Also let’s please not act like minisoc’s antisemitism is in any way unique. Other tankies on here like marxism-leninism-memeism have said worse things, like that Jewish people ought to be thanking Stalin for saving them from the Holocaust.
Let’s eradicate this preposterous notion that you can be a defender of Stalin and not simultaneously be a raging antisemite racist homophobe. There are no non-problematic tankies. If you defend Stalin, you defend ethnic cleansing, the arrest, enslavement, and murder of gay men, antisemitic purges, and a million other atrocities.
Tankies like to pretend that Stalinist mass murders and systems of forced labor camps were substantially different and in no way comparable to the Nazis because the Stalinists at least on the surface espoused the values of internationalism and anti-racism. But in practice the gulags and the purges were systems of racist terror. Hitler killed more people but Stalin sure gave him a run for his money.
I can’t wait for people to performatively denounce the ““““tankies”“““ for five seconds while doing literally zero self-reflection
Wasn’t that called McCarthyism?
Stan’s body count is miles higher than Hitler’s last I checked. Unless I’m having a moment of bad memory at 430AM
If you compare intentional murders, Hitler’s is higher. Famine deaths were definitely caused by Stalin’s policies, and the word genocidal certainly qualifies in the case of the Ukrainian famine, but I think it’s not quite the same to say that famine deaths should count equally as people being rounded up and arrested, and then shot or gassed to death or killed from overwork and brutal conditions in a prison camp.
Still though, counting only intentional murders, Stalin’s death toll easily makes it into the 7 figures.
the key difference here imo is that both angles are incorrect: Nazism inherently leads to mass murder as per Generalplan Ost, since the whole plan is to lebensraum new territories and get rid of or enslave the population there, however, communist governments ended up with such an enormous death toll because the countries where communism was enacted were so big. so this implies three things: authoritarianism equals mass murder even if you are the “””good guys”””, communism doesn’t scale well at all, and “hey you thought my ideology murders the most people in history, whereas it only murdered the second most people in history” does not sound enticing
I feel like
If you take somebody’s food
That they say they need
And then they starve to death
That’s murder, even if you didn’t believe them when they said they needed the food.
Yes but if you do that you have to start accounting for capitalism’s death toll too. But no one wants to say it’s the government’s fault that a bunch of people without money starved when the crops failed, that was just like, completely external or something.
It’s one thing to have people suffer in a famine, it’s another thing to cause one that otherwise wouldn’t happen.
Anyhow, suppose there is some baseline level of famine that occurs in any country as a result of environmental conditions, and some minimum number of people who will die from it. Ideologies/economies are judged by how far above that number they come in. Does Capitalism do better on that metric? Does it do better than Feudalism?
But if we’re going for this level of detail, then slow economic growth counts against Communism, too. How many have died because of less wealth for healthcare, or for safety procedures? How many have died due to a slower pace of technological development? How many have died because Communist governments were so bad that they created massive amounts of corruption that persist to this day?
I guess I’m just annoyed with that comic with a Communist sitting on a tiny hill of skulls while a banker stands next to a small mountain of them. Even after you account for, for instance, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which can be attributed to Capitalism, Communism is still going to end up responsible for more net deaths, and yet so many people smart enough to know better want to try it again.
