How long do you want to fight a losing battle with the planet? How high do you eventually want the levees to be before you give up? When the city's subsided to the point where it's an isolated bowl in the ocean?
How long? As long as you need to get the technology to win. I don't expect water to be a problem in 2030 New Orleans. It's all a matter of production forces. Once you get enough of them, there is no stopping you, planet or no planet.
We already can build underwater hotels (coming to Dubai in 2006), 8-km high oil rigs, 0.8-km high skyscrapers and what not. There will eventually be no problem in building a city in the crater of an active volcano, on the sea floor 2km deep, on the South Pole, in Earth orbit or in the Missisipi delta. With AI and nanotechnology it will all be a piece of cake.
Now the only two real questions are whether it's better to fix the city or build a new one and whether (New) New Orleans will hold on for 20-30 years in spite of the coming global warming.
Nonsense. We don't need to go far - just look at the US, can ugly truths about their race situation be told? No, they can't and the Americans are the first to admit that. In communist societies most topics were open for discussion - how do you think the opposition to the regime operated - via telepathy?
And the communist leaders are not seen as liars or monsters. Even after 15 years of smear campaigns, Russian people still respect the genius and honesty of Lenin, confidence and authority of Stalin. Only misled Europeans and Americans, who believe what they are told by their capitalism masters, may see Communist leaders as monsters. At the same time they see their own leaders as paragons of integrity...
You are so predictable and so simple... If it's in the USA or West Germany or any other capitalist country - it's democracy, it's good. If it's in the USSR or East Germany - it's bad. You are so simple, it's boring.
There is no point in arguing with you, because if you assume that USA is the model society by which you judge everybody else, then everybody else will look worse than the USA. It's a logical fallacy, because you assume that democracy == USA without any arguments or proof and then also assume that this USian democracy is the most important thing in the world.
Needless to say, such worldview is too simplistic, not to say totally idiotic.
You are inherently stupid if you believe propaganda.
If you believe communism is inherently totalitarian, you are a moron, because communism abolishes the state when it's achieved. 100 millions is an obvious lie. Almost no people were killed (i.e. hundreds or thousands at most) during forced collectivization.
54,769,000 is a stupid lie and you are a moron for repeating it. Cambodia was not marxist or communist and it was supported by the USA (for its opposition to Vietnam), you moron. Pretty much everything else you say doesn't stand to any critical scrutiny.
You are brainwashed by your school, by the media, by the politicians. You are a total and utter moron, I feel sorry for you. However, I am not angry at you at all, because it's not your fault that you are so stupid and you are not the only one. Many (most?) Americans (and many Europeans as well) are taught lies in schools and grow up to believe them. You don't know anything true about history, just fabrications and, alas, you appear sadly unable to free yourself from this cage of lies.
So what? That was the law of the land. Dura lex sad lex. BTW, it's interesting to note that when people speak about the victims, they absolutely never mention those East German border guards who were killed by grenades thrown over the wall from the West side...
The trial was a complete judicial nonsense, a scam, a farce. The leaders were convicted to please the Western masters, not because there was any legal basis for that whatsoever. The law is a law and if it's passed in accordance with country's legal system, there is nothing wrong about it. Convicting Honneker for instituting a law that Uncle Sam considers bad is a violation of German sovereignty and of common sense.
As for the paradise of the unified Germany, consider that "A September 2004 poll found that 25% of West Germans and 12% of East Germans wished that East Germans were again cut off from West Germany by the Berlin Wall.", also 21% of all Germans want the Wall back, 27% of East Germans aren't happy about current political system, unemployment in East Germany is 21%.
You confuse free market and capitalism. These are two separate things. Capitalism is about maximizing profit through exploitation of workers, dirty monopolistic practices and imperial conquest. Free market is about fair competition.
The fallacy in your reasoning is that you take a minor questionable action of certain Soviet organisations and blow its importance out of all proportions.
Yes, a small number of books by certain authors were not available as wildly as they potentially could have been. So what? Are all books by all authors widely available in all other countries? Is it impossible that the establishment in other countries (such as the US) prevent or hinder publications of certain books deemed harmful? Was immeasurable harm done to Soviet people by the lack of an authorised edition of Doctor Zhivago?
You claim to have personal experience of all the bad things you described. Well, it's entirely possible, but you can't judge a country on the basis of personal experiences alone. Shit happens. In each and every country on Earth people get bad experiences - they are maimed in traffic accidents, die from food poisoning, are mugged in the streets, get STDs, fall in poodles, get hangovers. How do your personal bad experiences, these isolated and atypical incidents say anything about the country with the population of almost 300.000.000 people in general?
You say "People died from trivial diseases". Shit, how can I argue that? They did. People die from trivial diseases everywhere. In Holland, in Finland, in Switzerland, in Luxemburg. Such is the nature of life. However, if you check the statistics, you would find that death rates for most causes were quite low in Soviet Union and have been decreasing all the time, as the health system was being continiously improved.
You say "I cannot think of any single product you could be certain to find in the shops." Well, may be you cannot or may be you are a liar. When you entered even a small food store in some village, you were likely to find: fresh bread and other bakery products, fresh milk and other milk products, vegetables and fruits, canned and preserved products, eggs, meat, poultry and fish and a number of other necessary products. All these were very cheap and accessible to everyone. Same was true for other shops.
Yes, some products were occassionally hard to find. The main reason is that they were priced below the equilibrium price point and all available stock was usually quickly bought. Technically you could say that there have been a shortage, but in reality the per-capita consumption of this product could have easily been high relative to other countries. It's just that prices and production didn't automatically increase for popular products, so one sometimes got an impression of shortage.
Yes, there have been real shortages of certain products as well, but it rarely was significant.
You said "Racism was rampant... many Russians disliked blacks and showed it much more openly". What a ridiculous statement! First of all, if by blacks you mean Negros and not simply people of darker complexion from Caucasus or Middle Asia, then there haven't been that many blacks in Soviet Union. There were some foreign students, but Soviet Union didn't have a large population of blacks... How could the racism be rampant in such a case? It's just doesn't make any sense.
Furthermore, I already showed that according to the most obvious indicator, the share of international marriages, the racism/nationalism in Soviet Union was extremely low. There is simply no evidence for racism in USSR, but there are countless accounts of Soviet regime improving the lives of smaller nations immensely and of Soviet power eliminating racism as early as in 1920s. All nations had every opportunity to retain and develop their cultural heritage, use their native language and otherwise keep their traditions. In the time when many countries such as the USA had government-sanctioned discrimination and even had occasional lynchings of blacks, Soviet Union has eliminated racial hatred. Your lies and empty accusations cannot change that fact.
Feel free to correct me on that point, if I'm wrong. No need to, you are (sadly) correct, but that doesn't invalidate a single word or fact of what I said about the Soviet Union.
I notice you didn't include East Germany in your list of places full of happy Communists. Is that because it's hard to explain why it required a deadly barrier to keep them there if they were so happy?
No, it was because it would take too much time to list every country full of happy Communists - there were so many of them.
The wall was built as a result of growing tensions between the imperialist West and the Communist countries. The Cold War (initiated and fomented by the US) led to the construction of the wall. It was a part of politicking between the US and the USSR and had very little to do actually with preventing East Germans from moving to the West (everyone who wanted to move, already had the time to do that in the 16 years preceeding its construction).
Of course, some people tried to get across the wall and were shot, but, first, they were morons and, second, the scale of the problem was exaggerated by the eager corporate media in the US. First, there was a tacit agreement that those who wanted to emigrate could do it through the Austrian border without any risk (or publicity). Second, it's absolutely normal that the border guards shoot people who are trying to cross the border illegally. Yes, it's not always necessary, but you can hardly blame anyone for upholding the law.
Anyway, many people in East Germany were happy. After the reunification, even though trillions of marks (now euros) were spent and 17 years have passed, the situation in the East Germany is still not good and many people are not happy either. If you look beyond the usual slogans and start looking at social and economic indicators, you would realise that German socialism in the East wasn't bad at all when compared with German capitalism in the West.
The system did implode because it failed on most accounts, but most spectacularly when it comes to economic and environmental criteria. The reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union are too complex to be discussed here. But they have nothing to do with economic or environmental issues. The Soviet economy experienced continuous growth up until its very end. The environmental problems weren't any more serious than elsewhere in the world.
They did not provided basic needs for their citizens. I cannot think of any single product you could be certain to find in the shops. Sure, some days you could find excellent meat, and some days you could find decent toilet paper. However, there was no way you could be sure what you would find that particular day in the particular shop you chose to go to, and most products were of apalling quality. Many people project the shortages of early 1990s and late 1980s to the whole history of Soviet Union. This is wrong. Throughout most of the history all products were available in sufficient quantities. The actual per capita consumption of most products were among the highest in the world. The consumption of meat in Soviet Union was in world top 5, the consumption of many other important products, such as milk and milk products was significanlt higher than in the US.
It's easy to start believing personal accounts, but the plural of anecdote is not data. Most of the personal stories people tell you about their life in 1960s are made up. Ask any psychologist and he will confirm that. Personal memories aren't reliable in the first place and when you compound the problem with bias these stories go beyond useless. But if you compare actual numbers, you see a completely different picture. And before some moron starts about how "all soviet statistics were lies", that's not true. You can double-check a lot of numbers using international studies, using intelligence data, etc. There are enough sources and they generally confirm the Soviet data about its economy.
The health care was free but rubbish. People died from trivial diseases, that weren't considered deadly at all in the West.
For example? Many deseases (such as typhus, tuberculosis) were eliminted in Soviet Union very quickly. The health care wasn't the best in the world, but compared with other countries it was good, Soviet Union was in top 10 or top 20 by most statistical health indicators. And the health care was certainly better than it is in modern Russia.
Sure books were extremely cheap, but some of the most important litterature in the world was simply not available, as it wasn't judged politically correct. Pasternak? Dostoyevsky? Hardly ever available. bw5353, you seem to be quite a reasonable person. Please, try to think, how you were first exposed to these lies, who fabricated them and why they did it. Yes, there was censorship in Soviet Union, but censorship exists in every country, even in the US or in Western Europe. Politically incorrect books were restricted in every country at some point.
Why is it when Soviet Union does something - it's evil and horrible, but when the US does the same, it's fine and dandy? Many schools in the US still censor their libraries. The House Un-American Activities Committee blacklisted writers and film-directors in the US. There are many cases of censorship in the US, Europe and pretty much every country in the world. Why is it that when a certain Soviet writer is sharply criticised by the party it's suddenly so horrible? Pasternak's books were not taken out of the libraries or burned! It was simply that for his activities which were deemed anti-Soviet Pasternak was criticised, expeled from the Union of Writers and probably convinced to reject the Nobel prize. FBI did worse things to communists in the US at that time.
And for the record, books of both Pasternak and Dostoyevsky were studies in Soviet schools. And my family had both authors represented in our home library. Who told you that Dostoyevsky's books were not
Does the phrase "liquidation of the kulaks" mean anything to you? Yes, it does. But I suspect that most people have a very distorted picture of what happened then. It wasn't really that horrible or radical, considering the history of the "Land Question" in Russia and considering the Civil War that just finished. I hope you do realise that liquidation doesn't mean killing or imprisoning, just taking the property and relocating to other settlements. And it happened only to about 1-2% of all peasants.
Stalin was a hard-fisted, totalitarian ruler. He had those who opposed him not only killed, but erased from history. Men were literally painted out of Communist party photographs. What do you call this? He was hard-fisted, but that's what the situation required from a Soviet ruler at that time. He did what he ought to do. And he wasn't totalitarian, the right word is authoritarian. And I simply don't see anything particularly bad about painting men out of party photographs (and paintings too, BTW). How is that worse than Republicans paying Starr to paint Mr. Clinton with dirt? We tend to look at erasing history differently because we were raised on "1984" and this creates instant repulsion in us. But I doubt that people in 1930s were as concerned about that.
And boy, those East Germans sure seemed eager to get away from all the "peace and friendship" that the USSR had to offer them! Well, judging by the suicide rates increasing in the East, joining with the West Germany wasn't such a great idea after all... Even after spending all those trillions of deutchemarks (and now euros) the peace and friendship remains elusive...
The irrationality of people is not an argument. People in Soviet Union were welcoming the changes, even though in retrospect it should have been obvious to them that their personal situation would drastically worsen (miners, teachers... and pretty much everybody else). They believed the lies about the capitalist paradise (the media and movie images), weren't content with the steady improvements that Soviet system provided and wanted to have everything now.
You really took the parent post personally, didnt you? His point was NOT anti-communist- he was stating that a PURE communist system has not been implemented, and he is correct. If you are angry he called Lenin a 'so-called intellectual'- deal with it. You admit that he failed to build a communist society. The parent is entitled to his opinion on that result. I don't particularly mind the parent post. It's just that people are so brainwashed over communism and they don't realise that they rely completely on official anti-communist propaganda. And he implied (a common mistake) that Soviet Union had nothing to do with "real" communism. Of course, it hasn't succeeded in building communism, but it actually got quite far. If it wasn't for the Cold War, it might have be very close to the goal by now.
I hope that the persona who moderated this perfectly normal comment as Flaimbait didn't suddenly had a heart attack from reading it. It would be a shame to lose such a dedicated anti-communist crusader. They are a rare bread, now that the US government had to cut down on propaganda expenses. Everybody wants to hate Saddam Hussein now, it's no longer in fashion to hate communism, so we must preserve the irrational and thoroughly brainwashed soldiers such as this anonymous moderator.
Also check out Manna by Marshall Brain. This time communism is built in Australia and people from the USA are liberated by the emissaries from the Australian Project. The auther denies that he is in any way for communism, however, just proving again, how deep every American was affected by masterfully crafted Cold War anti-communist propaganda...
But the masses were happy in the Soviet Union. They are happy in Cuba as well and you would be surprised to find out that they are generally happy in Vietnam and North Korea as well. Of course, you would never ever read about it from most American newspapers or see it on American TV. I hope you don't hold any naive hopes of your media being objective and honest, do you?
Yes, people in communist countries are not as rich as they are in the "first world". But this is extremely simple to explain - they just don't have a "third world" to exploit! As simple as that.
But they got everything they had by their own labour. And they distributed the wealth equitably. Yes, Soviet people were never as reach as people from American upper-middle class, because they didn't have tens of struggling low-income workers and a hundred of poverty-stricken slaves as some rich Americans seem to do...
There is hope, however. Robotics, AI and nanotechnology will inevitably make means of production easily manufacturable. And that would mean instant death of capitalism. As soon as people would be able to make their own means of production, capital will become irrelevant and the world will gradually change into communism. It won't be easy and it would be a hundred years later than it could have happened, but it is inevitable.
First of all, Lenin and Stalin didn't create totalitarian systems and never intended to. There was never an attempt to achieve total (or anything close) control over the population. The level of control was comparable to that in most other countries in that time (consider how liberal, democratic and free America was in 1920s-1930s NOT). The USA had things like HUAC, please never forget about that.
Please don't think even for a second that you understand communism and marxism better than Lenin. This is simply ridiculous. Communists in Russia didn't just make some random decision without consideration for reality. They had like 30 years to think everything over and you assume that they were morons, because they didn't understand what some random Slashdot posters realised in 30 seconds. I don't think so, perhaps you just overestimate your ability to understand complex problems...
I am amazed at how easily you declare that one-party system was unneded. Perhaps it's because you are an overconfident moron, who doesn't know jack shit about Soviet history. You don't know anything about the Soviets in 1920s, you don't know how and why they were created, how they were organised and how they evolved. You don't care about how things are in real world, you only want to be a smartass.
Communism hasn't failed in Soviet Union, unless you use some very special definition of failure. It was a world superpower, the world leader in science, it had world highest levels of education, it provided almost the entire population with products and services to meet their basic needs (food, shelter, health care). It aimed to help each person develop his/her potential without limit and aimed to improve everyone's education and intelligence (the first country ever to do so). It never pandered to our worst instincts, not allowing entertainment to delve into endless violence, sex and bad taste. It opposed racial and nationalist hatred from the very beginning, creating for the first time ever a country with hundreds of nationalities that could coexist in peace and friendship. It supported global peace and provided economic and technological assistance to countries all over the globe (instead of exploting them for cheap labour and natural resources like most developed countries tend to do).
Unless you stick to the official line of Hoover, McCarthy and other vultures, there is no way you can describe Soviet system as failure. Yes, it didn't build a communist society, but it got much further than everyone else even dared to try.
Seriously, since no one is discussing/considering retroactive cancellations of copyright, the only difference we may possibly make is having or not having some works from 1930s in PD soon. Even if we succeed in that, it won't help us much.
The piracy fight is much more important than the fight for public domain. Considering the current situation, the ability to copy works freely is much more important than the right to do it. It is important that we support the pirates (including commercial pirates who profit from distribution of copyrighted works) and ensure that we have the Right to Read intact, if only de facto.
In 35 years capitalism will be dead and intellectual property will be dead. It's lunacy to seriously consider the death of public domain (but it can still be a valuable attention-grabbing device). I can't see how proprietary software will withstand the assault of FLOSS or how publishers and studios will ignore the reality of instant anonymous piracy.
Just think! It's 35 years! 35 years ago first BBSs were starting, we used floppies to carry 120 kilobytes (if that) of data around, Internet was something no one heard of...
Do you think it's possible that we won't have dramatic changes in our digital communications systems? Do you think it's possible that we won't have ways to safely, anonymously and instantly access all human knowledge (liberated by pirates if necessary)? If yes, then you must be living in some other world than I do...
P.S. I enjoy learning immensely. Thanks to the Internet and the piracy I can watch any film I want, watch most good educational programs I want, listen to audio lectures on many topics, read any classic books, read many recent books, read encyclopedias and articles from most major publications. All for free. I still pay for some media - it's easier to get pirated games on DVD and there are still many books that aren't available online, but that's insignificant and its importance will only diminish over time.
BT is only faster when people stop sharing old files. Total upload = total download, that's the rule of any P2P system. Since everyone's upload is normally saturated due to asynchronous nature of most connections, download can only be made faster by dropping something. BT does that with old releases.
As a result, new releases download 25% faster on BT than on ed2k. Old releases download 99% slower on BT (if at all) than on ed2k.
Personally, I don't mind a slightly slower download if that means I don't have to hunt down rare files, but can just search for them 80-90% of the time.
If you are going to believe that, there is no help available to you. The simple fact of life is that 100 million people were not killed. This is just a lie manufactured during the Cold War in part to provide neocons with a scary boogieman like Al Qaeda today. There is no substance behind these claims and it is complete nonsense really.
When 10% of people were killed in Cambodia, the results were immediately noticeable, so to speak. You claim that about one third of the population was killed, but noone inside the country can notice that. It's all in the heads of crazy (but well-paid) anti-Soviet propagandists, for whom no number is too large.
The real number of death sentences (not all of which were carried out) for political reasons (which according to Soviet Criminal Code also included murder, larceny and some other crimes that were considered crimes against the state) was below 0.3 million. And don't forget that a vast majority of those executions happened during the Second World War, when spies and saboteurs were real. Some people died in the labour camps, but the death rate there was actually slightly lower than that of a general population, so that shouldn't be counted.
This is what real facts are. Another very real fact is that because of the global capitalist system currently in place 24000 people die from hunger every day. And about 25000-30000 people more die every day from easily preventable deseases that communicate through untreated water. That's about 20 million people killed every year by capitalism. Or about 300 million since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I am not angry for you, you are just another victim of brainwashing. I am just sad that the lies you help to spread around are so successful. The truth is so difficult to accept for people who were manipulated their whole lives...
Enforcing standards is not going to work, the problem is with capitalism itself. When you base the economy on exploiting others, no wonder that psychopaths ran amok. In Soviet Union bosses were generally just normal people, they were paid on average 50-100% more than the rank and file and they cared about people they worked with. That means no large scale or random firing, sanatoriums and everything for the workers and generally a friendly and a relaxed atmosphere. Remove the private ownership of means of production and the profit motive and you instantly make society better.
Well, in my book if by following your policy to the letter you kill a random person and noone argues that the policy is somehow unclear or complicated, then this policy in a sense justifies randomly killing people.
The fact that all this happens with paper trail doesn't mean anything. I heard the paper trail in Auschwitz was top notch as well. What matters is reality - the actual facts. And the facts (judging from information available) are that a policeman has authority to decide that the person should be killed, even when a reasonable person, when faced with the same evidence is unlikely to call the evidence "clear cut".
A person who looks like a terrorist to a policeman (who presumably only saw the "suspect" from afar or on a camera) can be killed. There was no evidence that a bomb is present and even the police doesn't claim that there was such evidence. The only justification was that "he looked like the guy who might have attempted to explode a bomb elsewhere". This isn't a case where such a murder would have been justified. This isn't a situation where police had either proper intelligence or surveillance. Jean Charles didn't yell "I have a bomb". Noone yelled "He has a bomb". He didn't look like he had a bomb. The only way to describe is "I think he looks like a terrorist. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! He looks like a dead terrorist now."
This is wrong. This is just wrong on so many levels, I don't realise why the head of Scotland Yard hasn't resigned already. This is horribly wrong. Even Hestapo would never work that sloppily and with such disrespect for human life. They would at least confirm first that you are a Jew and not a Brazilian and then kill you.
Even the terrorists have some respect for human life, although they feel that they have a justification to take it. The policemen who murdered Jean Charles had no respect for life whatsoever. And for the animal who was responsible for the shoot-to-kill policy I have no words. He is the one who doesn't deserve to live and I hope he dies a brutal and horrible death.
I have this in perspective and thanks for the reply. I do not imply that this policy is worse in terms of actual human lives lost due to it, but it's worse (to me) in terms of its sheer irrationality and inhumanity. When a violent US thug tortures children in a prison, this is bad, but this isn't irrational or unexpected. When a stupid illogical Arab blows up people because of lies that he believes, this is completely understandable.
But when the police shoots people on the whim, just because they thought for a second that there might kind of be a terrorist around there somewhere, this is horribly wrong. Police. In Britain. Randomly killing people. In the name of safety. The very absurdity of the situation is the most horrible thing here. This is right in the same book as "Destroing the village was the only way to protect it" reports from the Vietnam War.
I do not oppose accidentally killing an innocent during an anti-terrorist operation, where lives of tens of people clearly hang in the balance. Where the whole operation is carefully orchestrated and 30 seconds of a delay can distrupt it unrepairably. Yes, if you are storming a building with a dozen of armed terrorists inside, you can justifiably cause some "collateral damage". But if you just pick a random person on the street, decide that he looks like a terrorist and shoot him in the head, this is unjust, this is inhuman and this is never justified. Look at Israel. They live under a constant threat of terrorist attacks (though suicide bombers are a relatively recent development), but they do not kill random civilians just because they might be terrorists. And this is despite the fact that there are soldiers armed with machine guns, not just undercover cops.
Might it be because good guys (Jews) generally look so much like the bad guys (Arabs) there? Are British cops just racists? Whatever the reason for the irrational hateful crime that they committed, this cannot be forgiven.
P.S. Sorry for the offtopic, with so many windows open and with such a short attention span it's inevitable that mistakes are made. I am not a policeman and I don't carry a gun, so I guess can be forgiven, though.
After reading a bit about the British "shot-to-kill" policy, I am disgusted. This is the worst thing that a supposedly civilized country has ever done in recent years. This is so horrible, I don't have words to explain how horrible it is. The people responsible for this policy are not even people, they are dangerous and violent inhumane animals who are much worse than the terorrists.
To have a policy of killing suspects on the spot just because you suspect they might be terrorists is so horrible, it dwarfs the untold horrors of Abu-Ghraib and even the terrorist bombings themselves.
P.S. Advice to Arabs and other suspicious elements living in London - don't leave home or use a cab.
Slashdot Mirror
How long do you want to fight a losing battle with the planet? How high do you eventually want the levees to be before you give up? When the city's subsided to the point where it's an isolated bowl in the ocean?
How long? As long as you need to get the technology to win. I don't expect water to be a problem in 2030 New Orleans. It's all a matter of production forces. Once you get enough of them, there is no stopping you, planet or no planet.
We already can build underwater hotels (coming to Dubai in 2006), 8-km high oil rigs, 0.8-km high skyscrapers and what not. There will eventually be no problem in building a city in the crater of an active volcano, on the sea floor 2km deep, on the South Pole, in Earth orbit or in the Missisipi delta. With AI and nanotechnology it will all be a piece of cake.
Now the only two real questions are whether it's better to fix the city or build a new one and whether (New) New Orleans will hold on for 20-30 years in spite of the coming global warming.
Nonsense. We don't need to go far - just look at the US, can ugly truths about their race situation be told? No, they can't and the Americans are the first to admit that. In communist societies most topics were open for discussion - how do you think the opposition to the regime operated - via telepathy?
And the communist leaders are not seen as liars or monsters. Even after 15 years of smear campaigns, Russian people still respect the genius and honesty of Lenin, confidence and authority of Stalin. Only misled Europeans and Americans, who believe what they are told by their capitalism masters, may see Communist leaders as monsters. At the same time they see their own leaders as paragons of integrity...
You are so predictable and so simple... If it's in the USA or West Germany or any other capitalist country - it's democracy, it's good. If it's in the USSR or East Germany - it's bad. You are so simple, it's boring.
There is no point in arguing with you, because if you assume that USA is the model society by which you judge everybody else, then everybody else will look worse than the USA. It's a logical fallacy, because you assume that democracy == USA without any arguments or proof and then also assume that this USian democracy is the most important thing in the world.
Needless to say, such worldview is too simplistic, not to say totally idiotic.
You are inherently stupid if you believe propaganda.
If you believe communism is inherently totalitarian, you are a moron, because communism abolishes the state when it's achieved. 100 millions is an obvious lie. Almost no people were killed (i.e. hundreds or thousands at most) during forced collectivization.
54,769,000 is a stupid lie and you are a moron for repeating it. Cambodia was not marxist or communist and it was supported by the USA (for its opposition to Vietnam), you moron. Pretty much everything else you say doesn't stand to any critical scrutiny.
You are brainwashed by your school, by the media, by the politicians. You are a total and utter moron, I feel sorry for you. However, I am not angry at you at all, because it's not your fault that you are so stupid and you are not the only one. Many (most?) Americans (and many Europeans as well) are taught lies in schools and grow up to believe them. You don't know anything true about history, just fabrications and, alas, you appear sadly unable to free yourself from this cage of lies.
So what? That was the law of the land. Dura lex sad lex. BTW, it's interesting to note that when people speak about the victims, they absolutely never mention those East German border guards who were killed by grenades thrown over the wall from the West side...
The trial was a complete judicial nonsense, a scam, a farce. The leaders were convicted to please the Western masters, not because there was any legal basis for that whatsoever. The law is a law and if it's passed in accordance with country's legal system, there is nothing wrong about it. Convicting Honneker for instituting a law that Uncle Sam considers bad is a violation of German sovereignty and of common sense.
As for the paradise of the unified Germany, consider that "A September 2004 poll found that 25% of West Germans and 12% of East Germans wished that East Germans were again cut off from West Germany by the Berlin Wall.", also 21% of all Germans want the Wall back, 27% of East Germans aren't happy about current political system, unemployment in East Germany is 21%.
You confuse free market and capitalism. These are two separate things. Capitalism is about maximizing profit through exploitation of workers, dirty monopolistic practices and imperial conquest. Free market is about fair competition.
The fallacy in your reasoning is that you take a minor questionable action of certain Soviet organisations and blow its importance out of all proportions.
Yes, a small number of books by certain authors were not available as wildly as they potentially could have been. So what? Are all books by all authors widely available in all other countries? Is it impossible that the establishment in other countries (such as the US) prevent or hinder publications of certain books deemed harmful? Was immeasurable harm done to Soviet people by the lack of an authorised edition of Doctor Zhivago?
You claim to have personal experience of all the bad things you described. Well, it's entirely possible, but you can't judge a country on the basis of personal experiences alone. Shit happens. In each and every country on Earth people get bad experiences - they are maimed in traffic accidents, die from food poisoning, are mugged in the streets, get STDs, fall in poodles, get hangovers. How do your personal bad experiences, these isolated and atypical incidents say anything about the country with the population of almost 300.000.000 people in general?
You say "People died from trivial diseases". Shit, how can I argue that? They did. People die from trivial diseases everywhere. In Holland, in Finland, in Switzerland, in Luxemburg. Such is the nature of life. However, if you check the statistics, you would find that death rates for most causes were quite low in Soviet Union and have been decreasing all the time, as the health system was being continiously improved.
You say "I cannot think of any single product you could be certain to find in the shops." Well, may be you cannot or may be you are a liar. When you entered even a small food store in some village, you were likely to find: fresh bread and other bakery products, fresh milk and other milk products, vegetables and fruits, canned and preserved products, eggs, meat, poultry and fish and a number of other necessary products. All these were very cheap and accessible to everyone. Same was true for other shops.
Yes, some products were occassionally hard to find. The main reason is that they were priced below the equilibrium price point and all available stock was usually quickly bought. Technically you could say that there have been a shortage, but in reality the per-capita consumption of this product could have easily been high relative to other countries. It's just that prices and production didn't automatically increase for popular products, so one sometimes got an impression of shortage.
Yes, there have been real shortages of certain products as well, but it rarely was significant.
You said "Racism was rampant... many Russians disliked blacks and showed it much more openly". What a ridiculous statement! First of all, if by blacks you mean Negros and not simply people of darker complexion from Caucasus or Middle Asia, then there haven't been that many blacks in Soviet Union. There were some foreign students, but Soviet Union didn't have a large population of blacks... How could the racism be rampant in such a case? It's just doesn't make any sense.
Furthermore, I already showed that according to the most obvious indicator, the share of international marriages, the racism/nationalism in Soviet Union was extremely low. There is simply no evidence for racism in USSR, but there are countless accounts of Soviet regime improving the lives of smaller nations immensely and of Soviet power eliminating racism as early as in 1920s. All nations had every opportunity to retain and develop their cultural heritage, use their native language and otherwise keep their traditions. In the time when many countries such as the USA had government-sanctioned discrimination and even had occasional lynchings of blacks, Soviet Union has eliminated racial hatred. Your lies and empty accusations cannot change that fact.
Feel free to correct me on that point, if I'm wrong.
No need to, you are (sadly) correct, but that doesn't invalidate a single word or fact of what I said about the Soviet Union.
I notice you didn't include East Germany in your list of places full of happy Communists. Is that because it's hard to explain why it required a deadly barrier to keep them there if they were so happy?
No, it was because it would take too much time to list every country full of happy Communists - there were so many of them.
The wall was built as a result of growing tensions between the imperialist West and the Communist countries. The Cold War (initiated and fomented by the US) led to the construction of the wall. It was a part of politicking between the US and the USSR and had very little to do actually with preventing East Germans from moving to the West (everyone who wanted to move, already had the time to do that in the 16 years preceeding its construction).
Of course, some people tried to get across the wall and were shot, but, first, they were morons and, second, the scale of the problem was exaggerated by the eager corporate media in the US. First, there was a tacit agreement that those who wanted to emigrate could do it through the Austrian border without any risk (or publicity). Second, it's absolutely normal that the border guards shoot people who are trying to cross the border illegally. Yes, it's not always necessary, but you can hardly blame anyone for upholding the law.
Anyway, many people in East Germany were happy. After the reunification, even though trillions of marks (now euros) were spent and 17 years have passed, the situation in the East Germany is still not good and many people are not happy either. If you look beyond the usual slogans and start looking at social and economic indicators, you would realise that German socialism in the East wasn't bad at all when compared with German capitalism in the West.
Can you say that Roman Empire was a failure? Or that Alexander the Great was a loser? I don't think so. Good things do not necessarily endure.
The system did implode because it failed on most accounts, but most spectacularly when it comes to economic and environmental criteria.
The reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union are too complex to be discussed here. But they have nothing to do with economic or environmental issues. The Soviet economy experienced continuous growth up until its very end. The environmental problems weren't any more serious than elsewhere in the world.
They did not provided basic needs for their citizens. I cannot think of any single product you could be certain to find in the shops. Sure, some days you could find excellent meat, and some days you could find decent toilet paper. However, there was no way you could be sure what you would find that particular day in the particular shop you chose to go to, and most products were of apalling quality.
Many people project the shortages of early 1990s and late 1980s to the whole history of Soviet Union. This is wrong. Throughout most of the history all products were available in sufficient quantities. The actual per capita consumption of most products were among the highest in the world. The consumption of meat in Soviet Union was in world top 5, the consumption of many other important products, such as milk and milk products was significanlt higher than in the US.
It's easy to start believing personal accounts, but the plural of anecdote is not data. Most of the personal stories people tell you about their life in 1960s are made up. Ask any psychologist and he will confirm that. Personal memories aren't reliable in the first place and when you compound the problem with bias these stories go beyond useless. But if you compare actual numbers, you see a completely different picture. And before some moron starts about how "all soviet statistics were lies", that's not true. You can double-check a lot of numbers using international studies, using intelligence data, etc. There are enough sources and they generally confirm the Soviet data about its economy.
The health care was free but rubbish. People died from trivial diseases, that weren't considered deadly at all in the West.
For example? Many deseases (such as typhus, tuberculosis) were eliminted in Soviet Union very quickly. The health care wasn't the best in the world, but compared with other countries it was good, Soviet Union was in top 10 or top 20 by most statistical health indicators. And the health care was certainly better than it is in modern Russia.
Sure books were extremely cheap, but some of the most important litterature in the world was simply not available, as it wasn't judged politically correct. Pasternak? Dostoyevsky? Hardly ever available.
bw5353, you seem to be quite a reasonable person. Please, try to think, how you were first exposed to these lies, who fabricated them and why they did it. Yes, there was censorship in Soviet Union, but censorship exists in every country, even in the US or in Western Europe. Politically incorrect books were restricted in every country at some point.
Why is it when Soviet Union does something - it's evil and horrible, but when the US does the same, it's fine and dandy? Many schools in the US still censor their libraries. The House Un-American Activities Committee blacklisted writers and film-directors in the US. There are many cases of censorship in the US, Europe and pretty much every country in the world. Why is it that when a certain Soviet writer is sharply criticised by the party it's suddenly so horrible? Pasternak's books were not taken out of the libraries or burned! It was simply that for his activities which were deemed anti-Soviet Pasternak was criticised, expeled from the Union of Writers and probably convinced to reject the Nobel prize. FBI did worse things to communists in the US at that time.
And for the record, books of both Pasternak and Dostoyevsky were studies in Soviet schools. And my family had both authors represented in our home library. Who told you that Dostoyevsky's books were not
Does the phrase "liquidation of the kulaks" mean anything to you?
Yes, it does. But I suspect that most people have a very distorted picture of what happened then. It wasn't really that horrible or radical, considering the history of the "Land Question" in Russia and considering the Civil War that just finished. I hope you do realise that liquidation doesn't mean killing or imprisoning, just taking the property and relocating to other settlements. And it happened only to about 1-2% of all peasants.
Stalin was a hard-fisted, totalitarian ruler. He had those who opposed him not only killed, but erased from history. Men were literally painted out of Communist party photographs. What do you call this?
He was hard-fisted, but that's what the situation required from a Soviet ruler at that time. He did what he ought to do. And he wasn't totalitarian, the right word is authoritarian. And I simply don't see anything particularly bad about painting men out of party photographs (and paintings too, BTW). How is that worse than Republicans paying Starr to paint Mr. Clinton with dirt? We tend to look at erasing history differently because we were raised on "1984" and this creates instant repulsion in us. But I doubt that people in 1930s were as concerned about that.
And boy, those East Germans sure seemed eager to get away from all the "peace and friendship" that the USSR had to offer them!
Well, judging by the suicide rates increasing in the East, joining with the West Germany wasn't such a great idea after all... Even after spending all those trillions of deutchemarks (and now euros) the peace and friendship remains elusive...
The irrationality of people is not an argument. People in Soviet Union were welcoming the changes, even though in retrospect it should have been obvious to them that their personal situation would drastically worsen (miners, teachers... and pretty much everybody else). They believed the lies about the capitalist paradise (the media and movie images), weren't content with the steady improvements that Soviet system provided and wanted to have everything now.
You really took the parent post personally, didnt you? His point was NOT anti-communist- he was stating that a PURE communist system has not been implemented, and he is correct. If you are angry he called Lenin a 'so-called intellectual'- deal with it. You admit that he failed to build a communist society. The parent is entitled to his opinion on that result.
I don't particularly mind the parent post. It's just that people are so brainwashed over communism and they don't realise that they rely completely on official anti-communist propaganda. And he implied (a common mistake) that Soviet Union had nothing to do with "real" communism. Of course, it hasn't succeeded in building communism, but it actually got quite far. If it wasn't for the Cold War, it might have be very close to the goal by now.
I hope that the persona who moderated this perfectly normal comment as Flaimbait didn't suddenly had a heart attack from reading it. It would be a shame to lose such a dedicated anti-communist crusader. They are a rare bread, now that the US government had to cut down on propaganda expenses. Everybody wants to hate Saddam Hussein now, it's no longer in fashion to hate communism, so we must preserve the irrational and thoroughly brainwashed soldiers such as this anonymous moderator.
Also check out Manna by Marshall Brain. This time communism is built in Australia and people from the USA are liberated by the emissaries from the Australian Project. The auther denies that he is in any way for communism, however, just proving again, how deep every American was affected by masterfully crafted Cold War anti-communist propaganda...
But the masses were happy in the Soviet Union. They are happy in Cuba as well and you would be surprised to find out that they are generally happy in Vietnam and North Korea as well. Of course, you would never ever read about it from most American newspapers or see it on American TV. I hope you don't hold any naive hopes of your media being objective and honest, do you?
Yes, people in communist countries are not as rich as they are in the "first world". But this is extremely simple to explain - they just don't have a "third world" to exploit! As simple as that.
But they got everything they had by their own labour. And they distributed the wealth equitably. Yes, Soviet people were never as reach as people from American upper-middle class, because they didn't have tens of struggling low-income workers and a hundred of poverty-stricken slaves as some rich Americans seem to do...
There is hope, however. Robotics, AI and nanotechnology will inevitably make means of production easily manufacturable. And that would mean instant death of capitalism. As soon as people would be able to make their own means of production, capital will become irrelevant and the world will gradually change into communism. It won't be easy and it would be a hundred years later than it could have happened, but it is inevitable.
First of all, Lenin and Stalin didn't create totalitarian systems and never intended to. There was never an attempt to achieve total (or anything close) control over the population. The level of control was comparable to that in most other countries in that time (consider how liberal, democratic and free America was in 1920s-1930s NOT). The USA had things like HUAC, please never forget about that.
Please don't think even for a second that you understand communism and marxism better than Lenin. This is simply ridiculous. Communists in Russia didn't just make some random decision without consideration for reality. They had like 30 years to think everything over and you assume that they were morons, because they didn't understand what some random Slashdot posters realised in 30 seconds. I don't think so, perhaps you just overestimate your ability to understand complex problems...
I am amazed at how easily you declare that one-party system was unneded. Perhaps it's because you are an overconfident moron, who doesn't know jack shit about Soviet history. You don't know anything about the Soviets in 1920s, you don't know how and why they were created, how they were organised and how they evolved. You don't care about how things are in real world, you only want to be a smartass.
Communism hasn't failed in Soviet Union, unless you use some very special definition of failure. It was a world superpower, the world leader in science, it had world highest levels of education, it provided almost the entire population with products and services to meet their basic needs (food, shelter, health care). It aimed to help each person develop his/her potential without limit and aimed to improve everyone's education and intelligence (the first country ever to do so). It never pandered to our worst instincts, not allowing entertainment to delve into endless violence, sex and bad taste. It opposed racial and nationalist hatred from the very beginning, creating for the first time ever a country with hundreds of nationalities that could coexist in peace and friendship. It supported global peace and provided economic and technological assistance to countries all over the globe (instead of exploting them for cheap labour and natural resources like most developed countries tend to do).
Unless you stick to the official line of Hoover, McCarthy and other vultures, there is no way you can describe Soviet system as failure. Yes, it didn't build a communist society, but it got much further than everyone else even dared to try.
Seriously, since no one is discussing/considering retroactive cancellations of copyright, the only difference we may possibly make is having or not having some works from 1930s in PD soon. Even if we succeed in that, it won't help us much.
The piracy fight is much more important than the fight for public domain. Considering the current situation, the ability to copy works freely is much more important than the right to do it. It is important that we support the pirates (including commercial pirates who profit from distribution of copyrighted works) and ensure that we have the Right to Read intact, if only de facto.
In 35 years capitalism will be dead and intellectual property will be dead. It's lunacy to seriously consider the death of public domain (but it can still be a valuable attention-grabbing device). I can't see how proprietary software will withstand the assault of FLOSS or how publishers and studios will ignore the reality of instant anonymous piracy.
Just think! It's 35 years! 35 years ago first BBSs were starting, we used floppies to carry 120 kilobytes (if that) of data around, Internet was something no one heard of...
Do you think it's possible that we won't have dramatic changes in our digital communications systems? Do you think it's possible that we won't have ways to safely, anonymously and instantly access all human knowledge (liberated by pirates if necessary)? If yes, then you must be living in some other world than I do...
P.S. I enjoy learning immensely. Thanks to the Internet and the piracy I can watch any film I want, watch most good educational programs I want, listen to audio lectures on many topics, read any classic books, read many recent books, read encyclopedias and articles from most major publications. All for free. I still pay for some media - it's easier to get pirated games on DVD and there are still many books that aren't available online, but that's insignificant and its importance will only diminish over time.
BT is only faster when people stop sharing old files. Total upload = total download, that's the rule of any P2P system. Since everyone's upload is normally saturated due to asynchronous nature of most connections, download can only be made faster by dropping something. BT does that with old releases.
As a result, new releases download 25% faster on BT than on ed2k. Old releases download 99% slower on BT (if at all) than on ed2k.
Personally, I don't mind a slightly slower download if that means I don't have to hunt down rare files, but can just search for them 80-90% of the time.
If you are going to believe that, there is no help available to you. The simple fact of life is that 100 million people were not killed. This is just a lie manufactured during the Cold War in part to provide neocons with a scary boogieman like Al Qaeda today. There is no substance behind these claims and it is complete nonsense really.
When 10% of people were killed in Cambodia, the results were immediately noticeable, so to speak. You claim that about one third of the population was killed, but noone inside the country can notice that. It's all in the heads of crazy (but well-paid) anti-Soviet propagandists, for whom no number is too large.
The real number of death sentences (not all of which were carried out) for political reasons (which according to Soviet Criminal Code also included murder, larceny and some other crimes that were considered crimes against the state) was below 0.3 million. And don't forget that a vast majority of those executions happened during the Second World War, when spies and saboteurs were real. Some people died in the labour camps, but the death rate there was actually slightly lower than that of a general population, so that shouldn't be counted.
This is what real facts are. Another very real fact is that because of the global capitalist system currently in place 24000 people die from hunger every day. And about 25000-30000 people more die every day from easily preventable deseases that communicate through untreated water. That's about 20 million people killed every year by capitalism. Or about 300 million since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I am not angry for you, you are just another victim of brainwashing. I am just sad that the lies you help to spread around are so successful. The truth is so difficult to accept for people who were manipulated their whole lives...
Enforcing standards is not going to work, the problem is with capitalism itself. When you base the economy on exploiting others, no wonder that psychopaths ran amok. In Soviet Union bosses were generally just normal people, they were paid on average 50-100% more than the rank and file and they cared about people they worked with. That means no large scale or random firing, sanatoriums and everything for the workers and generally a friendly and a relaxed atmosphere. Remove the private ownership of means of production and the profit motive and you instantly make society better.
Have you tried both managing and doing hard manual labour? Don't tell about the horrible stress the managers have to endure, sheesh.
Well, in my book if by following your policy to the letter you kill a random person and noone argues that the policy is somehow unclear or complicated, then this policy in a sense justifies randomly killing people.
The fact that all this happens with paper trail doesn't mean anything. I heard the paper trail in Auschwitz was top notch as well. What matters is reality - the actual facts. And the facts (judging from information available) are that a policeman has authority to decide that the person should be killed, even when a reasonable person, when faced with the same evidence is unlikely to call the evidence "clear cut".
A person who looks like a terrorist to a policeman (who presumably only saw the "suspect" from afar or on a camera) can be killed. There was no evidence that a bomb is present and even the police doesn't claim that there was such evidence. The only justification was that "he looked like the guy who might have attempted to explode a bomb elsewhere". This isn't a case where such a murder would have been justified. This isn't a situation where police had either proper intelligence or surveillance. Jean Charles didn't yell "I have a bomb". Noone yelled "He has a bomb". He didn't look like he had a bomb. The only way to describe is "I think he looks like a terrorist. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! He looks like a dead terrorist now."
This is wrong. This is just wrong on so many levels, I don't realise why the head of Scotland Yard hasn't resigned already. This is horribly wrong. Even Hestapo would never work that sloppily and with such disrespect for human life. They would at least confirm first that you are a Jew and not a Brazilian and then kill you.
Even the terrorists have some respect for human life, although they feel that they have a justification to take it. The policemen who murdered Jean Charles had no respect for life whatsoever. And for the animal who was responsible for the shoot-to-kill policy I have no words. He is the one who doesn't deserve to live and I hope he dies a brutal and horrible death.
I have this in perspective and thanks for the reply. I do not imply that this policy is worse in terms of actual human lives lost due to it, but it's worse (to me) in terms of its sheer irrationality and inhumanity. When a violent US thug tortures children in a prison, this is bad, but this isn't irrational or unexpected. When a stupid illogical Arab blows up people because of lies that he believes, this is completely understandable.
But when the police shoots people on the whim, just because they thought for a second that there might kind of be a terrorist around there somewhere, this is horribly wrong. Police. In Britain. Randomly killing people. In the name of safety. The very absurdity of the situation is the most horrible thing here. This is right in the same book as "Destroing the village was the only way to protect it" reports from the Vietnam War.
I do not oppose accidentally killing an innocent during an anti-terrorist operation, where lives of tens of people clearly hang in the balance. Where the whole operation is carefully orchestrated and 30 seconds of a delay can distrupt it unrepairably. Yes, if you are storming a building with a dozen of armed terrorists inside, you can justifiably cause some "collateral damage". But if you just pick a random person on the street, decide that he looks like a terrorist and shoot him in the head, this is unjust, this is inhuman and this is never justified. Look at Israel. They live under a constant threat of terrorist attacks (though suicide bombers are a relatively recent development), but they do not kill random civilians just because they might be terrorists. And this is despite the fact that there are soldiers armed with machine guns, not just undercover cops.
Might it be because good guys (Jews) generally look so much like the bad guys (Arabs) there? Are British cops just racists? Whatever the reason for the irrational hateful crime that they committed, this cannot be forgiven.
P.S. Sorry for the offtopic, with so many windows open and with such a short attention span it's inevitable that mistakes are made. I am not a policeman and I don't carry a gun, so I guess can be forgiven, though.
This was intended to be a reply to this post. Sorry.
This was supposed to be a reply to this post. Sorry.
There is such a story.
I don't like media outlets that are known to manipulate people with lies. Even if they may be telling a lot of true things, you never know...
After reading a bit about the British "shot-to-kill" policy, I am disgusted. This is the worst thing that a supposedly civilized country has ever done in recent years. This is so horrible, I don't have words to explain how horrible it is. The people responsible for this policy are not even people, they are dangerous and violent inhumane animals who are much worse than the terorrists.
To have a policy of killing suspects on the spot just because you suspect they might be terrorists is so horrible, it dwarfs the untold horrors of Abu-Ghraib and even the terrorist bombings themselves.
P.S. Advice to Arabs and other suspicious elements living in London - don't leave home or use a cab.