Re: And how did you celebrate 1 May?

David Friedman wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 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

Ah, but we have a larger sample of fascist governments (and would you
personally care to live under one?). We should probably also look at who
qualifies as client states (how 'bout the US-paid-for and supplied
right-wing death squads in Central America? Or the dictatorship in Chile?
What *do* those qualify as? They are most *certainly* not left wing, in
general, and for US funding, they always claim to be anti-leftists.

> 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

Because the Revolution was led by someone who meant what he said, and
wasn't
a nut case?

And how 'bout Vietnam?

> 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.
> 
If you make that fascism and other names of right-wing dictatorships, I
don't think so.

        mark