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Understanding Conservative Philosophy

 
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The 100 million figure is the total count of victims that can be attributed to communism in the USSR from 1917 to 1991.
This includes not just executions for political reasons (NOT murder and other crimes for which capital punishment exists in civilised countries) but also people dead from exposure and starvation, people dead in the Gulag from (deliberate) malnutrition and unsafe working conditions, etc.
These include millions dead during the forced migration out of central Asia where millions were loaded in cattle cars and literally dumped on the side of the trans Siberian railroad with only the clothes on their backs and told to build a new home there (without tools or food or weapons to defend themselves from wolves and bears, often in winter when all they had were summer clothes), people sent without trial to the lead mines in Siberia where they died slowly from exposure and lead poisoning, etc. etc.
The situation in the PRC is even worse...
Remember: under communist (and all other theocratic) rule suspicion IS proof and denial of guilt means you're guilty of herecy against the party which is a capital offense!
 
Jeroen Wenting
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Originally posted by herb slocomb:

Didn't the same thing occur in China on a massive scale involving millions? Why the whitewash over communism? Did it not rival Nazism in the numbers murdered?


communism far exceeds Nazism in the deathtoll, and especially in the randomness of the killings.
Worst example is Cambodia where communism killed an estimated 2-3 million people (on a population of under 15 million initially) between 1975 and 1978.
Even the Nazis needed 10 years to kill 5 million or so on a population of over 50 million (or a scant 1% of their population a year against 6-7% a year for the Khmer Rouge).
In the PRC millions were murdered too for having an education or knowing a foreign language during the cultural revolution but this was officially not officially endorsed (the communist party while starting the groups that did the killings didn't openly support them and in the end used the army to stop them once they'd done the dirty work and began to become a danger to the government).
In Vietnam, as in the PRC, daring to deny guilt in any charge laid against you for any crime meant you were guilty of crimes against the state. These invariably led to deportation to concentration camps.
It is now estimated that in Vietnam less than 10% of those sent to these camps (the numbers are still not known but these people number hundreds of thousands if not over a million in Vietnam alone) survived.
In the PRC the survival rate is even lower as effectively up until about 1990 noone ever returned (except a few foreigners who were let go and banned from the country as a sign of good will) of the tens of millions incarcerated. When next you buy something that says "made in China", think that the low price is made possible by the slave labour of the millions of political prisoners in the Laogai who buile and operate the factories in which they produce those cheap goods!
 
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Originally posted by Jeroen Wenting:

...communism far exceeds Nazism in the deathtoll, ...


My point is why is Nazism always the ultimate bogeyman and personification of evil when communists killed far more. Here in South Florida, we have Holocaust mueseums and memorials, and we have madated the public schools teach about the Holocasut. We also have many movies on the Holocaust and it never goes completely out of the public eye.
Where are the memorials, mueseums, and movies to commerate the millions who were murdered under communism??? Why the relative/comparative silence???
Of course we know the reason. The Left, which has sympathies with communism, has dominated the media in the West for the past 40 years. The mass murders have been downplayed. Not only the media, but the cultural establishment, has gone so far as to romanticize communist revolutionaries. Che Guevera T-shirts and posters still sell, and many in Europe and South America worship Castro despite the thousands he has executed or jailed.
 
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Originally posted by herb slocomb:
My point is why is Nazism always the ultimate bogeyman and personification of evil when communists killed far more.

Well, the Nazis barely had a chance. They were only in power for ten years in one country but they did manage to kill 50 million people. That seems to be better than any communist nation managed to do.
 
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You failed to consider the execution of 3 - 11 million Ukrainians and others that did not occur in the gulags.
Nope. I didn't say that 827 995 is the *total* number of victims. I said that 6-8 million is considered the closest estimation.
 
frank davis
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Originally posted by Mapraputa Is:
You failed to consider the execution of 3 - 11 million Ukrainians and others that did not occur in the gulags.
Nope. I didn't say that 827 995 is the *total* number of victims. I said that 6-8 million is considered the closest estimation.


My bad, I didn't read all the posts before responding and responded to your later post.
 
frank davis
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Originally posted by Thomas Paul:
Well, the Nazis barely had a chance. They were only in power for ten years in one country but they did manage to kill 50 million people. That seems to be better than any communist nation managed to do.


Most the estimates I saw put the figure at 20 million Nazi executions or a total around 28 million including war causalties. An impressive amount over 10 years, yet Stalin alone (by his own estimates and a few others) killed 10 million in a few years with the Ukrainian famine. So, if you measure by amount killed in worst(best performing?) year, maybe Stalin could win the most killed in one year award (especially if most of deaths not equally distributed over time during the famine), and communists had best overall total kill figure.
Since communists had higher overall kill figure and caused more misery over longer period of time(continuing still), maybe that made them an even worse negative experience for humanity. In any event, the relative and comparative silence in the cultural and media establishment is so incredibly unbalanced it does not begin to reflect any relative differences that may exist in terms of "worseness" between the two idealogies.
 
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Originally posted by herb slocomb:

My point is why is Nazism always the ultimate bogeyman and personification of evil when communists killed far more. Here in South Florida, we have Holocaust mueseums and memorials, and we have madated the public schools teach about the Holocasut. We also have many movies on the Holocaust and it never goes completely out of the public eye.
Where are the memorials, mueseums, and movies to commerate the millions who were murdered under communism??? Why the relative/comparative silence???


Maybe its partly because a lot of the holocaust survivors are living in the West, where they can tell their story, even in films ( for example Spielberg. ), and their descendents are interested in finding out. A lot of the survivors of the Gulag or of the PRC's camps are living in Russia or China, where theres less access to the media, especially the western media.
Plus you can go to Auschwitz and see what went on, and there's lots of documentation from the time the camps were liberated. You'd have a difficult job to go and visit a gulag camp, and get a feel of what went on there.
In fact, theres an excellent book by Anne Applebaum, called Gulag. The introduction: http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag/intro.html
addresses this issue better than I can. The only other book I've read that is as draining as this book is Primo Levis 'If This is a Man'.
[ February 23, 2004: Message edited by: Steve Wink ]
[ February 23, 2004: Message edited by: Steve Wink ]
 
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Originally posted by Thomas Paul:
Well, the Nazis barely had a chance. They were only in power for ten years in one country but they did manage to kill 50 million people. That seems to be better than any communist nation managed to do.


"No, please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
-J-
 
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Originally posted by Jeff Langr:

"No, please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
-J-


He killed the best man.
 
Mapraputa Is
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JW: The 100 million figure is the total count of victims that can be attributed to communism in the USSR from 1917 to 1991.
Here are census data for USSR population during the period when most repressions happened:
1926 - 147 million
1937 - 162 million
1959 - 208 million
There were no significant repressions to talk about since 60-s. Now add to your 100 million 26,6 million dead in WWII, and we will have that the USSR lost more than a half of its population! Are you serious?
If you mistrust official census, please note that the results of 1937 census were actually kept in secret, since Stalin expected it to be 170 million, and were only found in archives in late 1080-s.
If I am not mistaken, I saw a number close to 100 million as an estimation of total demographic loss in the USSR in XX century, including Civil War, WWII, and those who weren't born because their potential parents were killed.
 
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While many cite the precedent of religious persecution as a vital reason for the separation of church and state it would be worthwhile to explain the difference between right an wrong, simply to put such arguments in their true light.
Religious persecution has always been considered wrong. No religion ever says it is allright to persecute someone based upon their faith or beliefs. However what has happened in the past is that societies that were established on these very beliefs deviated from the intended path and strayed onto a path where persecution became a means to resolve issues. But one should bear in mind, that the original beliefs which were used to establish the society in the first place never agreed to or advocated this kind of persecution, however as humans normally do.. the people in power in that society strayed.
Societies back then were not democratic as they are today and hence power was concentrated in the hands of few. As the saying goes.. "Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Absolutely Corrupts". Today we have the means for a check and balance in the form of a constitutional democracy. We can always keep religious extremes in check if we give equal importance to the preservation of our society's constitution. However any reference to religion in modern liberal societies is met with scorn and any attempt to establish a core set of beliefs for the society is met with militant resistance. Why?
 
Mapraputa Is
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PM: However any reference to religion in modern liberal societies is met with scorn and any attempt to establish a core set of beliefs for the society is met with militant resistance. Why?
I can only talk for myself. It seems to me that "a core set of beliefs" only works when there is no such thing officially proclaimed and supported. We need to re-create this core set for ourselves, each of us. We cannot delegate this mission to the society.
[ February 28, 2004: Message edited by: Mapraputa Is ]
 
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