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Tito in Yugoslavia was considered by many as a benevolent communist dictator. For the average person their standard of living improved, they had some freedom.
I wouldn't consider Tito to have been 'benevolent', but I know what you're saying.
I think the problem a lot of people are having is that when someone points out that Titoist Yugoslavia was better (or, at least, less bad) than Nazi Germany - and it was, by far - they're not hearing 'Yugoslavia wasn't as bad as Nazi Germany', they're hearing 'Communism is good!' even though that is not what is being said in that case.
There's a sort of dogmatic political correctness that demands that communism in any historical iteration can never, ever, be stated to be better than any other historical government, and anyone who does so is automatically an apologist for the worse examples of Stalinist and Maoist crimes.
Communism as a historical discussion is a minefield that many cannot negotiate.
I think because one is inherently evil. Nazism. A regime that has within it's precepts the idea that some human beings are superior to others, and because of that they should be incarcerated, starved, tortured, and annihilated - can never be good or acceptable.
Communism does not need to involved these precepts, and totalitarianism is not a part of the ideology. Nor are gulags, kangaroo courts, or mass executions. There is nothing in Communism that stresses racial superiority.
However, as practiced by the likes of Stalin, it certainly was oppressive and evil.
Pure communism is a sharing of resources and government ownership of the means of production. While you may disagree vehemently with that idea, there is nothing inherently evil involved with that.
Hitler and Stalin were allies, in fact, Stalin admired Hitler so much that he had a nervous collapse during a week when he found out he was being invaded.
Stalin removed people irrationally, even worse that removing people because they are gays, gipsies, jews, etc.
Stalin removed cultured people, dentists, his own family, soviet prisoners, ex-bourgeois, many jews, professional army, anybody could be a victim of Stalin....and Beria. He killed more people than Hitler.
If Beria would have suceeded Stalin after his questionable death in 1954?...not many Russians would have survived as he hated them. He was shot by Kruschev.
Some say that Communism was some sort of Neo-Tzarism.
But even with all those ills affecting Russian economy nowdays, the country will be 100 times more efficient.
No it won't, because now it depends on the foreign investements - i.e. back to the square one, to the pre-revolutionary times. This was the kind of dependency that was impeding the development of Russia, and the kind of dependency that Bolsheviks set Russia free from.
And the practice immediately shows, that as soon as Russia starts pursuing her national interests ( such as taking Crimea back for example,) the chain is immediately yanked by the West in the form of "economic sanctions."
This whole "dependency" arrangement is not going to end up well yet again, as far as I can see.
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The other cause of communist decadence was motivation. You can't have very brilliant scientists and technicians working just to receive a Volga or a Lada in five years, or a Television or washing machine...
"Brilliant Russian scientists" never worked "just to receive a Volga or Lada" as form of motivation - you Kartstic know NOT what you are talking about. Motivation doesn't come only in a form of desire of material rewards. There is motivation of higher kind, when people are rewarded by their own achievements ( when it comes to intellectual jobs,) by respect they command in the society, ( and among their own peers); there is motivation of ideological/nationalist nature (i.e. of spiritual nature.) The Westerners living in material world often do not understand those things.
However there were plenty of not-so-brilliant representatives of Soviet bureaucracy, whose motivation was solely "Volga and Lada," and they were the ones who at the end sold their country to the US, since they were craving BMWs instead of "Volgas."
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or the right to buy one of those soviet buildings...kruschovas for an exhorbitant price,,,discounted from your meager salary....while apparatchniks were always in the west..
Karstic you are as clueless here as ever - no "soviet buildings" could be "sold for "exorbitant price" in the Soviet Union, since they ALL belonged to the government and even the apartments couldn't be "sold" - only received from the government for usage per family OR exchanged.
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Then corruption under the form of privileges...and money abroad, corruption...
"Under the form of privileges" - yes, but when it comes to "money abroad" - that came by the end of the Soviet system, and particularly after the crash of it. And that's what brought the economic disaster.
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And then, plain pilfering, maintaining East Europe, Cuba, Vietnam....giving away gas and oil free..or almost free as never was paid.
Powerful states don't live in the vacuum - they have to support their interests, and that costs money/resources.
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Then, large part of the proceeds of diamonds, caviar, rare metals always ended in the west..
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Yes it was part of Soviet exports, as much as it was during the pre-revolutionary times.
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and not many people know that there were soviet republics that were havens of absolute corruption..
Plenty of people knew what was going on in Caucasus and Asian republics, but Russians were looking at it as in "You can't change the non-Europeans and their ways of life, so we have to give them a slack."
When you have to outlaw religion in order to make Communism survive ,something is wrong.
Even China today, allows very little freedom of worship/religion.
The Soviets did not outlaw religion. They discouraged it, they made sure that non believers were able to take more advantages from their society than those who clung to their faith, and they battled the church in the form of practical jokes. For example, if a big religious holiday was coming up, they would schedule some huge attraction..a parade, a carnival..to tale place simultaneously in order to lure away potential church goers.
But religion was never outlawed. About a third of the empire's population remained religious.
Communism wants to force humanity into an ideal mold (the "New Man"), through punishing anyone who deviates from it. In this sense, it is forward-looking ("progressive"), but also utopian, in that its goals are unachievable. At worst, it becomes a means to justify the tyranny of a ruling clique (dictatorship over the proletariot; at best, it devolves into "state capitalism".
Nazism/Fascism, on the other hand, wants to return to a previously imagined pure and primitive social state (one nation, one volk), excluding all foreign elements, but in the form of a mass industrial dictatorship.
Both are undemocratic one-party mass tyrannies that differ largely only in their ideologies.
Can someone explain? Both were created and taken to the extreme by evil psychotic people, both ended up being responsible with unfathomable amount of deaths, both promote a thoroughly disgusting ideology that will ultimately only lead to unimaginable amounts of suffering to those that embrace it, both deserve to go into the dustbin of history and never even uttered ever again, both have ultimately failed at everything they ever espoused.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
The difference perhaps is that communism is an ideology with many different flavors from bad to worse - Stalinism and Khmer Rouge varieties being particularly bad of course. Because of that it's hard to label and pinpoint - the modern versions that are left in Vietnam and China, adapting mixed economies, are relatively benign. It does get condemned, but I guess it can be said that the concept, adapted by Karl Marx, had good intentions.
Nazism however is a specific political party, not an ideology in itself, and thus easier to pin down to one source - 1930s-1940s Germany, and one person - Hitler. It included a particularly nasty concept - racial superiority. It's hard to find any redeeming value in any of it's concepts.
The goal of Communism was for a better world. It was a utopian view that predictably went awry. But its objectives were facially constructive.
Nazism, on the other hand, had no program other than to bully surrounding countries and kill racial, ethnic and religious minorities. Murder and slaughter were its raison d' etre.
The goal of Communism was for a better world. It was a utopian view that predictably went awry. But its objectives were facially constructive.
Nazism, on the other hand, had no program other than to bully surrounding countries and kill racial, ethnic and religious minorities. Murder and slaughter were its raison d' etre.
Nazis believed they were building a better world too, a 1000yr reich.
Communism and nazi both have the same results because they both played God.
Communism is despised by freedom loving people, except communist sympathizers who are too stupid to recognize the obvious, that it cannot work. Did not work and never will.
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