/lit/ - Literature

>>12881839
>And in contrast to socialism, which brutally murdered hundreds of millions of people
The absolute level of discourse on this board. This would be too low even for /pol/. I blame Americans. As for actual refutation, I'll say two things. First, if we approach the world with this mind-set, then shouldn't we consider the "crimes of capitalism" as well? What about the million or so people that Bush and other neocons killed in Iraq? The various military juntas and CIA funded death squads in Latin America? The Cold-War era proxy wars? The people dying from poverty today? What about Fascism? Under a fascist system, the public and private sector are deeply intertwined, so there is a business elite of some sort. Can we lump them in there too? Do we If we measure death toll in terms of percentage of the population (China and the USSR are MASSIVE so it's natural for more people to die) in any given country, I think we'll come up with a comparable figure. But it's all nonsense anyway, because thinking about violence as a product of the broad ideology is absolutely stupid. Tearing down a society and rebuilding it is incredibly difficult, and it doesn't happen in a vacuum, or on a blank canvas. There are domestic realities to think of, international relations factors, considerations regarding the individual leaders who played a role in these regimes, and so on. People like pointing to the Holodomor and Mao's autism spree as examples of "socialist violence". Let's consider these two things. The Holodomor was as far as I know was a man-made famine. Stalin orchestrated the famine as part of his own agenda. Are murderous dictators a natural consequence of socialist governments? Obviously not, since we have murderous dictators of all ideological stripes - see the military juntas of Latin America and so on. As for Mao's string of disastrous policies, those as I understand them are a result of the anti-intellectual bent of Mao's take on Marxism. They kicked out the vast majority of technocrats to the rice fields. And so policy became informed by ideology without practical folk to mold it into something reasonable. And that's how you get peasants who get told to start making iron in their backyard and run around chasing sparrows. Again, this is not something inherent to socialist thinking, and you don't have to go any further than the USSR, where, as the people of /pol/and like to point out, was led by a bunch of (((intellectuals))).