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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bela_ghoulashi who wrote (53834)	10/22/2002 6:04:30 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Communism was the greatest social engineering experiment ever, I agree with you. True also that communist states cruelly and brutally caused many deaths. It would also be true if you had said, in addition, that these states were totalitarian, repressive, unpleasant, and that you wouldn't want to live there. Still, the points stand that: 1) It was not the ideology that was ruthless, as anyone who has read anything on the subject can tell you 2) As with any group of people, it is unfair (and wrong, even) to call all people who ever believed in communism "ruthless" or "harmdoer". ... and, incidentally: 3) I have never cared for the communist ideology, just read a little about it and discarded it as utopian ("Everyone share everything and be happy ever after") ... and moreover: 4) Please don't bite your tongue. Say all you wish to say :)

To: bela_ghoulashi who wrote (53834)	10/22/2002 11:39:51 AM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Respond to of 281500

Joseph Shumpeter predicted at the earliest stages of the Bolchevik revolution that at last communism would be put to the test, "accompanied by mountains of cadavers", but he was sadly mistaken assuming the world would quickly learn what a mistake it was. It took the whole of the 20th century for anyone to learn anything. It's worth citing the whole of the paragraph at the end of the link you provided : Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever seen. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering liberal democracy.