Yet another idiot totally clueless about the concept of democracy. Here's a quick little lesson.
i) Democracies are ruled by the people
Well, democracy is a vague term. India has long claimed to be the world's largest democracy, yet they made astonishingly dismal progress in reforming some of the perversities of the caste system, such as the treatment of the untouchables. "Democracy" entomologically means "rule by the people." Does this mean each person rules himself? Each person rules his neighbor? If it means anything like the latter, why do we want it? Holding up democracy as an end unto itself is stupid. If 99% of the population voted to murder and expropriate the other 1%, you wouldn't be in favor of it just because the murder had been acheived democratically.
ii) The US has 300 million people. If each person opens their mouth to yap then we get perfect anarchy.
For the most part people are allowed to speak without permission from the authorities, and this is quite consistent with a peaceful society. A society in which people arbitrarily silence each other with force is not peaceful. Even if this result is acheived through a democratic process.
iii) If 100 people, or 1000 people, or some such reasonable amount of people open their mouths to yap then actual work can get
done.
And which people are these? Our commie overlords?
iv) Therefore 300 million people voluntarily surrender their rights to speak by allowing an elected official to speak for them.
When did this surrender take place? Or do you have a different definition of "voluntary" than everyone else does?
v) If the elected officials doesn't do what you like then TOUGH FUCKING LUCK. Go vote again.
This is a good point about democracy - if you are wronged by the government, you don't necessarily have any recourse, other than the ballot, which is totally ineffecual.
Thanks so much, commie overlord, for your insightful ideas on the need for the intelligentsia to seize control of the nation in order to operate it in our interest.
And you my friend are an embarrasement to Canadians. In a perfect world there would be special places that we could drag people
like you off to.
And it would be called a gulag. That's where soviet communists put people who disagreed with them.
All countries have bans imposed on various things at various times. Remember *Prohibition* in the states?
You sure do like employing this type of argument. What it amounts to is this: the US once made the horrible mistake of banning alcohol, so now that the barn door's open, why not just cause more trouble banning other stuff?
The United States has more research done on medicine. Granted, it _is_ ten times the size of Canada.
Most (around 99%) of the drugs developed in the US are developed by private, for-profit, capitalist pig-dog pharmaceutical companies. You must be disappointed we still haven't appointed a Commissar of Medicine to nationalize them.
Year after year Canada is named the best country in the world in which to live. How the fuck can you manage to find so many problems with it?
I am truly happy for you that the one country you happen to live in is the best one on the planet.
By far the most
significant decline in the population was WW2 which claimed an official count of 25 million soviet citizens, and historians estimate the number could be as high as 50 millionn.
Even if the highest estimates are the right ones, so what? The population was already declining before WWII. If the low WWII casualty figures are correct, then the German army killed less Soviet subjects than the Soviet government did. For a fun exercise, try adding up all the American war dead from every war the U.S. has ever been in. One year of Leninist famine accounts for more deaths. Or one year of Stalinist famine. Or one year of frenzied executions (the Great Terror). A few years' worth of labor camp deaths also accounts for more deaths than all the U.S. wars. As for the appallingly high WWII casualties, this was also the fault of communism. Typically communists seek to over-politicize every aspect of life; Stalin allowed political concerns to determine which people should be officers.
The point you make about the starvation in 1921 is moot. AS you may recall there was a war raging in Russia at time, including the south-eastern / Ukrainian areas of Russia
Wrong. The civil war was over by 1921. (Actually, for all practical purposes the civil war was over by the end of 1920.) Having defeated the whites and the democratic socialists the bolsheviks turned to an even more persistent source of opposition: the peasantry. The bolsheviks diverted considerable military manpower and equipment to suppressing local uprisings even during the civil war. This includes the use of heavy artillery and warplanes against villages which violently resisted collectivization.
And by the way, the Ukraine is not a region of Russia. When Moscow ruled over the Ukranians it resulted in great misery. BTW, have you ever known a Ukranian or someone of Ukranian descent (especially a Ukranian Jew)? If so, what do they think about your enthusiastic defense of the USSR?
it would have been hard, if not impossible to get the right amount of food to where it was needed, regardless of the ecnomic or political model of the country.
Even the Soviet government no longer advanced this argument by the 1980's. They've admitted the truth, why haven't you? Distribution was not the problem. Soviet authorities set quotas for each region and "requisitioned" that amount of grain. In both famines, quotas were chosen for each region based in part on how many uprisings had occurred in the region (uprisings were recorded and classified). Rebellious regions were given high grain quotas. The soviets had no technical difficulties in distributing the grain to more subjugated or more important regions. BTW, how many famines did the U.S. have during its early history? During the pre-industrial years? And if "any economic system" has trouble distributing food correctly, then why have all the largest famines of this century occurred in communist countries? USSR, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Mozambique... all communist countries at the time of their mass starvations. Why have there been NO mass starvations in non-communist countries since after the end of WWII?
The famines were not caused because of a fault in communism,
They were a direct product of the collectivization of industry and agriculture. That is communism. The 30+ million who died during China's Great Leap Forward were also victims of an especially rapid collectivization of industry and agriculture. Forcing people into collectives is communism. Granted, the masses don't WANT to be forced onto collectives, but whoever said communism was in the interest of the masses? Come to think of it, I bet you said that.
And let us not forget the countless numbers of civilians that died as a direct result of the fighting
... most of whom were killed by communists...
A war, where the white army was financed almost exlusively by the U.S. and Britain, and a significant portion of the army were non-Russians.
Almost pure fantasy-the West didn't fund the whites or anyone else. As for allied troops being present during the civil war, in some instances the communists had actually *asked* for these troops to be moved into the country, because they were negotiating peace with the Germans and wanted to become an unappealing target for them. Most non-russian casualties of the civil war period -about 1500- were Japanese, and in 1924 the Japanese kindly gave back territory they had gained. (Stalin did not reciprocate after WWII.) The battle deaths borne by other allies do not even amount to a thousand over the whole period, and again they withdrew after the armistice negotiations ended. The only other major foreign casualties were a bunch of Czech POW's captured in tsarist days. It had been agreed to release the POW's from Russia so they could be taken to fight in France, but suddenly Trotsky threatened them with imprisonment in the concentration camps if they would not join the Reds. The Czech POW's responded by taking over the railroad by which they were to leave the country, employing the help of eager White forces to do so. Serves the Bolsheviks right for viciously trying to conscript foreigners in this way. It is a fact that this episode pissed off the allies, but they didn't respond by attacking the Russians.
The 1932-1933 famine was indeed a fault of the government. However, as you yourself said it was caused for political reasons.
Yes. Communism is a political reason.
Dictatorships are unique to communisn
I'm sure you meant to say dictatorships are NOT unique to communism. But the point is, dictatorships are universal among communist nations. This fact is a plain implication of orthodox communist theory.
As you may recall, Russia was not the only nation that treated with Hitler. Remember the Vichy government in France which collaborated with the Nazis. Remember the British government that advocated and adopted the policy of appeasement with Germany, not to mention the high-ranking nobility and politicians who either advocated peace talks with Germany, or who met secretly to discuss peace.
Yes it is true that the major powers hoped war would not be required in order to contain German aggression. It is also true they made concessions in hope of acheiving peace. Meanwhile, the Soviets were negotiating acts of war with the Germans. They were dividing up Poland between them. (An earlier unprovoked Russian invasion of Poland in 1919 had failed.) The Germans were asked to indicate their approval of a planned Soviet invasion of Finland (which failed disastrously at first). The Soviets also agreed to let the nazis use Soviet ports to service their u-boats. And they reached a mutual agreement in which Stalin would rat out communists in Germany and Poland in exchange for handing over Polish Jews to Hitler from the Russian-controlled region. Now, how many of the non-communuist and non-socialist European powers were guilty of these acts? The answer is that there were none; only the Nazis (slang expression for "National Socialist) and the communists were engaged in such conspiracies.
And yes, as you say Soviet Union suffered devestating losses in WW2. And yes, the Russian army collapsed against the German enslaught. But so did the Polish armies, the British armies in North Africa, and the French army.
Granted. And how many of those nations suffered 20 million dead as a result?
The Trans-Siberian railway was a project of the csarist government. It was completed in 1905,
The trans-siberian railway I am talking about runs roughly parallel to the older one, about 400 miles to the north. It was built ON TOP OF THE SNOW mostly by people whose only crime was failure to submit to the collective. About 200,000 workers died. The rails they built proved impossible to use. The project of building this route was finally completed under Brezhnev, who among other things wanted a railway that didn't pass so close to the Chinese border.
And just who are you to condemn the prision populations of the Soviet Union. The U.S. has 500,000 people in jail on drug offences
Yes, and at least I'm not defending this practice, like you are! I am opposed to drug prohibition. But so long as we are comparing U.S. prisons to the Soviets, what is the annual death rate in U.S. prisons? Is it 10-30% , as in the former USSR?. Let's not also forget the institutionalized torture, the practice of raping daughters and wives of prisoners in front of them, the systematic imprisonment or relocation of innocent families of victims of the NKVD/KGB. The fact that you knowingly defend these practices is quite disgusting. It is particularly grotesque for you to suggest that mass murder is OK, because after all, the U.S. is guilty of imprisoning drug users/sellers. If your most honored socialist leader were to rip out the still-beating heart of one of his victims, would you heckle anyone who objected, on the grounds that the Aztec priests did this, too?
You've spent a lot of time pointing out troubles that were present during the period that the Communists were in power. However, you have not shown how these are a result of communism.
Sure, maybe it was just a coincidence that more Russians were executed, imprisoned, or starved to death after the communists came to power. Likewise the death of 1/4 of the Cambodian population might have actually had nothing to do with the Khmer Rouge. And the famines that North Korea has been experiencing - why, that's just the weather! And it's a coincidence that just south of the border the crops do just fine.
Face it, when people are forced onto collectives, they suffer, and so they resist. But I'm sure your view is that you have to break a few eggs...
"All power to the Soviets"
Ironic. Actually it was more like "All power to the Politburo." The slogan you are quoting was used by opponents of the Bolsheviks (no, not the whites or even the mensheviks) who wanted decisions to be made at local councils, not in Moscow or Petrograd.
However, you only have to look at the countries in Africa and the middle east that are much farther right than the U.S. will ever and take note that these countries are all either dictarships, monarchies, or controlled by all powerfull businesses.
The most common political orientation of African governments has been avowedly socialist. Two African countries have seen outright communism: Ethiopia and Mozambique (yes, the two countries that had the terrible famines in the 80's - what a coincidence!)
There is a grain of truth in calling the middle-eastern dictatorships right-wing, however I think the use of that terminology is misleading. They are arbitrary terms which refer to loose conglomerations of sets of political beliefs which may or may not be related. Their meanings also change over time. They don't translate well into Arab politics. Also, sometimes middle eastern countries are run by socialist parties - Iraq, for example.
Socialism is about
doing what is best for the population, and it works, look at Soviet Russia.
I'll let this statement speak for itself. I think you've revealed a lot about your knowledge of world politics and history in this post.
However, in 1917 Russia was centuries behind. In those 75 years that the Soviets were in power, Russia achieved uninterrupted economic growth (at an overall rate higher than the U.S.)
"Uninterrupted growth" is, to put it mildly, a summary which leaves out some major episodes in Soviet history. In 1921 the USSR experienced a worse famine than any that had occurred previously in Russia or any of the countries it had absorbed. This was because Lenin instituted a policy of requisitioning unrealistically high quantities of grain from the rebellious areas in order to redistribute it to cities which were more politically important. At least 3 million starved to death.
It is difficult to estimate both the GDP and the population of the USSR during this period because the country followed a policy which made it extremely closed off from the west-anyone with contact with foreigners was persecuted, and often imprisoned. However as near as we can tell the standard of living for the peasantry was actually much lower by 1930 than it had been in 1915. Lenin also invented the concentration camp in 1919 as a tool for containing disloyal subjects and putting them to work. The use of this labor was extremely haphazard at best, and probably did nothing to help the economic lot of the average peasant. Prisoners were often employed in useless projects, such as a very large canal which was useless (not built deep enough), and most famously the trans-siberian railroad, whose construction claimed a whopping 200,000 dead to exhaustion, exposure, and starvation. It was never used.
One of the measures of the success of the Soviet experiment during the 1917-19 is the rate of population growth. A comprehensive census was completed in 1937; no true complete census had been done since the Tsarist days. De-classified Soviet archives now tell us that originally the census found that the population had shrunk by millions since communist rule began. The census managers who presented this information were all imprisoned, and in 1939 a new set of figures were released showing that the population had remained constant under communism.
One of the major reasons for the population decline was another, perhaps much larger famine under Stalin in 1932-1933. This famine took most of its toll in the Ukraine and what is now Kazakstan (yes that's the new correct spelling), these two republics accounting for about 7 million dead of starvation during the famine period. An additional 2 million in other regions starved to death. Again these famines were caused by massive seizures of grain on the part of the communist government. It targeted these particular regions because they were hotbeds of nationalist, anti-Russian sentiment. The Kazak case is a little different; they were a semi-nomadic people up until the famine period, when they were forced into collectives and many were re-located. It is interesting to note that while these ~9 million people starved to death, the USSR exported 1.8 million tons of grain, while another 4.5 million tons were being kept in secret stockpiles.
I challenge you to explain why the Germans utterly crushed their vastly larger, more resource-rich neighbor, if you maintain that the USSR had been experiencing "uninterrupted economic growth" up until that time. Hitler was able to make it within a few dozen miles of Moscow, and in the process caused the USSR to suffer more war dead than any other country participating in the war. BTW, how do you reconcile Stalin's early collusion with Hitler, if you claim that Soviet communism "worked" and acted in the best interest of the people?
I am also curious to know why it was in the best interest of the people for the USSR to imprison over ten million people at a time for political reasons, in forced-labor camps with 10-30% annual death rates?
Returning to the story of the USSR's "uninterrupted economic growth," there were many amusing most WWII instances of Western onlookers seriously misinterpreting the supposed facts and figures being released by the Soviet government. For instance, one year the Soviets might announce "We are spending X billion rubles to develop factories, canals, mines, etc." Western economists would do the math and conclude that the USSR was investing an ENORMOUS portion of their GDP to investment, which would normally portend unbelievable growth in output for the future. The truth was, the USSR dumped ENORMOUS portions of their GDP into useless projects, useful but mismanaged projects, showpiece projects which served no purpose but to impress outsiders, and a great many other forms of boondoggles. This spending represents pure waste. The only reason the USSR didn't fall behind even more than it did is that factory managers eventually learned techniques to trade goods illegally, which often helped them to improve efficiency even in the absence of markets on which to buy tne necessary inputs. The flip side to this is that factory managers also used this process to enrich themselves.
Points ommitted:
Extremely large number of executions carried out in USSR
Consistent history of creating conflicts with many other countries, including most neighbor states and a few scattered across the world
Enormous waste of money on space program the country could ill afford
Enormous waste of money on arms race the country could ill afford
Worst environmental record of any country anywhere, ever.
This is a country which never even flited with capitalism until now and is actually flourishing with the most fundamental, unregulated, unfettered capitalism at in its purist form.
Russia is not flourishing. For the most part the economic trend in Russia has been a continuation of the downward trend established in the 80's, and the demographics (such as life expectancy) are reflective of this fact.
Russia's economy is not characterized by "unregulated, unfettered capitalism..." As for regulation, I have heard anecdotally that the law would require an individual to go through 13 separate bureaucracies just to start a business that sold socks. What's really going on is that Bureaucrats make a living by asking for bribes; regulations exist in order to give government employees something to be bribed to overlook. Just as in other countries, organized crime specializes both in corrupting the government so that things can actually get done, and outright protecting people from the law. It is now true, and has probably been true for many years, that most of the production that goes on in Russia is against the law. That's how heavily regulated business is in Russia. Some of the other former Soviet republics are about as bad.
Capitalism means, among other things, "private ownership of the means of production." From what I've explained so far, you can imagine how little private ownership means when you have to bribe someone in order to exercise your property rights. Another complicating factor in the fictitious transition to capitalism is that when Russia privatized many of its state owned enterprises, they did so by a process which often involved bureaucrats giving favors to well-connected aspiring industrialists in exchange for bribes. This process is more plunder than it is privatization.
Organized crime in Russia is in part an offshoot of the old communist government. The mafia is heavily composed of ex-KGB types as well as factory manager-bureaucrat-politician types who used to be in charge of production and distribution in the communist days. The communist kleptocracy lives on, it just no longer bothers to put a veneer of justice on its activities.
It may be true that many Russians are honest, hardworking, and intelligent. It's not clear whether that will matter, given that the bad guys are the ones with all the guns and the political power. In the meantime the average Russian must tolerate the pilfering behavior of the customs officials who decide what is allowed to go into the country.
The American media do not cast a sufficienty ugly pall over our view of Russia, as evidenced by your impression that the country is flourishing and experimenting with capitalism. Again, Russia is going downhill in so many ways (and they still can't keep peace with their neighbor states). Russia is still nothing but a dirty, backwards corrupt third world kleptocracy, distinguished from other such countries only by its wasteful space program and its gigantic stockpiles of nukes.
Our nation is as scary to communists as theirs is to us.
If that is true, why do communist countries have to devote so much effort to keeping their people in, while the U.S. spends so much effort keeping immigrants out? For instance, have you heard of the Berlin Wall? Are you aware the Cuba regularly employs its military to gun down refugees while they try to flee? For a better understanding of this issue, I suggest you read _The Black Book of Communism_, which is a survey of communist terror in virtually every country which has either experienced communist rule or had a militant communist political movement. During the 20th century, communist governments have killed 85-100 million of their own citizens - most of them during peacetime. Whatever "peactime" means in a communist country.
Slashdot Mirror
Electroshock "exercise" pads don't build any muscle.
Excellent idea. I bet one of the employees who hangs out on alt.dss.hack would be up to this.
For the most part people are allowed to speak without permission from the authorities, and this is quite consistent with a peaceful society. A society in which people arbitrarily silence each other with force is not peaceful. Even if this result is acheived through a democratic process.
And which people are these? Our commie overlords?When did this surrender take place? Or do you have a different definition of "voluntary" than everyone else does?This is a good point about democracy - if you are wronged by the government, you don't necessarily have any recourse, other than the ballot, which is totally ineffecual.Thanks so much, commie overlord, for your insightful ideas on the need for the intelligentsia to seize control of the nation in order to operate it in our interest.
And it would be called a gulag. That's where soviet communists put people who disagreed with them.
You sure do like employing this type of argument. What it amounts to is this: the US once made the horrible mistake of banning alcohol, so now that the barn door's open, why not just cause more trouble banning other stuff?
Most (around 99%) of the drugs developed in the US are developed by private, for-profit, capitalist pig-dog pharmaceutical companies. You must be disappointed we still haven't appointed a Commissar of Medicine to nationalize them.
I am truly happy for you that the one country you happen to live in is the best one on the planet.Even if the highest estimates are the right ones, so what? The population was already declining before WWII. If the low WWII casualty figures are correct, then the German army killed less Soviet subjects than the Soviet government did. For a fun exercise, try adding up all the American war dead from every war the U.S. has ever been in. One year of Leninist famine accounts for more deaths. Or one year of Stalinist famine. Or one year of frenzied executions (the Great Terror). A few years' worth of labor camp deaths also accounts for more deaths than all the U.S. wars. As for the appallingly high WWII casualties, this was also the fault of communism. Typically communists seek to over-politicize every aspect of life; Stalin allowed political concerns to determine which people should be officers.
Wrong. The civil war was over by 1921. (Actually, for all practical purposes the civil war was over by the end of 1920.) Having defeated the whites and the democratic socialists the bolsheviks turned to an even more persistent source of opposition: the peasantry. The bolsheviks diverted considerable military manpower and equipment to suppressing local uprisings even during the civil war. This includes the use of heavy artillery and warplanes against villages which violently resisted collectivization.And by the way, the Ukraine is not a region of Russia. When Moscow ruled over the Ukranians it resulted in great misery. BTW, have you ever known a Ukranian or someone of Ukranian descent (especially a Ukranian Jew)? If so, what do they think about your enthusiastic defense of the USSR?
Even the Soviet government no longer advanced this argument by the 1980's. They've admitted the truth, why haven't you? Distribution was not the problem. Soviet authorities set quotas for each region and "requisitioned" that amount of grain. In both famines, quotas were chosen for each region based in part on how many uprisings had occurred in the region (uprisings were recorded and classified). Rebellious regions were given high grain quotas. The soviets had no technical difficulties in distributing the grain to more subjugated or more important regions. BTW, how many famines did the U.S. have during its early history? During the pre-industrial years? And if "any economic system" has trouble distributing food correctly, then why have all the largest famines of this century occurred in communist countries? USSR, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Mozambique... all communist countries at the time of their mass starvations. Why have there been NO mass starvations in non-communist countries since after the end of WWII?
They were a direct product of the collectivization of industry and agriculture. That is communism. The 30+ million who died during China's Great Leap Forward were also victims of an especially rapid collectivization of industry and agriculture. Forcing people into collectives is communism. Granted, the masses don't WANT to be forced onto collectives, but whoever said communism was in the interest of the masses? Come to think of it, I bet you said that.
... most of whom were killed by communists...
Almost pure fantasy-the West didn't fund the whites or anyone else. As for allied troops being present during the civil war, in some instances the communists had actually *asked* for these troops to be moved into the country, because they were negotiating peace with the Germans and wanted to become an unappealing target for them. Most non-russian casualties of the civil war period -about 1500- were Japanese, and in 1924 the Japanese kindly gave back territory they had gained. (Stalin did not reciprocate after WWII.) The battle deaths borne by other allies do not even amount to a thousand over the whole period, and again they withdrew after the armistice negotiations ended. The only other major foreign casualties were a bunch of Czech POW's captured in tsarist days. It had been agreed to release the POW's from Russia so they could be taken to fight in France, but suddenly Trotsky threatened them with imprisonment in the concentration camps if they would not join the Reds. The Czech POW's responded by taking over the railroad by which they were to leave the country, employing the help of eager White forces to do so. Serves the Bolsheviks right for viciously trying to conscript foreigners in this way. It is a fact that this episode pissed off the allies, but they didn't respond by attacking the Russians.Yes. Communism is a political reason.
I'm sure you meant to say dictatorships are NOT unique to communism. But the point is, dictatorships are universal among communist nations. This fact is a plain implication of orthodox communist theory.
Yes it is true that the major powers hoped war would not be required in order to contain German aggression. It is also true they made concessions in hope of acheiving peace. Meanwhile, the Soviets were negotiating acts of war with the Germans. They were dividing up Poland between them. (An earlier unprovoked Russian invasion of Poland in 1919 had failed.) The Germans were asked to indicate their approval of a planned Soviet invasion of Finland (which failed disastrously at first). The Soviets also agreed to let the nazis use Soviet ports to service their u-boats. And they reached a mutual agreement in which Stalin would rat out communists in Germany and Poland in exchange for handing over Polish Jews to Hitler from the Russian-controlled region. Now, how many of the non-communuist and non-socialist European powers were guilty of these acts? The answer is that there were none; only the Nazis (slang expression for "National Socialist) and the communists were engaged in such conspiracies. Granted. And how many of those nations suffered 20 million dead as a result?The trans-siberian railway I am talking about runs roughly parallel to the older one, about 400 miles to the north. It was built ON TOP OF THE SNOW mostly by people whose only crime was failure to submit to the collective. About 200,000 workers died. The rails they built proved impossible to use. The project of building this route was finally completed under Brezhnev, who among other things wanted a railway that didn't pass so close to the Chinese border. Yes, and at least I'm not defending this practice, like you are! I am opposed to drug prohibition. But so long as we are comparing U.S. prisons to the Soviets, what is the annual death rate in U.S. prisons? Is it 10-30% , as in the former USSR?. Let's not also forget the institutionalized torture, the practice of raping daughters and wives of prisoners in front of them, the systematic imprisonment or relocation of innocent families of victims of the NKVD/KGB. The fact that you knowingly defend these practices is quite disgusting. It is particularly grotesque for you to suggest that mass murder is OK, because after all, the U.S. is guilty of imprisoning drug users/sellers. If your most honored socialist leader were to rip out the still-beating heart of one of his victims, would you heckle anyone who objected, on the grounds that the Aztec priests did this, too? Sure, maybe it was just a coincidence that more Russians were executed, imprisoned, or starved to death after the communists came to power. Likewise the death of 1/4 of the Cambodian population might have actually had nothing to do with the Khmer Rouge. And the famines that North Korea has been experiencing - why, that's just the weather! And it's a coincidence that just south of the border the crops do just fine.Face it, when people are forced onto collectives, they suffer, and so they resist. But I'm sure your view is that you have to break a few eggs...
Ironic. Actually it was more like "All power to the Politburo." The slogan you are quoting was used by opponents of the Bolsheviks (no, not the whites or even the mensheviks) who wanted decisions to be made at local councils, not in Moscow or Petrograd.The most common political orientation of African governments has been avowedly socialist. Two African countries have seen outright communism: Ethiopia and Mozambique (yes, the two countries that had the terrible famines in the 80's - what a coincidence!)
There is a grain of truth in calling the middle-eastern dictatorships right-wing, however I think the use of that terminology is misleading. They are arbitrary terms which refer to loose conglomerations of sets of political beliefs which may or may not be related. Their meanings also change over time. They don't translate well into Arab politics. Also, sometimes middle eastern countries are run by socialist parties - Iraq, for example.
I'll let this statement speak for itself. I think you've revealed a lot about your knowledge of world politics and history in this post.
"Uninterrupted growth" is, to put it mildly, a summary which leaves out some major episodes in Soviet history. In 1921 the USSR experienced a worse famine than any that had occurred previously in Russia or any of the countries it had absorbed. This was because Lenin instituted a policy of requisitioning unrealistically high quantities of grain from the rebellious areas in order to redistribute it to cities which were more politically important. At least 3 million starved to death.
It is difficult to estimate both the GDP and the population of the USSR during this period because the country followed a policy which made it extremely closed off from the west-anyone with contact with foreigners was persecuted, and often imprisoned. However as near as we can tell the standard of living for the peasantry was actually much lower by 1930 than it had been in 1915. Lenin also invented the concentration camp in 1919 as a tool for containing disloyal subjects and putting them to work. The use of this labor was extremely haphazard at best, and probably did nothing to help the economic lot of the average peasant. Prisoners were often employed in useless projects, such as a very large canal which was useless (not built deep enough), and most famously the trans-siberian railroad, whose construction claimed a whopping 200,000 dead to exhaustion, exposure, and starvation. It was never used.
One of the measures of the success of the Soviet experiment during the 1917-19 is the rate of population growth. A comprehensive census was completed in 1937; no true complete census had been done since the Tsarist days. De-classified Soviet archives now tell us that originally the census found that the population had shrunk by millions since communist rule began. The census managers who presented this information were all imprisoned, and in 1939 a new set of figures were released showing that the population had remained constant under communism.
One of the major reasons for the population decline was another, perhaps much larger famine under Stalin in 1932-1933. This famine took most of its toll in the Ukraine and what is now Kazakstan (yes that's the new correct spelling), these two republics accounting for about 7 million dead of starvation during the famine period. An additional 2 million in other regions starved to death. Again these famines were caused by massive seizures of grain on the part of the communist government. It targeted these particular regions because they were hotbeds of nationalist, anti-Russian sentiment. The Kazak case is a little different; they were a semi-nomadic people up until the famine period, when they were forced into collectives and many were re-located. It is interesting to note that while these ~9 million people starved to death, the USSR exported 1.8 million tons of grain, while another 4.5 million tons were being kept in secret stockpiles.
I challenge you to explain why the Germans utterly crushed their vastly larger, more resource-rich neighbor, if you maintain that the USSR had been experiencing "uninterrupted economic growth" up until that time. Hitler was able to make it within a few dozen miles of Moscow, and in the process caused the USSR to suffer more war dead than any other country participating in the war. BTW, how do you reconcile Stalin's early collusion with Hitler, if you claim that Soviet communism "worked" and acted in the best interest of the people?
I am also curious to know why it was in the best interest of the people for the USSR to imprison over ten million people at a time for political reasons, in forced-labor camps with 10-30% annual death rates?
Returning to the story of the USSR's "uninterrupted economic growth," there were many amusing most WWII instances of Western onlookers seriously misinterpreting the supposed facts and figures being released by the Soviet government. For instance, one year the Soviets might announce "We are spending X billion rubles to develop factories, canals, mines, etc." Western economists would do the math and conclude that the USSR was investing an ENORMOUS portion of their GDP to investment, which would normally portend unbelievable growth in output for the future. The truth was, the USSR dumped ENORMOUS portions of their GDP into useless projects, useful but mismanaged projects, showpiece projects which served no purpose but to impress outsiders, and a great many other forms of boondoggles. This spending represents pure waste. The only reason the USSR didn't fall behind even more than it did is that factory managers eventually learned techniques to trade goods illegally, which often helped them to improve efficiency even in the absence of markets on which to buy tne necessary inputs. The flip side to this is that factory managers also used this process to enrich themselves.
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This is a country which never even flited with capitalism until now and is actually flourishing with the most fundamental, unregulated, unfettered capitalism at in its purist form.
Russia is not flourishing. For the most part the economic trend in Russia has been a continuation of the downward trend established in the 80's, and the demographics (such as life expectancy) are reflective of this fact.
Russia's economy is not characterized by "unregulated, unfettered capitalism ..." As for regulation, I have heard anecdotally that the law would require an individual to go through 13 separate bureaucracies just to start a business that sold socks. What's really going on is that Bureaucrats make a living by asking for bribes; regulations exist in order to give government employees something to be bribed to overlook. Just as in other countries, organized crime specializes both in corrupting the government so that things can actually get done, and outright protecting people from the law. It is now true, and has probably been true for many years, that most of the production that goes on in Russia is against the law. That's how heavily regulated business is in Russia. Some of the other former Soviet republics are about as bad.
Capitalism means, among other things, "private ownership of the means of production." From what I've explained so far, you can imagine how little private ownership means when you have to bribe someone in order to exercise your property rights. Another complicating factor in the fictitious transition to capitalism is that when Russia privatized many of its state owned enterprises, they did so by a process which often involved bureaucrats giving favors to well-connected aspiring industrialists in exchange for bribes. This process is more plunder than it is privatization.
Organized crime in Russia is in part an offshoot of the old communist government. The mafia is heavily composed of ex-KGB types as well as factory manager-bureaucrat-politician types who used to be in charge of production and distribution in the communist days. The communist kleptocracy lives on, it just no longer bothers to put a veneer of justice on its activities.
It may be true that many Russians are honest, hardworking, and intelligent. It's not clear whether that will matter, given that the bad guys are the ones with all the guns and the political power. In the meantime the average Russian must tolerate the pilfering behavior of the customs officials who decide what is allowed to go into the country.
The American media do not cast a sufficienty ugly pall over our view of Russia, as evidenced by your impression that the country is flourishing and experimenting with capitalism. Again, Russia is going downhill in so many ways (and they still can't keep peace with their neighbor states). Russia is still nothing but a dirty, backwards corrupt third world kleptocracy, distinguished from other such countries only by its wasteful space program and its gigantic stockpiles of nukes.
If that is true, why do communist countries have to devote so much effort to keeping their people in, while the U.S. spends so much effort keeping immigrants out? For instance, have you heard of the Berlin Wall? Are you aware the Cuba regularly employs its military to gun down refugees while they try to flee? For a better understanding of this issue, I suggest you read _The Black Book of Communism_, which is a survey of communist terror in virtually every country which has either experienced communist rule or had a militant communist political movement. During the 20th century, communist governments have killed 85-100 million of their own citizens - most of them during peacetime. Whatever "peactime" means in a communist country.