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@reprobate said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
@Nepia spot on, but ideologues will attempt to seize on anything to "prove" they are right. In this case, Stalin and Mao means that right wing politics is better than left. Not often you get to hear something so blatantly stupid said in absolute seriousness, I suggest you enjoy it for the joke that it is.
I know this doesn't fit your world view, but it's just a fact that left wing policies taken to their extreme have killed many millions more people.
Not a controversial point at all, just history.
Dictatorships were just the mechanism in place to deliver those ideas.
This all started because Nepia bristled at the distinction of a communist dictator, claiming a false equivalence with the damage done by right wing dictators. Not even close.
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@reprobate said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
@Kirwan how did Hitler go?
He was comparable to Pol Pot, but an amateur compared to Stalin or Mao. He's also an outlier, can you name another right wing dictator that compared with these guys?
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@reprobate said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
@Kirwan if we're talking in single digits then they are all outliers.
So you can't name another one?
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If you have an x axis with Communism on the left and Fascism on the right, with modern liberal democracies in the centre - what is the x axis actually measuring? It's a meaningless arbitrary scale
Collectivism vs Individualism is a much more coherent scale
National socialism realised you did not need ownership of the means of production. You just had to have control over the means of production.
Communism would still be on the far left, Fascism quite far left and modern liberal democracies would be to the right of centre.
Damn these collectivist monsters and their apologists
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@reprobate said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
@Kirwan how did Hitler go?
He was also not a right winger. He was yet another socialist...
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I don't support Castro as being a paragon of anything, and while I can read through his policy beliefs and achievements and see some good left-wing policies among them, I dislike others, and think some of the methods were outright homicidal and evil.
More generally, I might be a leftie, but I don't support Trotsky-ism/Lenin-ism, don't believe that the ends justify the means (which is where a lot the elimination of opposition by any means necessary comes from in Lenin and Trotsky's writing), and don't think the state needs to own the means of production of everything. There is plenty of room for state/government intervention without killing political opponents, creating gulags or opening political prisons, and these are not exclusive to the political left. My macroeconomic preferences are closer to Keynes than Marx. Social democratic beliefs are not socialism, and the bulk of lefties are not communists or socialists.
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@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
@reprobate said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
@Kirwan how did Hitler go?
He was also not a right winger. He was yet another socialist...
if you actually think that, then you ought to do a bit more reading on the subject.
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@reprobate said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
@reprobate said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
@Kirwan how did Hitler go?
He was also not a right winger. He was yet another socialist...
if you actually think that, then you ought to do a bit more reading on the subject.
I have read plenty about it thanks. He was a member of the Workers Party and then the National Socialists, it has been proposed that he was a 'spy' but that was never proven... and remains just a claim... quite baseless one at that. It is also claimed that he was not a socialist because he hated communism, but as history shows left wingers are never slow to purge other left wingers.
The reality is that he espoused MANY left wing views such as big controlling government, loss of liberty and personal freedom and govt control over both citizens and means of production.
If you had just stuck with claiming he was not a left winger you might have had a chance. But you seem to think he was right wing, which is a bit silly really given the party he belonged to, how he controlled the govt and the form the govt took. And that is before you even look at his personal statements on the matter.Such as
"German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas "I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun", adding revealingly that "the whole of National Socialism" was based on Marx."""find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution". Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route - a long and needlessly painful route - and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had "averaged downwards"; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known. It is plain that Hitler and his associates meant their claim to socialism to be taken seriously; they took it seriously themselves."
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@dogmeat said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
Don't want to get dragged into this truly bizarre pissing comp but Catholic Church more than likely outdoes all dictators of any political persuasion - combined.
Who here has actually been to Cuba?
Dictators by different name, and weirder clothes?
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@dogmeat said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
Don't want to get dragged into this truly bizarre pissing comp but Catholic Church more than likely outdoes all dictators of any political persuasion - combined.
You're probably right, but I had a look and the Chinese are pretty bad historically - Mao was the worst numerically, but they seem to have a habit of serious civil wars and atrocities... Genghis Khan would be up there as well, especially in terms of percentages of populations, as he had a nasty habit of ordering the slaughter of entire cities of tens of thousands of people, including the women and children.
Pre-20th century, King Leopold II of Belgium is high on the list for his efforts in the Congo.
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No love for Ghengis or Kublai Khan in this thread?
FFS, the point Nepia was making (which was totally misconstrued) was that dictators are dictators and are bad despite political leanings. The absurdity of doing body counts to try and prove that the political leanings of dictators makes them seemingly more efficient killing machines is some of the stupidest shit posted.
It's like the stupidity of the Road Toll with an emphasis on the number of dead rather that the number of death causing accidents (ie one minivan with 5 people having one accident is supposedly worse than four separate accidents on the same stretch of road with one death in each)
What is worse? The actual number of bodies, the percentage of the persecuted group wiped out or the political cause and effect of the actions?
Makes no difference. Assholes be assholes. -
@Crucial said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
@booboo said in Add Fidel to the 2016 body count:
I was kind of thinking a better comparison was serial killers. Gays v Heterosexual. ie Dahmer v Bundy. Who was more evil ... ?
That obviously depends on which one voted Green.
Duh. Dahmer
RIP 2017