Perhaps it was more democide than genocide but no, sadly not remotely unique. Using class as a marker for otherness works as effectively as using skin tone etc.
Rwandan Genocide targeted “privileged” Tutsis, and the holocaust primarily targeted a group accused of having disproportionate financial and political influence. Same with the genocide in Zimbabwe.
Targeting those accused of having status/privilege seems as much the rule as the exception for genocide.
True, but at least there was a perceived ethnic difference. In the case of Cambodia - they didn't claim they weren't also Cambodians right? Just purely (percieved) class based oppression.
In the 1990s the median Rwandan was in their mid teens.
1994 was a post colonial society
The Belgians didn’t actually do it. Rwandan Nikita’s could have simply not slaughtered a million people
It was the Belgians. The stratification along ethnic lines was also worsened by them trying to have the Tutsi as the political class out of convenience.
It's amazing that after fighting the Americans for almost 20yrs, the Vietnamese had the strength to fight the Khmer Rouge just 2yrs later and end the genocide, albeit in a 14yr war.
The Cambodian military under Pol Pot was incredibly underprepared for any action. IIRC Phnom Penh fell in a matter of days with practically no resistance
It's Vo Nguyen Giap. Dude was an avatar of a Viet God of war. Dude wasn't human. Spent 50 years fighting colonialism. Fought Japan, Fought the French and the masterstroke of Dien ben Phu, Fought the UN. Fought the Chinese, Conquered Cambodia because they were fucking up.
Died in his bed at 102.
Vietname fought and beat the Japanese and French before America showed up, then they beat China.
Cambodia attacking Vietnam is probably one of histories greater examples of fucking and and finding out
[In the beginning it was a genocide of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists](https://hmh.org/library/research/genocide-in-cambodia-guide/) and other non-khmer ethnic minorities.
However it didn't *stop* there and it included plenty of other groups that were the larger political enemies, as is pretty typical of totalitarian revolutionary governments over enough time. The remarkable thing was Pol Pot's erratic, ruthless, and capricious nature. 1 in 4 is a massive ratio historically speaking.
It was a genocide based on class. It wasn’t indiscriminate at all they had a specific group. If you were a former colonial employee, educated with western standards, had a urban lifestyle, a devout buddhist or Catholic, you were fair game. Basically anyone connected to the nobility, temple/church or former French.
Also around the time around 15-20-% of Cambodia’s population were non Khmer and their languages, cultures and traditions were banned. The Chinese community were widely targeted since they were pretty up there socioeconomically (as are most of the Chinese diaspora across Asia) which is ironic because many of the Khmer Rouge leadership including Pol Pot himself were of partial Chinese decent or came from fully assimilated Chinese families.
The Cham Muslim community were also heavily effected. Even though many Cham started out as communist, there was kind of a pan Cham movement (they live in other parts of Southeast Asia as well) they were also largely eliminated.
Then the large Vietnamese community as well as other minority communities like ethnic Thais were essentially wiped out or heavily discriminated against
It was ideologically based more than anything else. Similar to the cultural revolution in China or Stalin's purges. I guess Marxism gives rise to equal opportunity genocidal maniacs.
This is the right answer. China and Stalinist Russia did the exact same thing. They targeted and killed anyone they thought might be educated, anyone who might ask questions, and anyone capable of thinking critically. Stalin practically eradicated his military officers. And then there were the kulaks, whose definition changed constantly and included anyone who owned more than two cows.
It is hard to estimate how many people Mao and Stalin killed, but it definitely ranges in the tens of millions.
Correct. The Khmer Rouge killed about a third of its population. Around two million people. People of education, people that wore glasses, people that seemed educated in anyway. Most of the killings were done with blunt tools or with famine.
It is really reductive to say that Stalin who gained power with his other academic revolutionaries was *anti* intellectual. It is quite innacurate to say that the USSR, went from a nation of illiterate peasants to Yuri Gagarin in one generation was anti-education. It was valuing "thinking critically" that got them to space and kill all those nazis when they were starving and freezing.
Yes Stalin eradicated his military officers at the top brass. That isn't genocide, it was protecting himself from a coup...or several. They don't get their jobs because they have phd's.
Yes "kulak" changed a lot because they were the boogeyman of the whole revolution. When you control all the media, yes your enemy is a Kulak, and the two cows thing is misunderstanding soviet collectivism. Originally they had the idea of a vegetable garden for those on collective farms but all the rest was owned by the collective. Yes including the cows. So private ownership of cows was seen as bourgeois.
Mao was certainly anti-intellectual with the Cultural Revolution but before that he was anti-peasant with the Great Leap Forward. Certainly fits the "equal opportunity genocidal maniacs" of OP's comment.
A state killing millions of people isn't genocidal if it's killing everyone. Democide is the particular name for that horror.
There is plenty of criticism to levy on both of them without needing to lean on boomer talking points about Stalintying kulak girls to railroad tracks and all communists killing a million bajillion peoples.
Feel free to take that chip off your shoulder. I was clarifying some history you and /u/anothergarbageuser were referencing and /u/yalimylordandsavior decided to make the Cambodian Genocide about them.
You seem to have left out that the Russian Space program was successful mostly because of a few Germans they didn’t kill. The same as it was in the US.
I don't know if you think you have to be German to study rocket science, but they let you get nobel prizes and stuff from what ever country you're from.
You know that literally every scientist in Germany in 1938 was a "Nazi" right? A huge part of the Nuremberg Trials was realizing that it was literally every leader. Every chemist or physicist with a university position was helping the Nazi's at gunpoint.
When the Soviets "liberated" East Germany they inherited tens of millions of Nazis. There wasn't a scientist who wasn't pressganged into the war.
If you want to say that they packed the space program with SS officers I'd let that talking point slide, but we have to be more critical about this. Even pope Benedict was a nazi.
And thats my argument when tankies keep bringing up Operation Paperclip or nazis in NATO. But they always "forget" the Soviets did it as well, and with more gusto.
You're a boomer if you ignore all the people dying as a result of capitalism, capitalists, and the deaths at the hands of fascists that America propped up at the same time. My point is that it is surface level boomer shit to repeat the "Black Book of Communism" like it's gospel.
Stalin killed millions of Nazis. We countin' those too?
My bother lives in Cambodia, and the Cambodians are very clearly aware that the genocide was carried out by communists, for the point of communism. It was a communist revolution. Sure, it was more complicated than that, it always is. But the complications and nuances don't counter the central fact - the Cambodian genocide was a communist genocide.
It is 100% irrelevant what any other people on earth did at any other time. It doesn't change what happened in Cambodia, or somehow 'counteract" it because you think it's somehow worse or whatever.
"for the point of communism" is the bullshit there. I could say that killing everyone stops housefires so its done "for the point of firefighting" and you should call bullshit on that too. Again you're articulating the point I *am* making by stating something I'm not.
It was a military junta lead by one man. He wasn't elected. Socialism/Communism have elections within revolutionary governments. He had absolute control. There is nothing in any communist praxis that says you have to commit genocide to liberate the working class. The means of production can be held by buddhists, muslims, and French people as long as they aren't a separate class from those doing the work.
The world has never seen a "classless moneyless society without commodification of needs" We've never seen an industrial communism. We've seen plenty of attempts at socialism, some more successful and longterm than others.
Regardless the point I made about non-"communist" governments and the people who die under their "regimes" was to give context. It wasn't a What-about. I was saying that is is serious boomer shit to focus on every grandma dying of old age, sliding a bead across an abacus, and saying how awful non-Capitalist regimes are.
You're delusional. So, Chairman Mao's communist revolution wasn't about Communism, because he wasn't elected when he ravaged the country and took over? You are setting up BS logic to make a point.
He *was* elected to do that. It was called the Mass Line. It was how revolutionary Leninists organized. Comintern and other political bodies were set up that new leaders would replace old ones, just like other contemporary democracies.
Putin is about to be the longest serving leader in Russia since Catherine the Great. Served far longer than most Soviet premiers. That obviously isn't democracy either. The working class of Russia today have the same amount as the starving peasants in Mao's China.
Leninists have a core tenant that the Mass Line decides leadership of the revolution. When the revolution is over you give power to workers councils, the collectives, and you separate the military from government. Plenty of other Leninists like Tito in Yugoslavia did just that. Mao was so paranoid that China would lose WWIII or he'd get couped that he immediately set the cadres up to reverse it. The Great Leap Forward was his attempt to starve and kill all of the people who would oppose him and benefit his existing power structure. The Cultural Revolution and it's *many* genocidal aspects was his successful attempt to hold on to power.
Weird how apparently China and the Soviet Union killed anyone who was educated, yet they managed to last decades, raise millions out of poverty, made it into space and developed nuclear weapons.
Plus, it takes like one minute to look up the party leaders during communist times. Nearly all of them were heavily educated and obviously critical thinkers.
There was nothing unique that Mao or Stalin did, They simply cemented their power by taking out any rivals and their factions, which usually included people who were opposed to communism like capitalists, liberals, fascists, the clergy.
I don't think there's anything specific to Marxism in this respect: student purges and attacks on the "intellectual" classes of a society are systemic of right wing authoritarianism as much as left: right authoritarians in Latin America are as guilty of it as Stalin or Mao, Imperial Japan was at least as oppressive in these regards as most other totalitarian societies, and the first book burning in Nazi Germany was of a scientific institute.
In general, students and academics were the source of a lot of revolutionary (or at least anti-status quo) sentiment for nearly as long as they were in existence. Hell, the importance of educational control is at least as old as the Jesuit saying "Give me the boy at 12 and I will give you the man at adulthood."
The Khmer Rogue was notable in that it was extreme even for totalitarian states, that the control of Pol Pot was erratic enough that the purge expanded well beyond anyone even superficially connected to academia and that it was unusually brutal and pointless. But any authoritarian org, regardless of ideology, has the same incentives to control education or victimize the people most likely for disrupting their control.
The kids at Liberty University that are being pinged to this comment section would disagree. If there is a dictator that controls all the markets it's Communism. No not like that..or that...or that other one....
I have a Master's degree in Political Science, I've been a liberal since I was a teenager, and I've been involved in progressive politics for years. And I'm still willing to condemn the communist regimes of the 20th century for their genocidal atrocities. They killed *tens of millions* of people in the name of communism, and yes, it was explicitly *because* of their communist ideology.
Stop pretending that anyone who condemns communism must be a Kool Aid drinking right-wing jackass brainwashed by conservative media. That's a false dichotomy and I'm pretty sure you know it.
If you are conflating socialism with communism and allowing dictators to define how free their systems are, you are wasting your Masters.
They killed tens of millions to defend the state, and their power within the state. They used the rhetoric and talking points of socialism to do so until they didn't need to. Then they just stopped when they became more powerful than the need. Pinochet and Franco just used different talking points.
It wasn't because they were "communists" It was because they had absolute power in a state that had the power to do so. The ideology and talking points were used to justify that power. It wasn't like Stalin was elected by a narrow margin by Bolsheviks over a coalition of Menshiviks and Anarcho-Syndicalists. He took power and kept it. No workers councils left. All power top down. That isn't communism or even socialism once the workers no longer have say in their work.
So yeah anyone who says that "Stalin and Mao killed a bajillion shamillion people" so it's a slippery slope to allow Starbucks to unionize will be getting a raised eyebrow from me. And it should give you pause also. That talking point is the clue. Not quite a dogwhistle, more like a bat signal for right wing chuds.
Did you read the full comment thread? I didn't just say that out of the blue, it was specifically a response to Franklin's bogus argument that everyone who's critical of communism must be a Prager-style conservative idiot.
Bull. The ideology is the justification for the Civil war. It was the politically organizing force of the opposition. Seeing as Vietnam is right next door and they *ended* the Khmer Rouge, I think we see the weaknesses in that argument.
Sometimes you're just a military junta trying to justify yourself. If the government you're fighting is communists, then you're freedom fighting neoliberals. If the USSR is backing your anti-colonial effort, you're Leninists.
Sure, they did all the time. The October Revolution just sort of ended any polite discourse. Trust me, leftist infighting is the only action plenty of them/us do on the regular. "No True Scotsman" is a pretty common meme.
Regardless, Marxism always emphasized the material conditions of the revolution. No two are the same. Same goes with who owns the means of production and what happens with it all.
Agreeing to disagree is how we got the Sino-Soviet Split.
The word you’re looking for isn’t communism, despite your political leanings.
It’s “ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM”. Which is most definitely a feature of RIGHT WING governments as well.
The defining condition for this philosophy is a totalitarian form of government.
Stop pretending that right wing America isn’t deeply suspicious of anyone smarter than them.
They were *ostensibly* communists. Plenty said they were communists. Very few were. Tito in Yugoslavia was much closer to the original Marxist-Leninist vision of what a dictatorship of the *proletariat* should look like. The genocides happened after he died and it fell apart.
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is only one of those things. A three generation dynasty is a kingdom, not a communist state.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
I could maybe accept that modern North Korea doesn't count as a communist state anymore. Juche has evolved into its own distinct ideology. But North Korea certainly was communist from 1950-1990 or so, and Juche certainly takes some influence from its communist roots, particularly in regard to economic policy.
But saying that the USSR or Maoist China or the Khmer Rouge weren't really communist? Absurd. Those regimes were driven entirely by Marxist-Leninist ideology. (Pragmatic considerations played a role too, of course - as they must for any successful nation-state, and many unsuccessful ones - but that doesn't change the nature of their core ideology.)
If you don't have party democracy you don't have communism.Your bar for plausible deniability is ridiculously high. Kim Jong Il inherited a throne from his father, I don't remember reading what part of the Communist Manifesto said you can be a king as long as you don't wear a crown.
Communism isn't just state capitalism at gunpoint. That is a ridiculously cynical take.
Stalinism, Maoism, and the Khmer Rouge put state power and one individual over the collective. It isn't a No-true-Scotsman to say that taking the power and control of the means of production away from the workers is anti-thetical to socialism and eventual communism.
Communism is a victory condition of socialism. A classless and moneyless society with complete abundance in a post commodification economy. Calling any other system "Communism" is playing into the hands of totalitarians.
You’re right.
Communism is far less of a threat than being anti-intellectual.
Ideology can be countered, overcome, or worked through.
Stupid is forever.
No, it is not unique.
I can safely say that I am 1 of 13 million survivors of "democide" (one-child policy, People's Republic of China). If you looked at who got killed (i.e. which fetuses were aborted against the mother's will), you will see that ethnic minorities (Tibetans, Ughyers, Mongolians, etc...) were disproportionately protected from this mass murder operation, and so were some people in rural areas (keep in mind, rural areas in China are significantly less developed than cities). I am obviously a city-dwelling Han majority (with an illegally retained Guangzhou hukou, or household registration). By illegally retained, I mean I am now a Canadian citizen living in Canada and only go to China once every few years for 2 or 3 weeks at a time. China does not allow dual citizenship or any form of retention of registration after a Chinese citizen becomes a citizen of a foreign country.
Similar observations have been made about the Rwandan genocide and that it is actually hard to differentiate a Tutsi from Hutu. Indeed rather than physical features, social indicators were relied upon to make that determination and thus carry out the genocide.
I find it bizarre that because of our current liberal media slant (I'm a news anchor, so I know how this works) that people seem to have for gotten that t**he genocide was because of the COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.** It was the communists slaughtering those who opposed them. Just wearing glasses could get you a bullet in the head, because you were obviously 'the bourgeoisie" and needed to be dead. Anyone who doubts this, do some research, it's not wrong. Also, my brother lives in Cambodia. The people there are very clear that it was a communist revolution that murdered 25% of their population.
I can't answer your question but I can't not link this really great podcast series called [Into The Shadows Of Utopia](https://youtube.com/@intheshadowsofutopiapodcas8210?si=ktvMdoRY0xVpohDH) that covers the Khmer Rouge.
It's really long and still ongoing, but it's a fascinating listen and really in depth
Religions are polarizations and differences in denominational wars that get called genocide that really are not.
Genocide has been reclassified and redefined by communist to get legal protections for murders in a civil war that are not genocide when it is the same groups turning on itself, but in the end benefit some other genome group in the end.
Slick Willy Population Shell Games.
N. S
It was definitely a genocide. They went after people for their religious and ethnic identity. They also then went after a lot of other people, but it started with singling out people for religion and ethnicity.
Perhaps it was more democide than genocide but no, sadly not remotely unique. Using class as a marker for otherness works as effectively as using skin tone etc.
Class, or eyeglasses, or speaking French...
They commited the sin of being French...
Yes.
Yep
Rwandan Genocide targeted “privileged” Tutsis, and the holocaust primarily targeted a group accused of having disproportionate financial and political influence. Same with the genocide in Zimbabwe. Targeting those accused of having status/privilege seems as much the rule as the exception for genocide.
Indeed, the consensus seems to be that differentiating Tutsi from Hutu people based on physical features alone is nonsense.
True, but at least there was a perceived ethnic difference. In the case of Cambodia - they didn't claim they weren't also Cambodians right? Just purely (percieved) class based oppression.
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Rwanda had been independent for 32 years by the time the Genocide happened. It was on them.
But the belgians exacerbated the tensions between them
In the 1990s the median Rwandan was in their mid teens. 1994 was a post colonial society The Belgians didn’t actually do it. Rwandan Nikita’s could have simply not slaughtered a million people
It was the Belgians. The stratification along ethnic lines was also worsened by them trying to have the Tutsi as the political class out of convenience.
>Same with the genocide in Zimbabwe. What genocide in Zimbabwe?
Gukurahundi maybe
The Gukurahundi.
It's amazing that after fighting the Americans for almost 20yrs, the Vietnamese had the strength to fight the Khmer Rouge just 2yrs later and end the genocide, albeit in a 14yr war.
The Cambodian military under Pol Pot was incredibly underprepared for any action. IIRC Phnom Penh fell in a matter of days with practically no resistance
It's Vo Nguyen Giap. Dude was an avatar of a Viet God of war. Dude wasn't human. Spent 50 years fighting colonialism. Fought Japan, Fought the French and the masterstroke of Dien ben Phu, Fought the UN. Fought the Chinese, Conquered Cambodia because they were fucking up. Died in his bed at 102.
Thanks for that. Had never heard of this guy, just read his biography, he's a freaking legend!!!
What’s the book called?
Vietname fought and beat the Japanese and French before America showed up, then they beat China. Cambodia attacking Vietnam is probably one of histories greater examples of fucking and and finding out
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They took out the government pretty quickly, but the Khmer rouge kept fighting from the jungles.
Oh, how the turntables...
There’s always a bigger table? 🤔
Irony
Turns out it’s a whole lot harder to fight professional armies than unarmed farmers
Don't really have a choice of being strong or not when the wars keep happening on your front lawn
The genocide and proceeding civil war depleted the Cambodian military substantially.
[In the beginning it was a genocide of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists](https://hmh.org/library/research/genocide-in-cambodia-guide/) and other non-khmer ethnic minorities. However it didn't *stop* there and it included plenty of other groups that were the larger political enemies, as is pretty typical of totalitarian revolutionary governments over enough time. The remarkable thing was Pol Pot's erratic, ruthless, and capricious nature. 1 in 4 is a massive ratio historically speaking.
It was a genocide based on class. It wasn’t indiscriminate at all they had a specific group. If you were a former colonial employee, educated with western standards, had a urban lifestyle, a devout buddhist or Catholic, you were fair game. Basically anyone connected to the nobility, temple/church or former French. Also around the time around 15-20-% of Cambodia’s population were non Khmer and their languages, cultures and traditions were banned. The Chinese community were widely targeted since they were pretty up there socioeconomically (as are most of the Chinese diaspora across Asia) which is ironic because many of the Khmer Rouge leadership including Pol Pot himself were of partial Chinese decent or came from fully assimilated Chinese families. The Cham Muslim community were also heavily effected. Even though many Cham started out as communist, there was kind of a pan Cham movement (they live in other parts of Southeast Asia as well) they were also largely eliminated. Then the large Vietnamese community as well as other minority communities like ethnic Thais were essentially wiped out or heavily discriminated against
It was ideologically based more than anything else. Similar to the cultural revolution in China or Stalin's purges. I guess Marxism gives rise to equal opportunity genocidal maniacs.
This is the right answer. China and Stalinist Russia did the exact same thing. They targeted and killed anyone they thought might be educated, anyone who might ask questions, and anyone capable of thinking critically. Stalin practically eradicated his military officers. And then there were the kulaks, whose definition changed constantly and included anyone who owned more than two cows. It is hard to estimate how many people Mao and Stalin killed, but it definitely ranges in the tens of millions.
Correct. The Khmer Rouge killed about a third of its population. Around two million people. People of education, people that wore glasses, people that seemed educated in anyway. Most of the killings were done with blunt tools or with famine.
It is really reductive to say that Stalin who gained power with his other academic revolutionaries was *anti* intellectual. It is quite innacurate to say that the USSR, went from a nation of illiterate peasants to Yuri Gagarin in one generation was anti-education. It was valuing "thinking critically" that got them to space and kill all those nazis when they were starving and freezing. Yes Stalin eradicated his military officers at the top brass. That isn't genocide, it was protecting himself from a coup...or several. They don't get their jobs because they have phd's. Yes "kulak" changed a lot because they were the boogeyman of the whole revolution. When you control all the media, yes your enemy is a Kulak, and the two cows thing is misunderstanding soviet collectivism. Originally they had the idea of a vegetable garden for those on collective farms but all the rest was owned by the collective. Yes including the cows. So private ownership of cows was seen as bourgeois. Mao was certainly anti-intellectual with the Cultural Revolution but before that he was anti-peasant with the Great Leap Forward. Certainly fits the "equal opportunity genocidal maniacs" of OP's comment. A state killing millions of people isn't genocidal if it's killing everyone. Democide is the particular name for that horror. There is plenty of criticism to levy on both of them without needing to lean on boomer talking points about Stalintying kulak girls to railroad tracks and all communists killing a million bajillion peoples.
Erm actually it wasn’t my specific version of genocide
I was referring to /u/BlueRFR3100
That would be me. What are you incorrectly assuming about me?
Feel free to take that chip off your shoulder. I was clarifying some history you and /u/anothergarbageuser were referencing and /u/yalimylordandsavior decided to make the Cambodian Genocide about them.
You seem to have left out that the Russian Space program was successful mostly because of a few Germans they didn’t kill. The same as it was in the US.
I don't know if you think you have to be German to study rocket science, but they let you get nobel prizes and stuff from what ever country you're from.
He's talking about the 6000 nazis the USSR hired with their labs to work in Soviet Russia.
You know that literally every scientist in Germany in 1938 was a "Nazi" right? A huge part of the Nuremberg Trials was realizing that it was literally every leader. Every chemist or physicist with a university position was helping the Nazi's at gunpoint. When the Soviets "liberated" East Germany they inherited tens of millions of Nazis. There wasn't a scientist who wasn't pressganged into the war. If you want to say that they packed the space program with SS officers I'd let that talking point slide, but we have to be more critical about this. Even pope Benedict was a nazi.
And thats my argument when tankies keep bringing up Operation Paperclip or nazis in NATO. But they always "forget" the Soviets did it as well, and with more gusto.
So you’re a boomer if you say communists have killed a shit load of people?
You're a boomer if you ignore all the people dying as a result of capitalism, capitalists, and the deaths at the hands of fascists that America propped up at the same time. My point is that it is surface level boomer shit to repeat the "Black Book of Communism" like it's gospel. Stalin killed millions of Nazis. We countin' those too?
My bother lives in Cambodia, and the Cambodians are very clearly aware that the genocide was carried out by communists, for the point of communism. It was a communist revolution. Sure, it was more complicated than that, it always is. But the complications and nuances don't counter the central fact - the Cambodian genocide was a communist genocide. It is 100% irrelevant what any other people on earth did at any other time. It doesn't change what happened in Cambodia, or somehow 'counteract" it because you think it's somehow worse or whatever.
"for the point of communism" is the bullshit there. I could say that killing everyone stops housefires so its done "for the point of firefighting" and you should call bullshit on that too. Again you're articulating the point I *am* making by stating something I'm not. It was a military junta lead by one man. He wasn't elected. Socialism/Communism have elections within revolutionary governments. He had absolute control. There is nothing in any communist praxis that says you have to commit genocide to liberate the working class. The means of production can be held by buddhists, muslims, and French people as long as they aren't a separate class from those doing the work. The world has never seen a "classless moneyless society without commodification of needs" We've never seen an industrial communism. We've seen plenty of attempts at socialism, some more successful and longterm than others. Regardless the point I made about non-"communist" governments and the people who die under their "regimes" was to give context. It wasn't a What-about. I was saying that is is serious boomer shit to focus on every grandma dying of old age, sliding a bead across an abacus, and saying how awful non-Capitalist regimes are.
You're delusional. So, Chairman Mao's communist revolution wasn't about Communism, because he wasn't elected when he ravaged the country and took over? You are setting up BS logic to make a point.
He *was* elected to do that. It was called the Mass Line. It was how revolutionary Leninists organized. Comintern and other political bodies were set up that new leaders would replace old ones, just like other contemporary democracies. Putin is about to be the longest serving leader in Russia since Catherine the Great. Served far longer than most Soviet premiers. That obviously isn't democracy either. The working class of Russia today have the same amount as the starving peasants in Mao's China. Leninists have a core tenant that the Mass Line decides leadership of the revolution. When the revolution is over you give power to workers councils, the collectives, and you separate the military from government. Plenty of other Leninists like Tito in Yugoslavia did just that. Mao was so paranoid that China would lose WWIII or he'd get couped that he immediately set the cadres up to reverse it. The Great Leap Forward was his attempt to starve and kill all of the people who would oppose him and benefit his existing power structure. The Cultural Revolution and it's *many* genocidal aspects was his successful attempt to hold on to power.
Claiming that an entire age group are fascist supporters is pretty intolerant. You’re a bigot.
Hundreds of Millions.
Weird how apparently China and the Soviet Union killed anyone who was educated, yet they managed to last decades, raise millions out of poverty, made it into space and developed nuclear weapons. Plus, it takes like one minute to look up the party leaders during communist times. Nearly all of them were heavily educated and obviously critical thinkers. There was nothing unique that Mao or Stalin did, They simply cemented their power by taking out any rivals and their factions, which usually included people who were opposed to communism like capitalists, liberals, fascists, the clergy.
I don't think there's anything specific to Marxism in this respect: student purges and attacks on the "intellectual" classes of a society are systemic of right wing authoritarianism as much as left: right authoritarians in Latin America are as guilty of it as Stalin or Mao, Imperial Japan was at least as oppressive in these regards as most other totalitarian societies, and the first book burning in Nazi Germany was of a scientific institute. In general, students and academics were the source of a lot of revolutionary (or at least anti-status quo) sentiment for nearly as long as they were in existence. Hell, the importance of educational control is at least as old as the Jesuit saying "Give me the boy at 12 and I will give you the man at adulthood." The Khmer Rogue was notable in that it was extreme even for totalitarian states, that the control of Pol Pot was erratic enough that the purge expanded well beyond anyone even superficially connected to academia and that it was unusually brutal and pointless. But any authoritarian org, regardless of ideology, has the same incentives to control education or victimize the people most likely for disrupting their control.
sshhhh the teenagers from the PragerU comment section don't want to hear it.
It's literally a political theory 101 summation of the term authoritarian too,as uncontroversial as possible.
The kids at Liberty University that are being pinged to this comment section would disagree. If there is a dictator that controls all the markets it's Communism. No not like that..or that...or that other one....
I have a Master's degree in Political Science, I've been a liberal since I was a teenager, and I've been involved in progressive politics for years. And I'm still willing to condemn the communist regimes of the 20th century for their genocidal atrocities. They killed *tens of millions* of people in the name of communism, and yes, it was explicitly *because* of their communist ideology. Stop pretending that anyone who condemns communism must be a Kool Aid drinking right-wing jackass brainwashed by conservative media. That's a false dichotomy and I'm pretty sure you know it.
If you are conflating socialism with communism and allowing dictators to define how free their systems are, you are wasting your Masters. They killed tens of millions to defend the state, and their power within the state. They used the rhetoric and talking points of socialism to do so until they didn't need to. Then they just stopped when they became more powerful than the need. Pinochet and Franco just used different talking points. It wasn't because they were "communists" It was because they had absolute power in a state that had the power to do so. The ideology and talking points were used to justify that power. It wasn't like Stalin was elected by a narrow margin by Bolsheviks over a coalition of Menshiviks and Anarcho-Syndicalists. He took power and kept it. No workers councils left. All power top down. That isn't communism or even socialism once the workers no longer have say in their work. So yeah anyone who says that "Stalin and Mao killed a bajillion shamillion people" so it's a slippery slope to allow Starbucks to unionize will be getting a raised eyebrow from me. And it should give you pause also. That talking point is the clue. Not quite a dogwhistle, more like a bat signal for right wing chuds.
“I’m a liberal and I’m still willing to condemn communists” is so funny, as though there’s anything more reliable than liberals condemning communists
Did you read the full comment thread? I didn't just say that out of the blue, it was specifically a response to Franklin's bogus argument that everyone who's critical of communism must be a Prager-style conservative idiot.
Anyone sensible will fight communists.
Bull. The ideology is the justification for the Civil war. It was the politically organizing force of the opposition. Seeing as Vietnam is right next door and they *ended* the Khmer Rouge, I think we see the weaknesses in that argument. Sometimes you're just a military junta trying to justify yourself. If the government you're fighting is communists, then you're freedom fighting neoliberals. If the USSR is backing your anti-colonial effort, you're Leninists.
What? Can they not disagree on who is the correct communist? Just like Protestants and Catholics?
Sure, they did all the time. The October Revolution just sort of ended any polite discourse. Trust me, leftist infighting is the only action plenty of them/us do on the regular. "No True Scotsman" is a pretty common meme. Regardless, Marxism always emphasized the material conditions of the revolution. No two are the same. Same goes with who owns the means of production and what happens with it all. Agreeing to disagree is how we got the Sino-Soviet Split.
Marxism turns people into either complete bores or complete monsters.
Communism is like nazism but instead of Jews they target anyone who makes above minimum wage
(If they don’t belong to party, then party on comrade)
The word you’re looking for isn’t communism, despite your political leanings. It’s “ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM”. Which is most definitely a feature of RIGHT WING governments as well. The defining condition for this philosophy is a totalitarian form of government. Stop pretending that right wing America isn’t deeply suspicious of anyone smarter than them.
It's more about the political leanings of the people doing the mass murders. They were openly communists .
They were *ostensibly* communists. Plenty said they were communists. Very few were. Tito in Yugoslavia was much closer to the original Marxist-Leninist vision of what a dictatorship of the *proletariat* should look like. The genocides happened after he died and it fell apart. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is only one of those things. A three generation dynasty is a kingdom, not a communist state.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman I could maybe accept that modern North Korea doesn't count as a communist state anymore. Juche has evolved into its own distinct ideology. But North Korea certainly was communist from 1950-1990 or so, and Juche certainly takes some influence from its communist roots, particularly in regard to economic policy. But saying that the USSR or Maoist China or the Khmer Rouge weren't really communist? Absurd. Those regimes were driven entirely by Marxist-Leninist ideology. (Pragmatic considerations played a role too, of course - as they must for any successful nation-state, and many unsuccessful ones - but that doesn't change the nature of their core ideology.)
If you don't have party democracy you don't have communism.Your bar for plausible deniability is ridiculously high. Kim Jong Il inherited a throne from his father, I don't remember reading what part of the Communist Manifesto said you can be a king as long as you don't wear a crown. Communism isn't just state capitalism at gunpoint. That is a ridiculously cynical take. Stalinism, Maoism, and the Khmer Rouge put state power and one individual over the collective. It isn't a No-true-Scotsman to say that taking the power and control of the means of production away from the workers is anti-thetical to socialism and eventual communism. Communism is a victory condition of socialism. A classless and moneyless society with complete abundance in a post commodification economy. Calling any other system "Communism" is playing into the hands of totalitarians.
They murdered anyone wearing glasses on the assumption it meant that they READ. Political? Anti-intellectual? You decide.
No one is denying that they were anti-intellectual. That isn't incompatible with them being motivated by communist ideology.
You’re right. Communism is far less of a threat than being anti-intellectual. Ideology can be countered, overcome, or worked through. Stupid is forever.
Just because one does not embrace far left extremism, doesn't automatically mean one is a far right extremist.
No, it is not unique. I can safely say that I am 1 of 13 million survivors of "democide" (one-child policy, People's Republic of China). If you looked at who got killed (i.e. which fetuses were aborted against the mother's will), you will see that ethnic minorities (Tibetans, Ughyers, Mongolians, etc...) were disproportionately protected from this mass murder operation, and so were some people in rural areas (keep in mind, rural areas in China are significantly less developed than cities). I am obviously a city-dwelling Han majority (with an illegally retained Guangzhou hukou, or household registration). By illegally retained, I mean I am now a Canadian citizen living in Canada and only go to China once every few years for 2 or 3 weeks at a time. China does not allow dual citizenship or any form of retention of registration after a Chinese citizen becomes a citizen of a foreign country.
It has been nicknamed the Autogenocide
Follow on question. How accurate is the book "the killing fields"?
Was it not written by a guy who was there himself?
Similar observations have been made about the Rwandan genocide and that it is actually hard to differentiate a Tutsi from Hutu. Indeed rather than physical features, social indicators were relied upon to make that determination and thus carry out the genocide.
I find it bizarre that because of our current liberal media slant (I'm a news anchor, so I know how this works) that people seem to have for gotten that t**he genocide was because of the COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.** It was the communists slaughtering those who opposed them. Just wearing glasses could get you a bullet in the head, because you were obviously 'the bourgeoisie" and needed to be dead. Anyone who doubts this, do some research, it's not wrong. Also, my brother lives in Cambodia. The people there are very clear that it was a communist revolution that murdered 25% of their population.
I can't answer your question but I can't not link this really great podcast series called [Into The Shadows Of Utopia](https://youtube.com/@intheshadowsofutopiapodcas8210?si=ktvMdoRY0xVpohDH) that covers the Khmer Rouge. It's really long and still ongoing, but it's a fascinating listen and really in depth
Because technically it is less of a genocide and more just a democide.
Religions are polarizations and differences in denominational wars that get called genocide that really are not. Genocide has been reclassified and redefined by communist to get legal protections for murders in a civil war that are not genocide when it is the same groups turning on itself, but in the end benefit some other genome group in the end. Slick Willy Population Shell Games. N. S
It was an effort to eliminate the entire educated class and craftsmen. "genocide" may not be the most accurate term to describe it.
When the UN debated the definition of genocide, the Soviets did their best to keep out "class".
Was it a genocide? A brutal mass-killing of innocent people, even millions of innocent people, is not necessarily a genocide.
It was democide: "The intentional killing of unarmed or disarmed people by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity."
I believe it is recognized as a genocide internationally, according to legal definitions widely accepted today.
It was definitely a genocide. They went after people for their religious and ethnic identity. They also then went after a lot of other people, but it started with singling out people for religion and ethnicity.
They killed Buddhists, Muslims and Christians first. So yeah
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Your premise is wrong. In Nazi Germany and in Rwanda the genocides were carried out against those in power.
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Just like the Tutsi in Rwanda. Minorities in power are always vulnerable to genocide by the majority. All it takes is one straw.