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. . . instead of somebody else. And therein lies the difference between capitalism and socialism. Cooperation with somebody else, instead of the unalloyed selfishness of the haves.
And the history of every socialist country proves that ultimately this "cooperation" leads to starvation for all. Lol
there was not one country in the world where this socialist idea worked, there was never a successful economically socialist country in the world. Capitalism is efficient while socialism is not.
. . . instead of somebody else. And therein lies the difference between capitalism and socialism. Cooperation with somebody else, instead of the unalloyed selfishness of the haves.
Cooperation?
It was coercion.
Sooner or later it was going to be impossible to address you in this thread while still avoiding drifting into a discussion of the merits of socialism. We already know one another's positions...you think highly of it, I think that it is great on paper and a complete impossibility in practical terms because it will always require an elitist dictatorship to generate what you casually identify as "cooperation." At least it always has so far.
But.....That Stalin was a SOB on behalf of a cause which you admire does not ameliorate the fact that he was a SOB, any more than some neo-Nazi's admiration for the Third Reich rehabilitates Hitler. They were both men who crossed that line of thinking where one decides that my personal vision of how things can and should be is so correct that it justifies the infliction of unlimited misery on an immense number of people. Everyone across that line is tied with everyone else across that line for moral depravity.
Sooner or later it was going to be impossible to address you in this thread while still avoiding drifting into a discussion of the merits of socialism. We already know one another's positions...you think highly of it, I think that it is great on paper and a complete impossibility in practical terms because it will always require an elitist dictatorship to generate what you casually identify as "cooperation." At least it always has so far.
But.....That Stalin was a SOB on behalf of a cause which you admire does not ameliorate the fact that he was a SOB, any more than some neo-Nazi's admiration for the Third Reich rehabilitates Hitler. They were both men who crossed that line of thinking where one decides that my personal vision of how things can and should be is so correct that it justifies the infliction of unlimited misery on an immense number of people. Everyone across that line is tied with everyone else across that line for moral depravity.
But their "personal visions" - (or rather the goals) definitely differ.
But their "personal visions" - (or rather the goals) definitely differ.
A distinction which was of great comfort to Stalin's victims?
Also, may we take a brief stroll through some of Stalin's other noble goals? For example, I suppose his goal of easing his personal paranoia by purging the party and the officer corps of anyone deemed remotely suspect or insufficiently enthusiastic in support of socialism, completely justified the execution and/or harsh incarceration of people not charged with any specific crime.
And the goal of avoiding any stress associated with worry over the loyalties of returning Soviet prisoners from the Third Reich, made the treatment those soldiers received perfectly acceptable. Here were people, soviet citizens, who had served in the Red Army under miserable conditions, been captured due to the incompetence of Stalin's generals, miraculously survived the brutal captivity of the Nazis...and now, finally freed, they were being shipped to Gulags because Uncle Joe just didn't quite trust em. You know...the crime of being someone who fell under Stalin's paranoid suspicions.
Stalin was very sporadic in his killing, as his paranoia brought him to killing randomly, or so it seemed. Deaths from gulags and purges brought his numbers anywhere from 3 to even 50 million!!!
Hitler knew his enemies (jews, political enemies, soviets, rivals) and his death count seems to go as high as 30 million. This, in theory, means that if you walked the line in Nazi Germany, and agreed with its policies, you could make it without much fear.
So, which one would you not want to rule you?
Who is the lesser of two evils?
Hitler was bent on world domination and came surprisingly close to achieving it with Japan and Italy as its allies. The Nazis were also very innovative minded.
Stalin wanted to dominate the world but surely did not have the tools or allies to do it.
The worst 43 are all capitalist countries, with more deaths per capita from malnutrition than North Korea. Peru has three times the per capita GDP of North Korea, but Peruvians are at greater risk of starvation than North Koreans, while rich Peruvians eat well. Cuba and Vietnam are tied with Japan, and better than the USA. China is tied with Denmark.
A distinction which was of great comfort to Stalin's victims?
Also, may we take a brief stroll through some of Stalin's other noble goals? For example, I suppose his goal of easing his personal paranoia by purging the party and the officer corps of anyone deemed remotely suspect or insufficiently enthusiastic in support of socialism, completely justified the execution and/or harsh incarceration of people not charged with any specific crime.
And the goal of avoiding any stress associated with worry over the loyalties of returning Soviet prisoners from the Third Reich, made the treatment those soldiers received perfectly acceptable. Here were people, soviet citizens, who had served in the Red Army under miserable conditions, been captured due to the incompetence of Stalin's generals, miraculously survived the brutal captivity of the Nazis...and now, finally freed, they were being shipped to Gulags because Uncle Joe just didn't quite trust em. You know...the crime of being someone who fell under Stalin's paranoid suspicions.
Grandstander, those were not Stalin's "goals" - those were his means of achieving his goals.
But - gotcha.
You are looking at means by which both Hitler and Stalin were achieving their goals, and put the equation mark between two of them, where I look at their goals, the point of final destination so to speak, and that's where I see where Hitler was worse, much worse. And just because he was much worse in terms of his goals, his means of achieving his goals were worse as well. Yes, Stalin did send former POWs back to the labor camps not trusting anyone, or feeling that they didn't deserve the honor of coming back to normal civil life, but no matter how low he stooped in this respect, his final goals, his ideology never allowed him to experiment on children keeping them in cages and the rest.
As I've said - whatever Stalin did, it was within the lines of what ruthless rulers did before him hundred years ago, particularly put in the context of Russian history ( Tatar-mongol invasion, anyone?)
However when we are talking about Hitler - he ventured into completely new territory, into the kind of ideas that were unknown to human kind and that were defying what "human kind" is.
I find it interesting that a lot of Americans apparently can't discern the difference between these two men and what exactly they stood for.
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Hitler was worst
