> People can freely call themselves communists or socialists, and few seem to have a problem.
(1) huge amounts of people do in fact rage uncontrollably at any idea that might be labeled "socialist", and (2) socialism encompasses such a wide variety of views, from anarchist and libertarian ideas, yes to Stalinist tankies. I'd wager the latter are a fringe minority.
> Being a communist absolutely makes you an evil person.
Tell me you don't know what communism is without telling me you don't know what communism is.
Yes, every known communist country has been rife with fascism, authoritarianism, and corruption. But those are orthogonal with communism as an economic model. It's like saying socialism is evil because the Nazis were socialist (they really weren't) just because "Socialist" is part of "Nationalist Socialist Party" .
> In the UK last week (or the week before) one arm of the government ordered another arm of the government to kill a 9 year old.
[citation needed], because this sounds like an extremely gross misinterpretation of a situation, likely done deliberately in bad faith.
> Should they be banned too or is communism less directly associated with mass killing and is more in the legitimate ideology territory?
Yes, I think so. It is possible (and, I mean, even basically the default) to be an ideologically consistent communist without any interest in mass killing; that's far more difficult for literal Nazis.
> Historically as practiced communism has involved mass murder of class enemies for political reasons.
I mean, to some extent, what ideology _hasn't_? It's not a core and necessary component of most ideologies, though.
> This would only be a fair standard if also applied to Communists. In terms of sheer historical body count, there is no rival.
Depending on how I was born, nazis want to get rid of me.
Who exactly are these "communists" wanting to get rid of? And how can I spot those people?
A lot of people has died in the name of Christianity. Would you call Christianity violent in terms of ideals?
I don't disagree that communist regimes have killed innumerable people, and even if I disagree with communism and think it's a terrible idea, there is literally nothing in the tenets against groups of people or violence.
>My opinion is that killing and subjugating people is wrong, regardless of your motivation for doing so, unless your motivation is to stop people from killing and subjugating other people.
Well, the motivation of communists was to stop people from "killing and subjugating other people" in the form of imperialism, wage slavery, and so on.
So?
>That entire exercise seems incredibly silly to me.
> Simply existing as a communist might be a call to repeat the same mistakes of the 20th century, which are in no way less horrific than the mistakes of fascism.
Communism in itself does not imply violence towards minorities or putting people into Gulags. Nazism or fascism always does, the demonization of those not in the "Volkskörper" (or deemed too weak to be worthy) is the core ideology.
While I agree that autoritarian Communism has failed and those who still adore Stalin are morons, there are many more Communist views that do not resort to authoritarianism.
Nothing in there implies genocide, as far as I can tell. Anti-immigration policies that could be perceived as "racist", perhaps, but no genocide! And that's a left-wing slur, not a label that many would choose to use themselves.
>There are communists who, surprisingly, don't want to be dictators.
How can one take the means of production from the capitalists and give them to "the people" without "seizing power"? More generally speaking, how could you ever expect communal ownership and absence of a state to scale with the size of modern societies? And if you don't have these qualities, is it really communism?
The two of you are putting words in my mouth, when I never claimed to be a fascist or a Nazi sympathizer or what have you. But from my perspective, communist strains range from horrifyingly totalitarian and contradictory, to laughably naive, to so close to the status quo as to be meaningless. At least fascist ideologies are forward and internally consist, and sadly, I think, closer to the true nature of the world than we would like to admit.
I'm not sure what point you're missing here. If you invade another country, particularly with the intention of commiting genocide there, and you get killed for doing so, you are not a victim of the country you were trying to wipe out, or its ideology, you're a victim of your own actions.
> Yes, I noticed, you seem to think that as long as you and yours are fine, it does not matter if millions of other people are killed.
Okay, explain how the lives of the majority of people in Russia would have been improved under Nazi occupation than under Communism.
> Are you saying that those who had killed more people are perfectly fine, as long as they were killing people you do not particularly approve of?
"Communism" has not killed more people. That's simply a fantasy based on an absurd publication denounced as fictitious even by its own authors.
> communists, who did kill more people
So you keep insisting. Who are you trying to convince, me or you?
> you do not consider those killed to be people [...] worth counting.
I don't believe people who were not killed by Communism should be counted as being killed by Communism.
> What does it have to do with anything?
What does any of this thread have to do with your incorrect insistence, supported by no credible source, that the famine of 1921 was a "forced famine"?
> I have heard there are quite a few people who do not think that many Jews were killed by nazis. And there are different numbers, too
And do you accept any of their different numbers?
> Who, do you think, those people really do not like to associate with?
> Imagine a world where you could say "Communism is bad" with the same impunity as you can say "Naziism is bad"...
I can imagine a world where "Communism", like "Naziism", was a label for a single system of government implemented by a single group of people in one time and place in history, with no theoretical model (and prior practical advocacy) that shared the same name but had substantial differences.
OTOH, that world is very much different from the real world, so when one wants to criticize one of the things called Communism, one needs to be careful in identifying which it is, since there are multiple of them, and they have different traits.
I view self identified communists as I would self-identified Nazis.
Both are horrendous philosophies that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
reply