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You
poisonedderailed the discussion by leading with this. Almost no normies actually think communism is good, nor are they yearning for it to any great degree. At worst they have some uninformed ideas that, if you squint, can sort of seem communist-adjacent. Stuff like supporting price ceilings or floors in competitive industries. But even these aren't really doing much damage. Things like "building more housing leads to higher housing + rent prices" has been much more disruptive to a flourishing society, and it doesn't spring from anything related to communism, but rather from ignorance of basic economics.Normies in Latin America keep voting for communists. Venezuelans elected Hugo Chavez. Nicaraguans elected Daniel Ortega. Peruvians elected Pedro Castillo.
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I put forward that normies think Nazism is bad. If you display a swastika, you are likely to suffer immediate social and possibly even legal consequences due to this belief.
What social and possibly even legal results do you observe from people displaying the hammer and sickle? If you observe a disparity, how large is that disparity? If it is indeed quite large, do you think it is perhaps too large, that the reaction to the hammer and sickle should conform more to that of the swastika? If so, what is the problem with describing this rectification as "teaching normies that communism is bad"?
The conflict with Nazism is a conflict theory conflict. Nazis have it good under Nazism, so they cannot be reasoned out of trying to do a Nazism, only suppressed.
The conflict with Communism is much more of a mistake theory conflict. Even the Communist elites had it worse than Capitalist elites under Communism, and it's more of a common knowledge that Communism was bad for everyone in general. That's why it doesn't need as much suppression.
It's the same "the right thinks the left is stupid, the left thinks the right is evil" thing, which rings true in the first place because the right-wing ideologies are usually the pragmatically selfish ones.
The notable problem with Communism is not that it made people generally poor. The problem is the vast amounts of rape, torture, hideous murder, rampant slavery, mass starvation, occasionally intentionally induced, and the general pattern of systemic efforts to mutilate the souls of those unfortunate enough to be held in its thrall. The fact that you have bypassed these to argue for common knowledge that Communism is bad because even elites weren't as rich as westerners rather underlines the point.
Communism is in fact a conflict theory. It is in fact predicated on making things good for Communists, and is explicit that this should come at the expense of non-communists, who are to be exterminated without mercy. It cannot even be argued that "non-communist" was a category one chose for themselves; communists routinely assigned the label on the basis of who your family was, and even on ethnicity when convinient.
I firmly believe that the left is evil, and am baffled that others are confused on this point. Certainly there has never been an empire more evil than Communism.
Nazi Germany, Pol Pot, Japanese Empire, Aztecs are strong contenders.
One of those four was part of the Communist empire, and another allied with them to initiate wars of aggression.
Still, "among the most evil empires in history" is far more fitting than "Certainly there has never been an empire more evil than Communism."
How many of them lasted as long, or held so many in thrall, or caused so much damage, or brought us so close to much, much worse?
I stand by my original statement. The nazis lasted twelve years, and roughly the same for the Japanese empire. The communists held power for nearly a century, and ruled something like a third of the whole world for roughly two generations, killing and brutalizing an absolutely staggering number of people in that time.
Note that "empire more evil than" is distinct from "caused most damage overall". Unless you go with some strict variant of ultrautilitarianism.
Aztecs killed far less people, but they remain strong contender to be more evil. Maybe in a quite tragic way as they actually believed own religion.
Similarly, nazi Germany is in my opinion more evil than USSR.
If you count overall damage and count all communists as one competitor, then yes they caused most damage overall.
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As others have noted, there were rape, torture, hideous murder, rampant slavery and starvation in many states across history, generally eased back on as such atrocities started to be less economically efficient and contributing to state security than not doing those things. So the notable thing about Communism is that they decided to do those things, up to eleven, and got nothing good in return. Elsewhere you say that those things would be immoral even if they resulted in great economic efficiency, and I agree, but I could find quite a few people even here on this forum who seem to be ready to return to premodern atrocity levels in return for some societal gains.
I think it's obvious the way Nazis determined their outgroup was quite a lot more rigid and, dare I say, final, than the way Communists did it. I'd guess there were more Communists of noble or otherwise undesirable descent than there were Jewish Nazis.
When there's no basis of injecting yourself into the power structure other than power, it doesn't look as bleak as having to be a blonde blue-eyed white man.
Also, I don't mean to say that Communism is a mistake theory, but that normies view "current society vs communism" as a mistake theory fight, as opposed to "current society vs nazism".
When you call an entire half of the political axis evil without even stating where you believe the center it, it does get confusing, yes.
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Of course this is the problem with communism. If all of the horrors of the USSR and red China had resulted in societies five times as prosperous as the US in material terms we’d all be communists now. The fact that the economic systems failed utterly is what makes communism disastrous. The torture, the killing, the brutality, (I exclude the starvation, which is a direct consequence of communism as an economic failure state), that is all sadly very human, very common, very widespread (certainly until very recently) in every corner of the world. What is particularly communist is that on not one occasion did it achieve anything like the mass popular prosperity achieved in comparable nations under capitalism.
I fundamentally disagree.
In the first place, if the USSR and Red China could actually produce five times the prosperity as the US, they likely would not have needed to resort to the violence. This is the basis of plausibility for "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism".
In the second place, I don't think torture, rape and murder can or will ever produce superior prosperity to their absence, so I don't think the question is actually meaningful. If we're going to chase the hypothetical, though, I'll happily reject the idea that economic abundance and moral justice are mutually fungible. It is not immoral to be poor. It is immoral to murder, rape and torture. This does not change even if the torture, rape and murder are enormously economically productive. Those who think otherwise and manage to make a go of it should be properly categorized as hostis humani generis. No mortal man is fit to prey on his fellows. Those who forget this should be reminded of their mortality.
I am skeptical that Communist Russia is actually typical in its rates of torture, murder and brutality. I think we can find other regimes that were similarly brutal, but those regimes are likewise unusual.
What is particularly communist is that it created notable brutality more or less out of whole cloth. We can accept that the Aztecs, in the end, gradually devolved into a society built on slavery and murder. What is surprising is that the Communists built such a society from scratch overnight, out of otherwise reasonably decent, peaceful human beings.
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That doesn't mean they can be reasoned out of communism. I've made this point before, but ideologies based on good intentions are often no better than ones based on blind hate. There's no limit to what a man can do, if you convince him it's all in the service of the greater good.
This makes no sense. If fewer people believed communism was bad, than you'd have even more people arguing it doesn't need to be suppressed.
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I don't disagree that normies think Nazism is worse (often far worse) than Communism. That's mostly because of the Holocaust. Communism has some atrocities with higher death counts (e.g. perhaps Mao's Cultural Revolution), but the Holocaust's relatively high death toll + the deliberateness of the whole ordeal is what makes it really pop. If you squint, you can sort of see how many of the deaths in China were accidental. It's hard to do the same for death camps.
It's not that it's a bad to teach them this, it's that there's not really a point since the vast majority already believe it. Yet for some reason much of the motte thinks a huge chunk of the West still harbors Communist sympathies, so most of his answers were specifically addressing that point.
You are thinking of the Great Leap Forward, not the Cultural Revolution (which was devastating to China and cost 1-2 million lives, but is a separate incident).
You're right, I get the two confused.
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We have people who argue that on this very forum. Out yonder, in the broader universe, normies who believe whatever's on TV-that-isn't-H2, are not making informed studies of the holocaust to argue that it couldn't have been an accident. They're being told it was deliberate. The holocaust is just like evolution; people don't make up their minds after seeing evidence. They make up their minds on the basis of conformity and then seek out evidence to confirm it.
A huge chunk of the elites of society are informed by people who are actual literal out and out marxists who use falsified marxist postulates as inputs in their theorems. Very little of this has to do with support for command economics, and you can have non-marxist totalitarian command economies.
And we just had Tucker, who informs almost the entire Republican right, interviewing a Nazi with Elon Musk promoting it. Would you take that as evidence that anti-Nazi efforts in the US have failed and that we must now quintuple down on them?
Communism and Nazi sympathies are contrarianism born from negative partisanship, not genuine broad support for those ideologies.
Considering that interviewing a Nazi and promoting the interview aren't indicative of any sort of positive opinion on Nazism - in fact, both behaviors are pretty much orthogonal to one's support of or opposition to the ideology, or any ideology - I'm not sure how this could be claimed to be evidence of such a thing.
This idea only works if a person is seriously committed to exploring viewpoints on their own merits rather than using that as a shield to broadcast highly controversial views. Tucker and the people who watch him might not fully agree with Nazi viewpoints as they're espoused, but they probably agree with at least some of them, and more importantly wish they were in the Overton Window in order to make their own views more palatable.
Sure, but you have no credibility with which to make the judgment whether they're seriously committed to exploring viewpoints on their own merits or using it as a shield to broadcast highly controversial views that they want to pull into the Overton window. In general, very few people have that level of credibility when talking about other people's behaviors, and specifically, if those other people are people one disagrees with or dislikes, then they definitely have no credibility in determining such things. If I disagree with them, then regardless of the underlying reality, of course I'll convince myself that these bad people with bad ideas are dishonest cynics who are cynically being dishonest in order to sneak in their bad ideas to the mainstream, and as such, my conclusion that that's what they're doing carries no weight.
This is why, again, interviewing a Nazi or promoting such an interview tells us nothing about how anti- or pro-Nazi they are; it's some dimension other than the actual ground-level ideological/political beliefs that determines if someone believes that publicizing an interview with [ideological/political beliefs they disagree with] is bad. It's either ideological hubris or ideological authoritarianism or some combination of both that are the determinants.
We don't have to use mind-reading here to determine motives. Rather, we can see if he's done similar things to the other side to determine if he has a genuine interest in all sides of the discussion. Has Tucker had a good faith interview with a far left woke person before? As in, one where the goal wasn't to laugh at them or use them as a foil, but to explore their views as he's comfortable doing with Nazis? I highly doubt it, but feel free to prove me wrong.
If we refuse to do this, then we capitulate to grifters who eternally claim they're "just asking questions". It's bad to give JAQing off a pass.
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"Interviewing a Nazi" is not analagous to "teaching Marxism".
Who's "teaching marxism" here? The person I responded to deliberately chose fairly wishy-washy language of "informed by people" because more forceful positions like "teaching marxism" aren't backed up by evidence of being widespread.
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I agree, object to this disparity in perception, and think it is reasonably described as "not believing that communism is bad". It's probably true that, in a sense, most people believe that french fries are bad. I think it's pretty clear that most people think smoking is bad. It seems to me that to the extent that normies consider Communism "bad", they consider it less bad than french fries. I think they should consider it more bad than smoking, and roughly as bad as naziism.
Communism has no shortage of deliberate exterminations, starvations, mass rape, mass torture, the whole shebang. The Cambodian communists killed one in four of their population. The Russian communists committed every atrocity imaginable at considerable scale. If there is no shortage of historical atrocity, why should we accept such an extreme difference in perception between the two ideologies? Isn't this disparity a problem? Isn't education the obvious solution? Why treat the present state as some immutable fact of nature, rather than critiquing it as we do other social phenomena?
Do people squint in this way for Nazi atrocities? Do we, generally speaking, tolerate those inclined to do so? Why should it be different for the many, many deliberate atrocities on the part of the Communists? Or is it your argument that no such atrocities exist, that the public perception is correct?
I would readily concede that they believe "communism is bad" in the sense that "french fries are bad". I see no evidence that they believe it in the sense that "smoking is bad", much less "naziism is bad." It seems obvious to me that the latter is necessary, given the amount of damage that Communism as an ideology has done and might do again.
I can't speak for the community at large, but in my own experience I believe that the West still harbors Communist sympathies because I observe its treatment of previous generations of Communists, and I observe a current generation of violent Communist thugs organizing widespread political violence with the tacit support of their local institutions, as well as local, state and federal governments. Further, I note that Communist ideology appears to be alive and well within the Overton window, while our society chases absurdly diminished returns seeking to further marginalize the already marginalized Nazis. I note that I am routinely lectured on the present threat of nazi ideology by people with the hammer and sickle in their social media bio. I disagree with this state of affairs and believe it should be rectified. Again, "teach normies that Communism is bad" seems like a reasonable shorthand for this aim, which seems obviously unachieved at the present.
Are you sure? How many are actually communist? US Antifa is much more extensively anarchist than it is communist (antifa is non-hierarchal), and outside of that, most of the rioters aren't espousing much in the way of an economic political ideology. Why do you think they are actually communist thugs? Being anti-fascist and/or anti-capitalist is not the same thing as being communist after all.
If communism had even reasonable approval you would have an actually influential communist party, and Trump using communist as an attack against Harris, would not be worth doing (because people would not see it as bad), nor would she have to say she isn't in response. In fact only 14% of Americans even have a favorable opinion of the term communism. (55% have a favorable opinion of the term capitalism just to contrast and socialism at 40%, 10% for Nazism/fascism).
I agree that worldwide communism is roughly as bad as Nazism, in as much as we are balancing huge amounts of horror. But in the US, the reason (in my opinion) why Nazism is seen as worse is that your own history is tangled up with racialized politics. Communism has no real significant negative history inside your nation, nor does it have any real chance of overturning your free(ish) market capitalism. Whereas you had an entire Civil War over an ideology that treated people differently because of race, which pattern matches much closer to Nazism, than Communism. That plus your "golden age" was just after defeating the Nazis and before the Cold War grew monstrously, so seeing the Nazis as the ultimate evil which the US defeated is part of the redemption myth-arc that many conservatives value. In overcoming a racist ideology, you began to overcome your own demons. It's not just left wingers who see Nazis as worse after all. The Silent Generation and Boomers dislike communism more than younger generations, but even they dislike fascism even more (roughly 43% think fascism is the most violent ideology, about 25% think communism or Marxism.)
You (as a nation) dislike Communism, but you HATE Nazis, because your own history is closer to almost becoming Nazis, than it is to becoming Communists. A nation that has emerged from Communism will probably hate Communists more than Nazis (Ukraine and Azov brigade as an example perhaps?) because of their experiences, not because they are making a rationally weighted decision that Communism is worse across the globe and all time than Nazism. So I think wanting America to hate Nazis and Communists just as much is only going to happen after you have a significant Communist government or civil war split across Communism vs Capitalism. Which I do not view as very likely, I admit.
(All stats are taken from polls commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation which works to try and educate Americans as to the fact that Communism/Marxism is as dangerous/more dangerous than fascism, so should if anything be swaying respondents to communism being bad. To be fair they do say: "Positive attitudes toward communism and socialism are at an all-time high in the United States. We have a solemn obligation to expose the lies of Marxism for the naïve who say they are willing to give collectivism another chance." so they agree with you directionally. Their own figures still show that it is regarded pretty negatively overall. They do accept donations and run museums and sponsor teacher certifications and the like, so if you do feel strongly about their mission, they do seem to be right up your alley so to speak. For transparency, I have donated to them before.)
I suppose that depends on how one defines "communist".
Let's suppose I define it as "generally-left-wing revolutionaries drawing significant ideological influence from Marx and the leaders of the various communist revolutions, rejecting capitalism and the existing rule-of-law and embracing lawless violence against their opponents." It seems to me that this definition covers the vast majority of the black-clad thugs committing lawless violence in numerous American cities, and that these thugs enjoy significant institutional support even from purportedly law-abiding progressive elites and institutions.
In concrete terms, what does this definition cost me in terms of predictive accuracy? Does it harm my ability to predict who they will ally with, who they will fight against, who will provide them with institutional protection and cover for their violence, which communities will allow them to operate and which they will avoid, etc? If it does not harm predictive accuracy in these matters, where does the predictive accuracy start breaking down, and what salient misconceptions result?
And yet, Communist gunmen can publicly take over portions of American cities, threaten people, even shoot people, and the police, local authorities and media look the other way and refuse to enforce the law against them. And because the media is actively covering for them, the public doesn't appear to grasp that this has happened, or why it is a serious problem.
Do you think there's a straightforward way to ensure that the law is enforced against such violent communist gangs, going forward?
If not, how should people like me go about securing similar tacit approval for our own armed, public infliction of violence on the people we deem deserving?
If the latter does not seem practicable, would it be fair to say that violent communist thugs, as I've defined them above, observably enjoy greater leniency than law-abiding Red Tribe types?
I don't think this is actually true. It seems obvious to me that communism was much more popular and for much longer than Naziism ever was, especially with my nation's elites and leadership. To the extent that America was never close to Gulags and mass starvation as a punitive policy, it was likewise never close to extermination camps. To the extent that it approached authoritarianism, it is not obvious to me that this potential authoritarianism was significantly more fascist than it was communist. Then too, it does not seem to me that the communists were actually immune to persecuting and even exterminating large groups of people on the basis of ethnicity.
I also note that countries that came far closer to falling to communism, like much of Western Europe, and even countries that partially DID fall to Communism, like Germany, conspicuously lack the antibodies to Communism that your argument implies they should possess.
I propose an alternative hypothesis: my nation dislikes Communism but HATES Naziism, because large and influential portions of my country's elite have been broadly sympathetic to Communism, and have systematically downplayed its evils in the public consciousness. There is no principled reason why Communist Atrocity should not be its own film category, in the manner of Holocaust films. There is no principled reason why our history education focuses so much on the one and so consistently ignores the other. Having spent some effort to educate myself, I find I am capable of hating them both, and see no reason why my fellow countrymen should not share this capacity. I note that academia and the media seem obsessed with maintaining the hatred one way, and have a long history of hagiography for the other, from Duranty on down to the evergreen academic studies on Marx and Lenin and Mao as serious, useful thinkers.
What's their plan for changing attitudes on this issue? How does it compare to Progressive plans for changing attitudes toward, say, LGBT+ issues?
It hinders your accuracy because it elides the differences inside the group. If they are Marxist communists then you are at risk of a Stalinist totalitarian state. If they are anarchists they might want to tear down the state but do not want it replaced. They'll be happy to burn a police station, but aren't going to reintroduce the Stasi.
Both might be the same now, but one is much more dangerous long term. You are always going to have people who want to tear down whatever the current system is. That is a given. Anarchists are a low threat though overall, they won't harness state power for gulags, or death camps. They're street level problems. Marxist communists onnthe other hand are a different kettle of fish.
Also it will mean you will miss steps (see Hitler vs Rohm) If antifa gained any sort of power, and starts infighting (which given it is a coalition defined by being against something and has multiple factions who disagree on what should be built instead it will) it is absolutely crucial to understand whether Marxist communists or anarchists or whoever started it and who is winning. Because that is going to be crucial as to what happens next. Out-group homogenity bias means you lose information about your opponents. If you are correct and elites are communist friendly. Then it is highly likely they will have to purge or get rid of an anarchist antifa for example. Again see Rohm. Is an elite clamp down on antifa proof of moderation or proof they are cleaning house to take over more thoroughly? Is it a welcome return to law and order or another Night of Long Knives? Without considering that antifa is not all the same, and understanding factionalism inside it, you will have no clue.
Now I am not arguing if you are caught in a dark alley with black bloc, it makes much of a difference, but socio-politically it really does.
As for the foundation, here is the link. So you can evaluate for yourself.
https://victimsofcommunism.org/
Then how do you explain the notable role Anarchists played in both the Bolshevik movement and in the construction of the actual Stalinist totalitarian state? I understand that they, like many of their Marxist Communist brethren, were subsequently murdered by the Stalinist totalitarian state that they had worked so hard together to build, but that doesn't change the fact that they did in fact build it, does it?
Likewise, you appear to be aware that Anarchists and Marxist Communists fight together here and now with the explicit goal of destroying our present society, and you appear to be explicitly claiming that we shouldn't worry about the Anarchists because if they're only active, dedicated allies of the people who want to commit mass murder, not planning mass murder themselves. I have zero confidence that even a pure Anarchist revolution would not generate mass murder, since I do not believe their ideology is even slightly coherent or grounded in reality, and I observe that utopian left-wing revolutionaries have a long track record of papering over the failures of their ideologies by killing the people they find most visibly inconvenient. Marxist Communism likewise had no history of mass murder until it actually won, and then the mass murders began immediately. Why should we suppose it would be different for the Anarchists, even if by some miracle they should manage not to simply empower another Stalin like they did the last several times?
The other part that I don't get is how you recognize that both of these groups are actively working to destroy the present peace, and then expect, should they succeed, for the results to somehow bifurcate based on which of the two is dominant over the other. Again, you seem to recognize that there is no observable separation between the two in their current actions, which are directed at destroying the relative peace and order of our present society. To the extent that they succeed in that goal, the next step is not that we get either an Anarchist or a Marxist Communist revolution, but rather Reds joining the political violence game wholesale, decisively ending peace and order for the foreseeable future. Avoiding that eventuality should be your priority, and in this there is no meaningful distinction between them. To the extent that you are willing either to tolerate either lawless violence from the Anarchists or the tacit support granted that violence by Blue institutions, it seems to me that you are, wittingly or not, endorsing Red violence as well. To the extent that you wish to forestall Red violence, it behooves you to forestall Anarchist violence and the tacit support granted to it in equal measure to Marxist Communist violence.
I disagree, because it does not seem to me that the nature of Antifa allows tight coordination with the authorities such that this sort of factionalism would be a concern. Antifa are thugs, and they are utilized as a deniable, arms-length tool by Blue elites. Their usefulness begins and ends with using violence to shut down and demoralize Reds, and all that the Elites provide for this is turning a blind eye. There is no plausible scenario where Antifa themselves actually end up in power. Their significance begins and ends with their ability to inflict lawless violence without consequence, and that significance is not altered by the ideological peculiarities of the various factions. They attack people Blues don't like, and Blues let them because Blues derive social and political advantage from the resulting chaos and dismay. The ultimate concern is the Blues running this system, and it is difficult to see how the differences between Marxist Communists and Anarchists register compared to the reality of the system as a whole. Likewise if one faction or the other were to be purged; the problem is the people in control of the system, not the pawns. Are they allowing lawless violence, or are they punishing it? If they arrest one faction and tell the other that they have to lay low, then they're not tolerating violence. If they arrest one faction but give the other free reign, they are tolerating violence. Which faction is doing or not doing the violence is irrelevant.
Blue Tribe toleration of their violence can permanently destroy peace and order either way, and their differences don't materially impact that destruction in any meaningful way. So no, I don't think it really does, socio-politically or in any other way.
I think you are misunderstanding me. I think anarchists are bad, and I think Marxist communists are bad. And I do not support either of their visions of the future, because I think either will be significantly worse than current. However, it is still really important to understand the differences, in local terms. Violence on the streets is generally bad, but it is not as bad as either a communist state or a complete state of anarchy.
Even granting your entire premise about the Blue Tribe using antifa, it has a number of different outcomes, depending on exactly what happens.
2)Actual Marxist-communists have or gain control over antifa and use it as part of a campaign to institute real communism - this is exceptionally unlikely but would be catastrophic.
I am saying pragmatically, that what happens next and how bad it is, can depend very much on who has, or gains control. You think it won't be 2) or 3) and I agree it is unlikely. But the world is full of more extreme people winning internal struggles and seizing power over an organization (See IRA to Provisional IRA to the "Real' IRA and so on). If one had the ability to know which splinter faction was going to take leadership, you could do something about it.
If I tell you, a hardline communist will take control of antifa (which would obviously have to include some amount of re-organization and purging) from say distributed Blue Tribe Bob's, do you think they will be less violent or more? If you had a choice of preventing it is your argument that it wouldn't really make a difference? As you yourself point out, the Blues want to run the system roughly as it is now. And if antifa is more anarchist than communist, then who you need to be keeping an eye out for and what kind of changes might be indicative of an increase in threat is very different.
I've lived with a simmering ideological conflict between factions, which includes street violence and much more and it isn't a picnic by any stretch of the imagination...but kids can still go to school and play in the park and listen to music and you can still watch the football and bbq (assuming Northern Irish weather allowed for it!). It's not an existential threat to the system. And the destruction of the system in a nation of 330 million people will be catastrophic.
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Antifa’s closet historical analogues are the Tsarist Black Hundreds, urban lumpenproletariat thugs doing violence against the working class in the service of a failed dictatorship.
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I was more describing why people felt that way rather than claiming it was correct. It was on the "is" side of the "is-ought" divide. Staying on that side for a moment, I can't think of any atrocities committed by Communists that had the same death toll x deliberateness that the Holocaust had. It had some with plausibly higher death totals, and some that were just as deliberate, but none that were both.
Moving to the "ought" part, I think Communism should be lumped in with Nazism broadly as "Authoritarianism" and stand in contrast to Democracy or Liberalism. We can quibble over exactly how much proportional guilt should be assigned to something like the Cultural Revolution compared to the Holocaust (0.5x? 0.8x?) but any measurements would pale in comparison to how relatively well-behaved democracies have been. They've obviously done some bad things themselves (e.g. Japanese internment), but the difference in scale and severity is readily apparent.
ANTIFA is not guilty of widespread political violence since it's not popular enough to generate such action, and BLM can't reasonably be called communist.
Deranged leftists on Twitter are not evidence of widespread communist sympathies. At least, they're no more evidence than deranged right-wingers on 4chan or this very site(!) are of widespread Nazi sympathies.
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The reason the hammer and sickle doesn't draw the same level of opprobrium as the swastika is the same reason anything associated with the Ottomans, or the Mongols,.or the Huns, or the Sudanese, or any other murderous regime doesn't either. There's a tacit understanding that this kind of behavior is historically common and continues to be common until a civilization reaches a certain level of development. Russia had always been a backwater so it was easy to dismiss Stalin as a thug, and most other Communist countries were even further behind economically, culturally, scientifically, and socially. Germany, on the other hand, was one of the most advanced countries in Europe, and had been viewed as such for a long time. The Holocaust wasn't the same kind of mass butchery that had always existed; it was a high-tech process optimized for efficiency with every detail down to the amount of gold extracted from dental fillings meticulously recorded, perpetrated by an army of bureaucrats in business suits and a leader who had been popularly elected. The idea that "progress" could lead to something like that was terrifying.
The Soviets were treated in the media as one of the most advanced countries in the world.
I'll suggest the conflict theory explanation instead: The average person doesn't think Communism is very bad because decades of leftist media propaganda has tried to minimize any bad things that Communists did from at least the 1960s until Communism died out. And even afterwards, they never tried to stir up hysteria about Communists being around every corner like they did with fascists.
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