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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34003 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Hitler's stated goals (which really are those same identity politics you are talking about) are taken to be evil, but the goals of Lenin and Mao are generally actually perceived as a deontological or virtuous good even by many of those (common in the US) who consider them a utilitarian evil.

What was Hitler's stated goal, in your view?

The Communists' stated goal was to make a better world by killing everyone who didn't fit into it, a number they generally estimated at ~10% of extant humans.

The Communists' stated goal was to make a better world by killing everyone who didn't fit into it

That is not remotely the goal of Communists. Especially stated. The goal of Communists is to maximize personal freedom and prosperity.

"There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror." -Karl Marx, 1848

"Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ... Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people." -V. Lenin, 1918

To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated. — Grigory Zinoviev, 1918

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.— Martin Latsis, Red Terror

...And of course, these quotations describe the policies Communists actually used when they seized power. The idea that identifiable classes of humans were evil by nature and would need to be exterminated to secure Utopia was explicitly baked into the ideology from the start.

And? Doesn't change what I said or the fact you're objectively wrong. The goal is to help people grow stronger.

Obviously "Communists" are not childish idiots with a terminally naive utopian pacifism. Almost by definition they are self selected from the more hardcore and roughneck of the greater socialist umbrella. They are willing to do what must be done to survive and thrive. But if everyone woke up tomorrow willing to work in peace and be a "Communist," or at least friendly, there would be no need for fighting nor an iota of desire for it - and the overwhelming majority would soon become richer and more prosperous with net utilitarian gains. It's a very prosocial ideology. It's generally right-wing ideologies that are characterized by a desire to mass murder the different.

Like, those 1918 quotes are from a period of straight up revolution and civil war, which they did not start nor desire. The initial Russian coup was fairly bloodless, but certain people weren't having it and were willing to kill and drag the country, if not world, into war and chaos to make sure it didn't happen. Do you oppose law & order, or the right to defend yourself? Do you think people shouldn't commit to war?

The idea that identifiable classes of humans were evil by nature and would need to be exterminated

Again, and? Do you think there or no evil people in society? Or is this just rank hypocrisy where those you perceive to be evil of course deserve to be suppressed if not eliminated, but when other people do it... And you're wrong, the thing about class is you specifically don't need to exterminate anyone nor is it by inborn nature. This isn't HBD. You can simply cast off the clothes of a class and you'll be fine. The nature of Communism guarantees dignified proper livelihood regardless of your personage, even if you're no longer a 1% elite.

See the case of former emperor Puyi and that one movie The Last Emperor, as a visual example.

a number they generally estimated at ~10% of extant humans.

Citation?

The early Soviet communists were explicitly pro-terror and against "Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life", but I was under the impression that they were imagining a world where a relatively small amount of terror and murder would be sufficient to make everybody else fall in line. Maybe my recollections are muddled with later leftist movements, but I could swear I recall even early Communism being very pro-equality, to the point of having theories of psychology where people are all basically the same underneath and the fact that some of them eventually want to be evil capitalist oppressors is just because they got an evil capitalist upbringing. Maybe I'm wrong, though - "reeducation camps" were a feature of lots of later strains of Communism but the Gulags didn't really bother to put on such an optimistic "we're trying to fix you for your own good" facade.

To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated. — Grigory Zinoviev, 1918

Early Communism was indeed very pro-equality, but it also viewed humans as the output of social forces, presumed that bad social forces could make bad humans, and was not shy about advocating that bad humans should be "liquidated". Once Communists gained power, this sort of liquidation was routine wherever they gained power.

I was wondering if maybe your citation would be nutpicking, and worried when I didn't recognize the name, but shame on my ignorance. The "chairman of the Communist International from 1919 to 1926" is a pretty solid reference. Thanks.

I think you specifically would've been around last time I had a similar discussion, but Hitler's stated goal was to make the world better for ethnic Germans at no expenses spared for other ethnicities (and with particular vengeance towards some specific ones that he considered their sworn enemies). For better or worse, most people consider such a goal already more evil than the same thing with people selected by socioeconomic status, but that's neglecting that the communists' stated goal as commonly understood does not mandate killing or even displacing any fixed set of people (that's why they ran reeducation camps).

Having to kill capitalists rather than being able to brainwash them all into becoming good workers was presumably seen by most communists (with the exception perhaps of outliers like Cambodia) as a failure and unfortunate compromise with reality. If you conflate "do terrible thing to everyone who doesn't fit in your world" and "do terrible thing to everyone who you can't reform to fit in your world no matter how much you try", then everyone supporting law and order in the US could also be said to want to make a better world by brutally robbing the liberty of everyone who doesn't fit into it, a number that is bounded below at ~0.5% of the US population.

Hitler's stated goal was to make the world better for ethnic Germans at no expenses spared for other ethnicities (and with particular vengeance towards some specific ones that he considered their sworn enemies).

Can you point me (or us) to Hitler's statements on this?

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