www.amazon.com/Gulag-Archipelago-1918-1956-Experiment-Investigation/dp/0813332893

And another. https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503000634&sr=1-1&keywords=black+book+of+communism

There are thousands more.

The Black Book of Communism

No such thing as the far left?

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

	

	

	

> # Socialism Worked in Venezuela | AIER
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> Political conservatives often deride socialism because, in their words, “it doesn’t work.” By this, they mean socialism doesn’t deliver liberty, prosperity, or peace but, instead, tyranny, poverty, and war. Although the facts certainly support this critique, the logical premise underlying the critique does not. To declare that something works (or not) implicitly assumes a standard of measurement. Which one do conservatives use?
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> Conservatives seem to blithely presume that socialists intend to deliver liberty, prosperity, and peace. But where’s the evidence for that claim, beyond mere self-serving socialist rhetoric and demagoguery? Why assume that socialists seek progress when their many “experiments” over the past century make clear, to anyone aware of the history, that socialist systems repeatedly, ineluctably, and inherently inflict human harm?
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> Even socialist despots now concur with conservatives that socialism doesn’t work. A recent headline reads “Venezuela's President Admits Economy Has Failed.” The despot is Nicolás Maduro, who last month told the Venezuelan congress that “the production models we’ve tried so far have failed, and the responsibility is ours, mine and yours.” Maduro is an avowed socialist in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.
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> No mystery there. Since his election in 2013, Maduro has accelerated the socialization of that once-rich nation, causing a severe economic contraction, capital flight, refugees, worsening poverty, hyperinflation, shortages, rising mortality rates, malnutrition, and starvation. For many years prior, Maduro was a minister in the socialist regime of his predecessor and hero, the late Hugo Chávez, who initiated the latest socialization without apology. Venezuelans elected Chávez four times between 1999 and 2012.
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> Neither Chávez nor Maduro presented himself as anything other than socialist. They knew what they were aiming at, and voters knew what they were getting. The ultimate details may have differed, but the basic results were generally expected. Why should they regret the results? Did someone expect instead to get liberty, prosperity, and peace? Did some prefer capitalism but could find no political party to represent their wish? Perhaps the voters were duped because Chávez and Maduro promised public ownership of the means of production and a redistribution of wealth. The first occurred; the second didn’t. But isn’t that always the way with socialism? As Jack Nicholson put it to his evading, lying client in the movie Chinatown (1974), “There’s no time to be shocked by the truth.”
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> “Redistribution” is but a euphemism for legalized grand larceny; you don’t create wealth by stealing it, any more than you multiply it by dividing it. Moreover, don’t the means of production include not only machines but people — that is, laborers? When human capital is publicly owned, it’s akin to slavery. Why today would it remain a mystery, to any people anywhere, that government ownership of people is inhumane?
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> As mentioned, the historical facts support the conservative critique of socialism. That socialist systems have impoverished and killed more than 100 million people over the past 100 years is a matter of established historical record. The gruesome evidence through the end of the 20th century, which is indisputable, is compiled in R.J. Rummel’s Death by Government (1994) and in The Black Book of Communism (1999).
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> Socialists are anxious to insist, of course, that none of the horrors of socialism have been due to socialism, that true socialism has yet to be tried, and that it’s only coincidental that “socialist” appears as part of the names United Socialist Party (PSUV) in Venezuela, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in Russia, National Socialist (Nazi) Workers’ Party in Germany, and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the latest fad group for some of the young. These were irrelevant cases of mistaken identity, claim socialists, who add that real socialism now exists in the Nordic countries, even though those countries have no significant public ownership of the means of production. Socialists are unashamedly contradictory when claiming that the USSR wasn’t socialist, but Denmark is.
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> In addition to implicitly complimenting socialists by assuming they want liberty, prosperity, and peace, conservatives also try to educate socialists about the principles of sound economics to show how private property, sound money, a free price system, and the profit motive ensure economic success, while communal ownership, fiat money, price controls, and punitive taxation necessarily bring economic ruin. It’s all quite true, of course. But what if socialists already know this stuff and don’t care? What if they recognize sound economics but evade it because they have other priorities? Suppose they agree with their hero Karl Marx, who wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) that capitalism is a vital, energetic, productive engine, yet morally evil because it is so egoistic, individualist, and rights-obsessed? Perhaps demagogues and despots keep promising socialism, and victims keep accepting it, because both consider it to be moral, even though destructive.
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> In their critiques of socialism and interventionism, conservatives also like to cite the law of unintended consequences, which says the well-laid plans and policies of political-economic leaders often yield the precise opposite results of what’s intended. Likewise, the common cliché says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Again, notice the underlying (but unproven) premise: the intentions are good.
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> Is this always true? When Maduro concedes that his models have failed, in the sense that they’ve destroyed Venezuela’s economy, does it make him less socialist? Might his constituents now become pro-capitalist? Does he consider the possibility that capitalism’s underlying ethic is moral after all, while that of socialism is larcenous, unjust, and punitive? Unlikely. Socialists are crazy like a fox. That is, they know their intended prey (capital) and they’ll do whatever it takes to seek it out, take it, kill it, and eat it, with nary a thought about the future.
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> Of course, one should never argue by impugning, without evidence, an opponent’s inner motives or intentions. But sometimes aims and goals are named explicitly. Even when not, it seems perfectly fair to conclude that whenever certain ideologues keep pushing for a social-political-economic system that invariably proves disastrous, they probably prefer disaster. Nihilists exist, after all. Many conservatives simply assume that they know the socialists’ motives, and without much evidence, presume that they’re benevolent.
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> Conservatives seem unaware that socialists don’t expect their system to work in the sense of creating liberty, prosperity, and peace. First and foremost, they expect it to work to seize the means of production, human capital included. Then they expect it to entail, in their own words, a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” They expect it’ll destroy liberty and prosperity. In this sense, history demonstrates unequivocally that socialism works wonderfully.
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> That destruction was Marx’s main aim is clear from his Manifesto of the Communist Party. The hoped-for anti-capitalist revolution, he wrote, would be a “radical rupture of traditional property relations,” for it first would “raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy,” and then, with its “political supremacy,” the rulers would “wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie,” an act that “cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property.” That was “unavoidable.” The takeover would occur “by means of measures which appear economically insufficient and untenable.”
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> Marx was right to concede that socialism is “economically untenable.” It’s only the flip-side to his equally true concession that capitalism is productive. What he knew, socialists have known for years. In fact, socialism is worse than untenable. It’s destructive and inhumane. Conservatives should know that socialists know of their own destructive intent and should oppose them, instead of implicitly praising them.
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>This is a very deep topic that cant be summarized in a sentence.

totally understandable...

>I'm sure youll take that to mean that I dont know or or I making it up. No matter.

pffft. don't be so presumptuous...

>Historians have written ad nauseum about exactly how the highly centralized bureaucracy of complete state ownership inevitably and in all cases has lead to heavy handed authoritarianism.

this is the one question here i want an answer for (and haven't received an answer to), as the rest seems highly debatable (more on this below) and should be easy enough to provide a simple summary for. please do so. that those leaders who have attempted (and failed) to implement communism previously have all been assholes doesn't mean that communism inherently leads to authoritarianism, genocide, extrajudicial killings, etc. its quite a leap to suggest so.

> ...that has eclipsed every other ideology in terms of human suffering.

and this is where that debate comes in that i mentioned earlier. but its not the topic of this discussion directly so we can move on from it, for now.

> For a scholarly retrospective on the subject, I suggest "https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087"

its hardly scholarly...as noted here by another redditor, two of the authors have renounced the book, the figures have been inflated due to error and nevermind the blatant historical inaccuracies within. i haven't read the book but this quite detailed NYT review seems to suggest that it doesn't quite say what you think it says. referring to the last paragraph, speaking of communism versus nazism...italics and bold are mine.



>All of which brings one to the second great question. What of the relative immorality of Communism and Nazism? Both Malia and Courtois chew over this puzzle at some length; oddly, they do it as though it were not one of the standard subjects of debate back to the 1950's. The body count tips the scales against Communism. If wild utopian disregard for human life is the charge, there is little to choose between the practices of Nazism and Communism. But if the issue is the intrinsic evil of the entire project, it still seems no contest. Nazism was committed in principle to exterminating the Jews. So long as a shred of Marxist intelligence remained to Communist practice, it was not in itself an exterminationist project. Just how and why socialist aspirations came in practice to be so thoroughly betrayed will continue to preoccupy historians well into the next century.

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so this book admits that the "socialist aspirations" were "betrayed" meaning the evil and tyranny were not inherent to it, unlike nazism. also note that the question "will continue to preoccupy historians well into the next century". this book does not provide that answer, at least to the reviewer quoted.

​

Black Book of Communism

https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810

"The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.

To this list should be added nearly a million Gulag prisoners released during World War II into Red Army penal battalions, where they faced almost certain death; the partisans and civilians killed in the postwar revolts against Soviet rule in Ukraine and the Baltics; and dying Gulag inmates freed so that their deaths would not count in official statistics.

If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history."

See also "The Black Book of Communism"

This is a very deep topic that cant be summarized in a sentence. I'm sure youll take that to mean that I dont know or or I making it up. No matter.

Historians have written ad nauseum about exactly how the highly centralized bureaucracy of complete state ownership inevitably and in all cases has lead to heavy handed authoritarianism. There is a deep history of political repressions by Communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, killing population in labor camps and artificially created famines that has eclipsed every other ideology in terms of human suffering.

For a scholarly retrospective on the subject, I suggest "https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087"

Marxism has led to mass killings in every Marxist country. Even the Marxist leaders know it's a lie because the system can't possibly work.

You may want to read DUPES [ http://www.amazon.com/DUPES-Americas-Adversaries-Manipulated-Progressives/dp/1935191756/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1318882124&sr=8-3] , and Mao, [http://www.amazon.com/Mao-Story-Jung-Chang/dp/0679746323/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318882169&sr=1-1] and the black book of Communism [http://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318882202&sr=1-1], before you get trapped supporting a death cult.

For the communist death toll? The generally cited figure of 100 million comes from the Black Book of Communism. Other estimates are even higher. The commonly cited figure for the Holocaust is 12 million.

> Russia before socialism was a semi-feudal backward country that regularly had famines.

And after that it became a gulag-country where everyone was worse off than before.

>Yes and capitalism creates unemployment. In socialist countries there was basically 0 unemployment.

If you consider forced labor "employment", then you can opt for prison in a capitalist society as well. You get free food, free housing, and about as much freedom as you get under communism.

>Citation needed. These countries often had famine sway before socialism.

Are you serious? Have you never heard of Holodomor? Have you never heard of Mao's death toll? They surpassed previous famines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

>Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years.

>https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

> A) That's not a mass shooting, your alt-right NZ shooter, for instance, is a mass shooter.

Not in the US. Not a member of any US political organization affiliated with the alt-right.

>B) Black people are disproportionately shot by police, dummy.

False. Assuming all interactions with police carry the same threat of death, black people are shot at a lower rate than their interactions with police (a factor of their crime rate) compared to whites. Whites are shot more often than blacks, on a per-encounter rate.

>The previous poster already gave you a link showing you this, you moron. Try and keep up

Who? Who is the alt-right member who killed more than 9 people in a single incident?

>And stop desperately trying to deflect from the fact that your alt-right bros are response for far more violence and death than your most hated leftist enemies are

You sure?

>I think the lesson to learned from the Chinese and Soviet famines is less about redistributing wealth and more about how we're all one wave of farm failures away from mass starvation

A great point. But I fundamentally disagree.

We do live in a limited resource world. I would argue that socialized system not only naturally breaks the system of incentives which drive a market (in this case a farming market), but it's also easily weaponized to intentionally do that - and to murder people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

This was intentional. There's no denying at all, with any historical knowledge, that the soviets intended to kill these people, rape, and take all material possessions from them.

Now, I would concede that later on, the soviets made mistakes which exacerbated other situations where people starved, but that has more to do with the way that socialism functions.

This has to do with the bell curve, the normal distribution. In any given system, and this is a rough average, but it holds pretty stable and true, that 10% of the people involved in that system produce about 50% of the goods.

So if you have a 1000 farmers, 100 of them produce 50% of the grain. If you have 100,000 farmers, 1000 of them produce 50% of the grain. This is really easily observable in statistics like these: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-federal-income-tax-2016-02-24

When you introduce forced redistribution into these systems, it significantly reduces the overall production of the system. Well, if you are one of the people doing a lion's share of innovation, or work, labor, or investment into a given system, and you're suddenly told that bob who produces almost nothing compared to you will now be receiving the same pay as you, you will stop being incentivized to maintain that same level of production.

And what that means, is that now the redistributionist policy doesn't work anymore.

Because this whole idea was predicated on the following: Hey, look at this capitalist system. In theory, if we redistribute everything evenly, we will have enough for everyone, and that is fair. We should do that.

Except people aren't always the same. They dont have the same values, they dont work the same, there's variation.

So now, we introduce this redistribution of product. But now, since we're not capitalistic, we're no longer producing enough to go around.

And now, people starve to death.

------------------

To restate this, lets say it takes a minimum of 2lbs of grain per person, per day to survive. We have 100 people. We need 200 lbs of grain a day so that no one starves.

We take a look at our capitalist system, and we produce 300 lbs of grain a day overall. Ok, lets forcefully redistribute it.

Now, after we forcibly take people's personal property away from them, often kill the people who best know how to produce grain, and then pay everyone the same for farming that grain....we end up with 90 people (we killed ten of them and took their wine).

So now we need 180 lbs of grain a day to survive. But now, since we got rid of the 10 people who produced 50% of the grain, we only have a production of 150 lbs of grain a day, overall.

It doesn't matter how evenly we redistribute this now, we're screwed.

And in addition, in most of these socialist cases, the lions share was also sent to party members, making the problem even worse.

----------------------------------------------

>he common denominator between these and the Soviet/Chinese isn't socialist ideology(hardly), it's a heavy handed elite trying to squeeze the peasantry dry even while they were starving.

A communist perspective, through and through. It's the oppressor, vs the oppressed. Not all starvation was caused by communism, that would be absurd. And i'm not even saying that capitalist systems DONT do what you are saying they do, where an elite act in a manner where it's an elite trying to squeeze the peasantry , maybe even kill them too:

For instance, here's a writeup I just happened to do on the causes of the Irish potato famine:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskThe_Donald/comments/7wle75/why_is_the_term_politically_incorrect_only_ever/du1w3x4/


What I am absolutely willing to claim is that whenever you have a socialist or communist system, death follows inevitably. It has happened, or is happening, in every single instance in which the communist system has been tried. And often, it's much more than just lowering production and causing starvation, but the totalitarianism which always occurs leads to purges and genocides in nearly every observable case.

It's not just the soviets, or the chinese. Here, since it's handy:

Here you go, citations, in low end to high end death estimates!

Communists/Socialists in the USSR Killed between 3.5 million to 60 million people

Communists/Socialists in China killed between 18 to 40 million people

Communists/Socialists in Cambodia killed between 1.1 million to 3.8 million people

Communists/Socialists in Bulgaria killed at least 31,000 people

Communists/Socialists in North Korea killed between 500,000 to 3.5 million people

Communists/Socialists in East Germany killed between 80,000 to 100,000 people

Communists/Socialists in Romania killed between 30,000 and 450,000 people

Communists/Socialists in Cuba killed between 17,000 and 65,000 people

Communists/Socialists in various African countries killed between 120,000 and 1.7 million people

Communists/Socialists in Yugoslavia killed between 150,000 to 1 million people

Communists/Socialists in Afganistan killed between 750,000 to 1.5 million people

And we're seeing the cycle repeat in real time now, as political dissidents against socialism (among other prisoners) are being left to stave to death in Venezuelan prisons.

---------------------------------------------

Edit: TLDR: Non redistributionist capitalism is by no means perfect, but it's the best system we have at the moment, and whenever we try socialism or communism, tens of millions of people die, and that's immoral, so please stop advocating for it.

> Why is communism hated? whats bad about it?

Because it is an oppressive and murderous system of government.

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

>Anyone with the slightest clue in economics will know that monopoly is essentially a market failure as it fails to be productively efficient. Socialism is MAXIMUM GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION and therefore a monopoly

Socialism would include the absence of a market. Calling socialism a "market failure" is either obvious or ridiculous, depending on how you look at it.

>in the Soviet Union when Stalin collectivised the farming (100% control of the market therefore it is a pure monopoly),

The BBC probably isn't the best place to find accurate historical analysis, especially not a "bitesize" without any sources made to help high schoolers with studying.

There are well-sourced resources that show, while collectivization and state action did play an active role in the famine, it's way more nuanced than "the gooberment collectivized agriculture, famine happened, therefore famine happened because of gooberment."

>this caused the deaths of 30 million innocent women and children

Source?

>we can see that free market reforms allowed there to be many new billionaires. This shows how the free market creates almost unfathomable amounts of wealth that is not seen in any socialist country.

Post-Soviet Russia might be great for those billionaires, but it seems pretty shit for the average worker.

>In practise this could be dynamically efficient however it is not as communism has killed 100 million people.

I'm surprised anyone takes the 'Black Book of Communism' seriously.

>In the free market we would have perfect competition. Essentially, in perfect competition:

Your list is extremely idealistic, and many of the subjects listed don't reflect reality, and I don't think ever have.

" There is [...] no information failure or time lags in the flow of information" only makes sense if you ignore the examples of the delusion of information performed by corporations.^([1])

"[Consumers] make rational decisions to maximize their self-interest" only makes sense if you ignore the examples of firms capitalizing on the ignorance and short-sightedness of average consumers to manipulate their decisions,^([2]) and, again, the corporate delusion of information.

I could go on. Now, granted, a competitive capitalist market is a utopia compared to an oligopolistic capitalist economy, but many of the examples you've listed are extremely idealistic, and many of your criticisms of socialism are overly simplistic, at best.

>despite the challenges i face from cultural marxist teachers.

I don't think it's healthy that you're ignoring professors that you deem "cultural Marxists".

http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism-Repression/dp/0674076087

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

maybe get someone who can read to read this outloud to you!

Here are the fruits of communist movements around the world:

• [The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression] (https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087)

Who? Scholars?

https://www.amazon.ca/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

In terms of actual Russian deaths, figure was around 20 million. That is only killed. It doesn't include the mass deportations. But that's a critical examination of every communist country, which puts the number at 97 million deaths throughout the history of communism.

How about this book?
http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism-Repression/dp/0674076087

You seem to be forgetting the 100 million deaths.

What was wrong about what I said? Just because your teachers have decided to downplay the horrors of socialism/communism doesn't mean the atrocities didn't happen. https://smile.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GO9A5TY0HPFO&keywords=little+black+book+of+communism&qid=1571055902&sprefix=little+black+book+of+c%2Caps%2C169&sr=8-1

Almost 100 million deaths and counting. Probably something to do with that.

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

https://www.amazon.com/Gulag-Archipelago-1918-1956-Experiment-Investigation/dp/0813332893

Some sources

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies by M. Stanton Evans
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1400081068/?tag=freedradio-20

Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator by Arthur Herman
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0684836254/?tag=freedradio-20

Witness by Whittaker Chambers
http://www.amazon.com/dp/162157296X/?tag=freedradio-20

The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors by Eric Breindel
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0895262754/?tag=freedradio-20

Stalin's Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government by M. Stanton Evans
http://www.amazon.com/dp/143914768X/?tag=freedradio-20

Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason by Christina Shelton
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1451655428/?tag=freedradio-20

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0674076087/?tag=freedradio-20

Need I mention the hundred million dead due to atheists in the 20th century?

Black Book of Communism

>Seriously, I don't get it, could someone please explain to me why Socialism is so looked down upon by so many people.

Because (a) it's a religion (b) it doesn't work and (c) it killed over 100 million people in the 20th century.

(a) http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Communism-Robert-Harvey/dp/B000KHXCF8

(b) "Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it." Economist Thomas Sowell.

(c) http://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

Edit

(d) So I don't have to cut and paste it again:

>No clear distinction can be drawn between "socialism" and "communism."
~~Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (Modern Library, 2001)

(e)

>What was once a monolithic Marxist Left proceeded to split into numerous camps [in the 1950s after the confirmation of Stalinist atrocities and the Soviet invasion of Hungary] All of the camps recognized, though that if the fight against capitalism were to be carried on, the first order of business was to distance socialism from the Soviet Union. Just as the disaster of National Socialism in Germany was not socialism, the disaster of Communism in the Soviet Union was not socialism. In fact, there were no real socialist societies anywhere, so pointing fingers of moral condemnation was simply meaningless.

>With no real socialist states to uphold as positive examples of socialist practice, the Left's new strategies focused almost exclusively upon critiquing the liberal capitalist nations.

~~ Stephen Hicks, *Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (2004)

I didn't care for the not so subtle social commentary in much of this episode
(This one went way over board with socialist politics. How all men are endowed with the same genetic makeup and only through luck that some become rich and powerful while others work dead end factory jobs blah blah).

News flash: communism never works

But the ending redeemed it all. Wow!