I have no problem with miseducated students chanting support for their Platonic ideal of communism. I care when they start burning businesses not deemed friendly enough to the proletariat.
Punching Nazis
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I have no problem with miseducated students chanting support for their Platonic ideal of communism. I care when they start burning businesses not deemed friendly enough to the proletariat.
Timsup2nothin
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See, this is where you misread reality. Or, alternatively, you just don't have any idea what communism is so you have to talk out your butt.
Synobun
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I don't really consider anyone or anything to be evil as I find it to be an easy label to use when you want to dehumanize or "other" someone else in order to justify your own behaviour. That being said, I'm still cognizant of behaviours that would fall under a general moral agreement of what is evil, such as exterminating people or systemic oppression of a demographic. I'm staunchly against those behaviours.
The argument that one cannot consider something evil if it doesn't directly impact their own personal self is one that lacks nuance or even an appreciation of what humanity is. We are not a species designed to be singular in how we operate and exist. While we are not a hive mind, our brains are built to be social. We have instincts to congregate. We work best in groups as opposed to when we're doing our best "lone man on an island" impression. Babies without socialization are compromised in their physical and mental health and adults themselves have an extremely high risk of going insane without human contact.
What someone does to the person next to you does impact "your" self because that person changed your existence. Their presence altered your routine and affected your perspective. The implications of what an individual or a group does has everything to do with you, primarily because people do not stay in their corner. Even the most isolationist of societies and peoples meddle in the affairs of others. It is not only in our biological nature but it is a simple fact of living on the same planet. At some point, what another person does on the other side of the planet will impact your side of the planet. This was true without globalization, it is definitely true now.
Just because you fall under the strict and narrow perspective of the "ideal" individual of whichever oppressive government you've rallied into power does not mean you are immune to their actions or otherwise detached from the plights of the people they are oppressing or wiping out. You will find it difficult to say that the policies of a Nazi regime are a net positive on society without also admitting to some grievous personal beliefs.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I'm not sure where all these romantic fellow-travelers are supposed to be lurking. Are Marxist hold-outs a more common sight in the United States than I'd been lead to believe?
It seems to me that people don't criticise the Stalinist regimes with the same vehemence they do fascism because they generally understand that the crimes of Stalinism were rooted in paranoia, philistinism and incompetence, rather than an apocalyptic drive for world conquest. They provoke condemnation, but rarely the same gut-deep abhorrence. Perhaps this is mistaken, perhaps we exaggerate the diabolical nature of the Nazis and understate that of the Stalinists, but it is what it is, and it doesn't require even a sneaking sympathy for Marx to explain.
It helps, too, that the Stalinists habitually slaughtered each other, and that by the time we were in a position to hold anyone to account, they'd already disappeared into some KGB dungeon, as had the men who put them there, and the men who put them there. There was no Russian Nuremberg in part because there was nobody left to hang.
So judging communism based on how it worked in practice is misreading reality, while holding on to some pie-in-the-sky vision of theoretical communism isn't? That's an interesting perspective.
EDIT: Basically, my stance is ideologies should be judged on how they actually worked when put into practice, not on what that ideology's supporters say it should have been like.
EDIT2: And by that measure, no ideology that has been implemented on a large scale has a very positive track record. Which is why my general stance is that any "ism" is poison and anyone who follows an "ism" dogmatically is a fool.
Here's a different explanation, which I would like your thoughts on:
"Now of course you can turn this around and ask, well, if reaction was discredited by Hitler and Bull Connor, by race hatred and Jew hatred, why wasn’t left-wing radicalism discredited by Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot? If this is all about moral credibility and the company you keep, why did so many prominent historians and literary critics get to keep on calling themselves Marxists after every Marxist-Leninist regime committed mass murder on an epic scale? Why are Kipling’s politics or Eliot’s or Pound’s or even Heidegger’s considered so much more “problematic” and all-discrediting than the Stalinist strain in so much left-wing historiography and philosophy and criticism and art?
Conservatives have been asking these questions for a long time; they’re still good ones. But without defending the left-wing blindness that long disfigured Western debates about Marxism, you can still see other reasons why a distinctive set of taboos might have grown up around reactionary ideas in the post-World War II West.
The most important one is that political reaction’s worst crimes were committed close to home, in the heart of Europe in fact, while the darkest crimes of Communism were perpetrated in (relatively) distant lands. If the history of the 1930s and 1940s had been somewhat altered, and (let’s say) a Stalin-esque German Communist leader had allied with a Marxist-Leninist Japan to plunge the globe into a genocidal war (a war in which a reactionary White Russian Empire, led by a ruthless Admiral Kolchak, fought on the same side as Britain and France and the United States), then I suspect that left-wing radicalism would have seemed less idealistic and admirable subsequently than it did after the united anti-fascist front, and right-wing reaction would have seemed less absolutely evil than it did in the shadow of Hitler and Holocaust. But familiarity with evils breeds taboos against them, and since it was reaction — or certain styles thereof, at least — that helped prepare the way for the West’s “only culturally available icon of absolute evil,” its subsequent intellectual marginalization makes sense on a human level even before questions of academic bias enter in.
And then in the specifically American context, too, reactionary ideas begin with a kind of double handicap. First, America has no real ancien regime, no medieval Catholic past: Not only our liberals but our conservatives take certain liberal premises for granted, and the American reactionary always risks projecting an air of make-believe — a “look at me, Ma, I’m a pirate” sensibility — in a way that even now (or maybe especially now?) a European reactionary does not.
Second, to the extent that we have any inheritance that’s even somewhat reactionary and aristocratic and old-regime-ish, it’s the inheritance of the Old South, which for all its gifts and graces is morally corrupted at its roots and freighted with all the weight of America’s original sin.
So as with the crimes of the Nazis in Western Europe, the familiarity problem comes in here: If reaction in the American context means a Confederate flag and radicalism a Che Guevara tee-shirt, well, Che was a wicked man with a wicked ideology and Marxist regimes have committed worse atrocities than the C.S.A., but the Confederacy’s evils are still ours, still American, in a way that the killing fields and gulags are not."
Berzerker
Deity
the south practiced slavery, the north committed genocide
we suck
we suck
Old Hippy
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should they dress up in funny costumes and dump tea in the harbour instead
Akka
Moody old mage.
The answer is pretty obvious : despite communist regimes being about as bad as nazi ones when it comes to behaviour, totalitarianism and body count, the fact is that the communist ideology is itself pretty good-natured (it's about considering all humans equals and sharing resources). Mass murders is not an avowed goal of communism.
Nazi ideology, though, IS about racial superiority and authoritarianism and eliminating the "unfit".
In other words : the evils caused by communist regimes can be argued to be due to a faulty implementation of communism (with the valid question : "is it even possible to have a non-faulty implementation ?"), while evils caused by nazism are actually due to a successful implementation of nazism.
Yes, and I agree with all of this. Your self is emotionally impacted by what other people do to each other, via empathy. The strength of the emotional impact is correlated with your own experiences. What I was asking was what evil was to you, personally. That is because I see evil as an emotional/biological process, rather than an abstract concept.
Lexicus
Deity
This is crap, the South committed genocide too.
In any case it doesn't particularly matter. The choice was ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans and occupation of their land, either by slave plantations or freeholders. I know which I prefer.
Lexicus
Deity
Because the left-wing radicalism of, say, a Martin Luther King or a Cesar Chavez, is completely different, in both conception and effect, from Leninism?
Meanwhile, you can tell how much 'reaction' has been discredited from recent events. Donald Trump must have won the Presidency because reaction is discredited.
To say that reaction is discredited is basically false, anyway - that implies reaction was some sort of thought-out philosophy, when really it's more like unfiltered impulses travelling up from the reptilian brain. It can't ever really be "discredited," only imperfectly ignored like other reptilian instincts.
Some of the Harkonnen were less terrible than others. I don't see many people arguing that any Harkonnen was pro human-rights, though. It is a fantasy that the North was anti-slavery for reasons other than opportunism and trying to keep euro major powers from intervening in the civil war. The same North that went on to murder far more natives anyway. Maybe a North alone would have considerably less powers to genocide, and same is true for the South, which looked more like the kind of state which would be isolationist.
Hailing one side as protectors, heroes or whatever, and the other as the devil, isn't helping, which is why the debate on this as well has become so low-level. Btw, looking at 90s US shows, it seems the South wasn't that taboo a topic nor in tautology with slavery. What changed in the last 20 years to make the South be the spawn of satan?
Lexicus
Deity
Some of the Harkonnen were less terrible than others. I don't see many people arguing that any Harkonnen was pro human-rights, though. It is a fantasy that the North was anti-slavery for reasons other than opportunism and trying to keep euro major powers from intervening in the civil war. The same North that went on to murder far more natives anyway. Maybe a North alone would have considerably less powers to genocide, and same is true for the South, which looked more like the kind of state which would be isolationist.
Hailing one side as protectors, heroes or whatever, and the other as the devil, isn't helping, which is why the debate on this as well has become so low-level. Btw, looking at 90s US shows, it seems the South wasn't that taboo a topic nor in tautology with slavery. What changed in the last 20 years to make the South be the spawn of satan?
It's evident from this that you pretty much have no idea what you're talking about. Let's address it point by point.
1) "The North" was not a monolithic entity. There were various political factions at play and some were in fact pro-slavery (and, incidentally, anti-war). Notably, the banks in the Northeast, which had essentially grown up financing the expansion of slavery into the Deep South and Mississippi Valley, actually attempted a capital strike rather than financing Mr. Lincoln's war, which they saw as basically insane.
The real force of anti-slavery politics came from the bulk of smallholders from what's now the Midwest, and they were against slavery mainly because of their political/economic interest in limiting the power of the Southern slaveholders. Many, perhaps most, of the Midwestern farmers were after all selling foodstuffs to cotton plantations in the Mississippi and Deep South and getting screwed on the deals due to the economic power of the slaveholding class, which Lincoln and the Republicans argued was due to unfairly stealing the products of other people's labor (Lincoln also argued this about the Northern class of merchants and bankers). This was the basis of the free-soil movement that eventually became the principal political force in the Republican Party, and it had nothing to do with political opportunism or European intervention in a war that no one really knew was coming until it was almost happening.
Then of course there were the radical abolitionists, and it was the war itself that actually made their ideology politically dominant, as it increasingly became clear to the Federal government and the military that emancipation was a military necessity, an aspect of a total war strategy designed to bring the South to its knees socially and economically.
2) The South looked like it would be isolationist is another laughably ignorant statement.
I would suggest picking up this book if you have any interest in the matter:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737259
The truth is that the Slave Power orchestrated a great deal of territorial expansion for the US and had imperial designs for much of the land around the Caribbean (including Cuba). The Mexican War in particular was decried, more or less correctly in my view, as a straightforward land grab designed to increase the political power of the slaveholders.
Inno in that sense is half-right- the North had an imperial project, but the South did too, an imperial project that has been fairly obscure for the simple reason that as soon as the South lost, the Lost Cause historiography that emphasized the points you're trying to argue here became dominant - the South was just defending itself, the war wasn't really about slavery, and on and on.
3) Finally, I at least am certainly not hailing the Union as heroes, though I do think the South were unambiguously devils. For your last question, you again just don't know what you're talking about. It was during the Civil Rights era, the 1960s, that the dominant Lost Cause, Southern-friendly historiography of the Civil War was overturned by serious scholarship. Twenty years ago people with a clue were still speaking as though the South fought for slavery because it did. And I dunno, I'd say the debate as a whole isn't really low-level, there has been a lot of quality scholarship that's come out recently, if this debate seems poor quality perhaps it's because people who are utterly ignorant of the topic keep feeling the need to stick their oars in the water
It's evident from this that you pretty much have no idea what you're talking about. Let's address it point by point.
1) "The North" was not a monolithic entity. There were various political factions at play and some were in fact pro-slavery (and, incidentally, anti-war). Notably, the banks in the Northeast, which had essentially grown up financing the expansion of slavery into the Deep South and Mississippi Valley, actually attempted a capital strike rather than financing Mr. Lincoln's war, which they saw as basically insane.
The real force of anti-slavery politics came from the bulk of smallholders from what's now the Midwest, and they were against slavery mainly because of their political/economic interest in limiting the power of the Southern slaveholders. Many, perhaps most, of the Midwestern farmers were after all selling foodstuffs to cotton plantations in the Mississippi and Deep South and getting screwed on the deals due to the economic power of the slaveholding class, which Lincoln and the Republicans argued was due to unfairly stealing the products of other people's labor (Lincoln also argued this about the Northern class of merchants and bankers). This was the basis of the free-soil movement that eventually became the principal political force in the Republican Party, and it had nothing to do with political opportunism or European intervention in a war that no one really knew was coming until it was almost happening.
Then of course there were the radical abolitionists, and it was the war itself that actually made their ideology politically dominant, as it increasingly became clear to the Federal government and the military that emancipation was a military necessity, an aspect of a total war strategy designed to bring the South to its knees socially and economically.
2) The South looked like it would be isolationist is another laughably ignorant statement.
I would suggest picking up this book if you have any interest in the matter:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737259
The truth is that the Slave Power orchestrated a great deal of territorial expansion for the US and had imperial designs for much of the land around the Caribbean (including Cuba). The Mexican War in particular was decried, more or less correctly in my view, as a straightforward land grab designed to increase the political power of the slaveholders.
Inno in that sense is half-right- the North had an imperial project, but the South did too, an imperial project that has been fairly obscure for the simple reason that as soon as the South lost, the Lost Cause historiography that emphasized the points you're trying to argue here became dominant - the South was just defending itself, the war wasn't really about slavery, and on and on.
3) Finally, I at least am certainly not hailing the Union as heroes, though I do think the South were unambiguously devils. For your last question, you again just don't know what you're talking about. It was during the Civil Rights era, the 1960s, that the dominant Lost Cause, Southern-friendly historiography of the Civil War was overturned by serious scholarship. Twenty years ago people with a clue were still speaking as though the South fought for slavery because it did. And I dunno, I'd say the debate as a whole isn't really low-level, there has been a lot of quality scholarship that's come out recently, if this debate seems poor quality perhaps it's because people who are utterly ignorant of the topic keep feeling the need to stick their oars in the water
At least you aren't being defensive
Anyway, my interest in all this is as one noticing that the US is always increasing interest on what creates even more schisms in an already rather problematic situation. I think it doesn't deserve, nor does it logically invite, your dismissal. Re the current level of debate on this in the US, i am not sure if you even believe what you typed.
And i see you didn't even respond (despite the claim of answering one by one etc) on the South being presented in non-taboo fashion in US shows (let alone games or other media) in the 90s. Again, what changed in 20 years? I am sure it is not more polarization and division tactics, cause it never is.
A small-time, and known to be racist 90s show, David Lynch's "Twin Peaks". Obviously they shy away from using the South as a symbol of other stuff instead of slavery:
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Lexicus
Deity
Wrong and won't admit it. Sad!
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