Quote:
Originally Posted by microbet
That's a vanishingly small subset of people. But, I think anti-communist crusaders, whether it be because that's just their political beliefs or often they come from people who fled communist countries/revolutions like Cuba or Vietnam, will take any talk about communism or Marxism to be signing on for the atrocities of Stalin or Mao. And they take any talk about how maybe it's not communism that caused those events and other economic systems, ideologies or greed have caused atrocities throughout history as whataboutism that somehow is excusing Stalin and Mao.
Nationalism is certainly partly to blame for many atrocities including Stalin's and especially Hitler's, but you're allowed to be patriotic without someone telling you that 100 million people have died because of patriotism. Even when racists are rebuked they are rarely blamed for endorsing all the past horrors of racism.
Far from being a No True Communist, I think a good argument can be made that Stalin is really the only successful communist history has produced. Obviously he was terrible, but you really can't argue with his results. After Lenin basically destroyed the Soviet economy,* Stalin transformed it into an industrial powerhouse, and by the middle of WWII built the greatest war machine the world had seen up to that point, then used it to impose communism throughout Eastern Europe. Compared to Stalin, all the other notable communists--Mao, Lenin, Trotsky--were basically aimless murderers who shot people by the magazine for no particular reason other than to instill terror and hope it would magically bring about communism. Stalin had a clear plan, seized political power, killed anyone he thought might be a threat, then set about starving or killing anyone who was surplus to requirements and forced the rest to work on his grand national plan.
I'm not saying Stalin was good obviously. He was extremely bad. The reason, though, is that communism is bad. To implement it, you need to destroy a lot of people's way of life, and to force them to acquiesce to that you need to kill a bunch of them or send them to the gulag, and to keep political power while you're doing that you need to kill all your rivals. That's the path. In light of that, you can pretty much divide real world communists into three categories:
-Real Communists: Stalin only
-Aimless murderers: Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Pol Pot. Happy to kill lots of people, but lack the ability to accomplish anything through their murderers.
-Social democrats who don't like democracy: People like Castro. Laudably choose not to impose a real communist transformation on their countries, and instead aim for social democracy, except instead of the democracy part you have a king and no one has any rights.
EDIT: Forgot my footnote!:
*It is technically true that Lenin revived the Soviet economy with the NEP, but that basically meant abandoning communism so as to allow the economy to recuperate after the depredations of war communism. It's not a communist success story.