Re: And how did you celebrate 1 May?

In article <pqedncnjv9Ij-oPVnZ2dnUVZ_vadnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 mark <whitroth@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> Sean O'Hara wrote:
> > In the Year of the Earth Rat, the Great and Powerful Dan Goodman
> > declared:
> >> Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Dan Goodman <dsgood@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >>>> With the Nazis, it was a matter of principle.
> >>> Same with the Communists.  With Nazis it was race; with Communists
it
> >>> was social class.
> >> 
> >> No, it was a mere matter of policy.
> > 
> > Look at the current debate between Russia and the Ukraine about
> > whether the engineered famine of the '30s was genocide. The Russians
> > claim it wasn't on the grounds that they weren't singling out any
> > ethnicity -- they were persecuting them based upon their refusal to
> > go along with collectivization. In other words, it was a policy
> > based upon the principles of Communism.
> 
> I'm not a Communist, but I don't think that was the "principles of
> Communism". More correctly, those were the "principles" of a homicidal
> psychopath.
> 
>         mark

But then, the same could be said for the Final Solution, mutatis 
mutandis. 

We have a sample of one independent Nazi government. We have a larger 
sample of communist governments. Not all of them were murderous on 
something like the the Nazi scale--I think Cuba is pretty clearly an 
exception, although that may be partly because it was easier for people 
to leave--but at least four that I can think of were, and one of those 
killed a considerably larger fraction of the people it controlled than 
the Nazis did. 

So on the whole, I think the evidence that murdering very large numbers 
of people is closely connected to communism is better than the evidence 
that it is closely connected to Nazism.

-- 
 http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
 Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
 Published by Baen, paperback in bookstores now