[QUOTE="theone86"]
[QUOTE="Laihendi"]
Here is a good and informative article
According to a disturbingly pleasant graphic fromInformation is Beautifulentitled simply 20thCentury Death, communism was the leading ideological cause of death between 1900 and 2000. The 94 million that perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe easily (and tragically) trump the 28 million that died under fascist regimes during the same period.
During the century measured, more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communisms total by only 9 million.
It gets worse when you look at the lower right of the chartThe Natural Worldwhich includes animals (7 million), natural disasters (24 million), and famine (101 million). Curiously, all of the worlds worst famines during the 20th century were in communist countries: China (twice!), the Soviet Union, and North Korea.
Communism is a killer. And yet some still say they support the idea: According to a 2011 Rasmussen poll, 11% of Americans think that communism would better serve this countrys needs than our current system.Laihendi
http://reason.com/blog/2013/03/13/communism-killed-94m-in-20th-century
Deaths from laissez-faire capitalism - 0
Deaths from communism - 94,000,000
Communism is the most violent and destructive ideology in human history. I think it is clear which is the moral social system, and which is not.
The bolded is not true, Pinochet's government is one prominent example I can think of that is responsible for numerous deaths, I'm sure there are more. If we're going to get technical we could start to get into all the dictators that the U.S. backed and see how many people they killed. Does the Shah of Iran count in this calculation? There's another large group of deaths.
Aside from that, you're painting in broad strokes. To say that North Korean communism is the same thing as Cuban or Soviet communism is about the same thing as saying Nazi Germany's economy was pretty much the same as the modern U.S. economy. Aside from that, just about every form of communism that's ever been implemented at a national scale is a pretty far cry from what Marx put forward as a functional form of communism (he did speak about crude communism which he called destructive). Aside from that, Marx is not the penultimate authority on communism and there is a wide range of communist ideologies which vary, sometimes profoundly, from one another. To say that governments who claimed a communist ideology (and I'd say authoritarianism in general is pretty opposed to communism on an ideological level) were responsible for killings, therefore communism as a whole is a failed ideology is wholly fallacious.
Those regimes were not free capitalist societies. A dictator has nothing to do with laissez-faire capitalism. Also,
Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom-while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?-by what standard?Ayn Rand
Um, no, sorry, that's a cop-out. If you're going to whitewash communism because of the acts of certain communist regimes then you can't be picky about which free market governments you want to prop up as examples. Besides, you're not addressing the problem of capitalist societies without dictators supporting dictators. Sure, they're not directly acting as dictators, but then why are they continuously propping up authoritarian regimes?
Acting as if I should take Rand seriously. Your quote just shows how ignorant and fallcious her reasoning is. Again, she is assuming that communism practiced on a national level is the same thing as any sort of communist ideology anywhere. That's a genetic fallacy, you can't damn a whole ideology based on the actions of a select group of pracitcioners, especially when the original theorists said nothing of authoritarian enforcement of their ideology in the first place. The fact that she takes killings to be a central part of all communism (the part about spilling blood) is evidence of how fallacious her reasoning is. There are communists who just go out and live in the woods in self-sustainign communities, are they demanding that blood be spilled in the name of their code? Are they morally bankrupt? No. Ayn Rand was a sociopath. She was a deranged woman who admittedly suffered unduly during her life, but she took that experience and unduly blamed an entire group for her own suffering, and then proceeded to write sh*tty sophist propaganda slandering them writ large. There's no good reason to take her seriously.
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