I really, really made the effort to avoid this thread because I knew it would devolve into the usual idiotic arguments but my will cracked and I peeked. So here I am. Again.
ecadre wrote:
A crude analysis, there is a wide ranging debate in Communist Parties about the different socialist countries, we would certainly not describe them as "cruel dictatorship".
Why not? We did. If it walks like a duck, and looks like a duck...
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Reason 3: Communism calls for blood shed. This is closely related to reason 2. If you need a bloody revolution then i don't see how it can be supported. It calls for murdering people. That in and of itself is moraly distasteful to me.
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The Communist Party has NEVER called for "murdering people". A peaceful revolution is what we want, unfortunately those with power, wealth and control often want to hang on to it violently.
Actually, although it depends which communist party you're talking about, the Soviet and Chinese-inspired communist parties do call for bloodshed and extermination of their respective bogeymen. Of course they didn't use the word "murder" because that implies a crime is being committed, but nonetheless we were taught from an early age that we needed to be absolutely ruthless with the bourgoisie, including mass extermination if need be. The concept of the Red Terror was glorified with "heroic" stories of land and business owners getting their come-upance at the end of a rope or a bullet. Remember that pre-teens were getting military training in Communist eastern Europe until 1990 or so. What was your grade in grenade-tossing?
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Reason 4: It bans religion. Religion is the opiate of the people according to Marx. Marx believed that Religion needed to be outlawed as it blinded people to the pains they experience on earth as they are contented as they wait for pleasures in the afterlife. Depending on who you talk to they may beleive the same thing. However, why should they be able to force beliefs on people. The Church was criticized for burning people at the steaks as heretics if they were not what is now Roman Catholic. Communism essentially does the same thing. If you aren't and athiest we will shoot you in the head.
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What utter garbage. Where was the present Pope born?? Are you really are this ignorant?
Bad analogy. The current Pope, as Karol Wojtyla, Bishop of Kraków, was an ardent anti-communist who had repeated brushes with the communists. The communists in Poland couldn't shut down the churches because the Catholic church had become too powerful an organization and one that specialized in organizing resistance, after 123 years of foreign rule in Poland (1795-1918). The communists did imprison the Polish primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, in the early 1950s and murdered many rural priests but they knew they were too weak to take on the church as a whole - not without sparking a revolution.
In Hungary there was no monolithic church as Hungarians are divided between the Roman Catholic and an old Calvinist Protestant denomination, Reformism, so in the 1950s they imprisoned the Catholic cardinal József Mindszenty for years (after he'd spent years in jail for opposing Hungary's German collaboration in WW II). In the 1956 Revolution Mindszenty escaped his captors and found safe haven in the American Embassy in Budapest, but he couldn't leave that building until a deal was finally worked out between Budapest and Washington in 1971 allowing Mindszenty to leave Hungary for the Vatican.
Even in the "softer" communist regimes like Poland or Hungary, in the 1950s Stalinist period it was extremely dangerous to be too active with any church publically. Many people were murdered for their beliefs in this period. After the post-Stalinist period set in then the communists largely stopped murdering believers although every once in a while an outspoken priest would "disappear". Remember the Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko getting beaten to death by the SB (Polish version of KGB) in 1984 for his outspoken sermons on human rights in Poland? Even after the murdering generally stopped though it could still be dangerous to visit church regularly; it could effect your ability to get a job, a promotion, food ration cards, your children's ability to get into a good school, or many other bureaucratic realities of life in a communist state. As late as the late 1980s the communists still sent secret agents to church services to write down the names of people who were attending. Hungary by the 1980s was far more lenient than Poland, but I know of several families who sent children on triups to Western Europe on convenient excuses to have them baptised or receive their First Communion, away from Budapests' prying eyes.
Poland and Hungary were relatively soft cases though; Romania under Ceausescu and Albania under both Hoxha and Alia declared open war on religion, murdering untold thousands connected to churches and destroying much church property, some of it centuries old.
Have a look at Communist Party websites (the British or US ones would be good for English speakers) and do a search on "religion". This will give you the facts of what Communists are ACTUALLY saying, rather than the prejudiced nonsense above.
The old American communist party, led by Gus Hall, also used to denounce religion. Harold J. Laski, the eminent 1940s British communist, also talked of trashing the Church of England. Don't know what those buggers are saying nowadays but we in Eastern Europe were told that our American and British comrades were shoulder-to-shoulder with us on their hostility to religion. You may want to check out some of Karl Marx's readings to get a better understanding of communists' attitudes towards religion.
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Those are just a few of the reasons i hate communism.
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Hate is a big emotion, for myself I hate, poverty, war, exploitation and oppression, how about you?
So do I. Sadly, communism brought all of these things to Eastern Europe.
And for peoples information, Communist Parties have been banned at different times in vitually every country in the world.
A short list of European countries where Communist Parties have been banned at different times (i know that I have left some off this list as it is from memory);
Ireland
Finland
Denmark
Portugal
Spain
France
Germany
Austria
Italy
Romania
Hungary
Albania
Russia
Bulgaria
Czehoslovakia
Poland
Norway
First, the operative word is
when. Poland banned the communist party of Poland in the interbellum years (1920-1939) because it wasn't just another political party, it was one that advocated the violent overthrow of the government and the mass-enslavement of society. The Polish Communist Party (KPP) was directly funded and controlled by the USSR, and amazingly the KPP advocated every single foreign policy goal of the USSR including those contrary to Poland's own interests.
The USSR went on to become an ally of Hitler's and divide Eastern Europe (including Poland) between them, just like good old fashioned imperialists. Hitler invaded Poland on 01. September, Stlain joined in on the 17th. You might want to check out Jan T. Gross' book (now in English)
Revolution From Abroad, which details the massacres the Soviets carried out among Poles, Ukrainians and Ruthenians during their 1939-1941 occupation of eastern Poland. My family lived in this region at that time, and my wife's grandfather (an officer in the Polish Army) was very nearly sent to the Soviet POW camps for officers at Katyn - where the USSR murdered more than 14,000 unarmed Polish officers in 1941 (as Moscow admitted in 1990).
Secondly, want to hear something really funny about the KPP? It met its extinction from a surprising source, although we shouldn't be surprised. Stalin, who had a maniacal hatred for Poles, summoned the entire cadre of the KPP to Moscow in 1938
and Stalin had every single one of them either imprisoned or executed. The KPP was de-recognized and dissolved by Comintern. A mid-level communist member, Wladyslaw Gomulka, was saved from being murdered by his Soviet "comrades" simply because he had been arrested by the Polish authorities for being a communist agent and was sitting in a prison cell when Stalin summoned the KPP to Moscow. Isn't that a hoot? A Polish prison saved this bast*rd's life. Because the top leadership of the KPP was wiped out by Stalin, Gomulka became the party's leader during WW II (now that's a promotion process!) and after the war when the Soviets imposed a communist regime on Poland in 1944. Stalin still didn't trust Gomulka and he had him arrested and imprisoned in 1951 (like in all his puppet regimes in Eastern Europe from 1947-1951), but Gomulka was released and able to claw back into power after a military confrontation with the Soviets in 1956. (
Here is a link to an old quiz I did on the events of 1956 in the History forums if you're interested.) He was booted from power in 1970 after having peaceful workers who were protesting price increases shot down in the streets with tanks and army helicopters. Good riddance.
Communists have been murdered, put on show trials, had their political rights oppressed and been hounded and repressed in all european countries - to this day.
First of all, bullsh*t. Communists have been elected to office in France, Italy and San Marino, and have enjoyed open political access and activity throughout all of Europe since 1945. Yes, some were persecuted prior to 1939 but so were many other political groups, democrats included. Get over it. I've had to sludge through tons of crapola published by Western European communists, all published in the West and without political fear, while only the communist press was allowed in Eastern Europe. I have no problem with letting them stand in open elections like any other party and indeed they do in Eastern Europe, but let's not forget that no political group - and that includes the Nazis - has killed more people than commmunism. That's one of the reasons the old communist parties all had to undergo substantial image and ideological overhauls after 1989 in Europe, because their bankrupt beliefs had been exposed to the light of day and hadn't fared well.
I've lived under communists, and have no desire to wish them on anyone else ever. I remember after the Hungarian communist government came unravelled at the end of 1989 seeing a bunch of old, embittered commies flocking to a small bar in my unversity city called
Denevér ("The Bat") to drown their sorrows at having lost power; that's when I knew it was going to be a better world.
Allow me to recite something I'd posted in another thread, in another forum:
Fascism was able to live itself out and die a spectacular bunker death in the world's worst war, discrediting it for everyone except a few fringe freaks. Communism also proved itself an utter failure, murdering far more people (almost all of them its own citizens) than fascism could dream of, and yet there are still so many young people today in the West who think it has validity. What the hell does a political theory have to do for them to consider it a failure? It can murder large chunks of its population, collapse the economy, create mass poverty, destroy living standards, create a tyranny for its citizens, restrict all travel, imprison anyone who dissents or even looks like they'll dissent, and cap it off by creating one of the most militarized societies since Sparta - and someone still looks at this and thinks it might be a good idea?
I capped this rant with a nice "WTH" smiley but as no such option exists here, I will settle for this one:
:rant:
Tisk, tisk, the dirty history of these democratic nations come out.
Don't like it when the tables are turned on them, do they? Sounds like the capitalists in my family for a few decades in one of those 'workers paradises'.
