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CoMmUnIsM KiILed 100 MiLliOn
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this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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I've never been able to get liberals to admit capitalism killed anyone. They always deflect saying authoritarianism or governments killed people, not capitalism, since they say capitalism is an ideal of treating people fairly or blah blah
I'll readily admit communists killed people, and they deserved it. There should be more dead Nazis and landlords. Kill them all.
Hi, I'm an advocate for democracy, human rights, and civil liberty with an aversion to harm, which many would say is the definition of a Liberal. Capitalism has killed countless people and continues to do so today in places like the USA, China, and Russia as well as around the world. Greed and wealth disparity is a disease ever-present.
Historically, plutocracy was the cause and justification for many horrible atrocities including the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Opium Wars.
I've personally never met a Liberal who defended any of those things. That would probably be more the Laissez-Faire and Anti-Taxation crowds sometimes referred to as libertarians in the USA, I'm sure there are other groups as well.
You know what I would never do, though? Compare communism/socialism to whatever the fuck the Chinese Autocracy is. That's just delusional.
I find it funny that when people from other instances disagree with something here, they introduce themselves in a similar fashion as you:
Every socialist is an advocate for these things as well. How can someone advocate for workplace democracy without being an advocate for democracy in general? Isn't working to alleviate poverty (like China, where they have already lifted 700+ million people out of it) a victory for human rights? Isn't a system where everyone is accountable and can't use their wealth to circumvent the law an improvement for civil liberties? And lastly, every human who isn't a psychopath has an aversion to harm..
Meanwhile, liberalism also claims to advocate for these things, but with no actions to back them. How can someone claim that choosing which rich people party to vote for every 4 years is democratic? Yet most people don't challenge this claim. How can someone claim to be an advocate for human rights but take no action against homelessness and poverty? Historically, why is it that most (if not all) human rights declarations happened in slave-owning and/or imperialist countries?
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought this was a discussion about acknowledging the death and harm caused by capitalism. Is that not what this discussion was about? Why are you suddenly changing the subject? Let's roll with it, then.
Average quality of life in every imaginable facet has improved over the last century in almost every country, China just had a lower starting point before catching up to the modern world, most of which was done between the 70s and 90s. One growing problem in China is Homelessness as rural and migrant workers numbering in the hundreds of millions are ineligible for housing in the cities they work in because their Hukou designation is elsewhere. China has 814 Billionaires if you include Hong Kong and Macau. Just like the USA and Europe they have rising youth unemployment and constant banking crisis.
This statement shows a severe lack of historical awareness about eastern nations including China. By the pound, there has been more bloodshed over class disputes there than any other corner of the earth.
Not only was the person you responded to correct about this, this statement is actually applicable to you right now. 🤷🏿♂️
That's cause the bourgeoisie can and will do everything to stay in power, and that's when fascism takes hold.
Okay. Good so far.
Incorrect. It was settler colonialism and imperialism that directly drove both of these atrocities and then some.
It doesn't matter. Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism, which also whitewashes crimes committed by the US. And there are plenty of liberals who would happily put people like me back in chains for not voting for their "harm reduction" candidate.
If you don't know what is actually going on in China, it's probably better not to speak as an authority on it. Good intentions don't inherently make you any more effective at being well-informed. You can be more well-informed still, if you translate the intent to a certain amount of humility about what you know and find the right people to listen to. Right now, how you come across to me is a western chauvinist who is determined to oversimplify the world and pretend other cultures and peoples are identical to yours, while speaking from a position of implied superiority of knowledge and understanding of the world.
You might think that's a lot to extrapolate from your post, but the tone of your post is a lot more generic of an ideological position than you might realize. It's good that you recognize the harm capitalism causes. But that can't be the end of it or you miss the larger picture of the world's development and history. You have to recognize what colonialism and imperialism are, as a bare minimum, and preferably attain some understanding of how the targets of these things have developed in their efforts toward self-determination. Notably, the western empire is still an ongoing thing to contend with. If you exclude that from your understanding of nations, you will be viewing the world through a simplified lens of "good/bad nation" and missing a large portion of not only development and the whys behind it, but also information and bias, and being able to recognize, for example, that much of the "information" you will find from the western empire about China is coming from a place of empire wanting to undermine it.
Recognition of biases is pivotal to going further than condemnation of vague descriptions of reality like "greed." Greed is real, but it is insufficient to explain the mechanisms of development of a nation, a people, much less the entire world. Choosing to consciously side with colonized people's over colonizers is a form of bias, but this does not make it bad. There is no escaping bias. There is no ideology where you can be above the fray. The question is, do you come to recognize the biases and choose sides, or do you pretend to be above it and condemn vague descriptions of behavior that are commonly associated with immoral action. The second one might make you feel good, but it offers no materially proven solutions to the problems of the day. The first one is what history is actually operating on and will continue to operate on, whether you recognize the mechanisms or not.