gekko,Aug 18 2005, 05:49 PM Wrote:That may have been enough if this discussion was limited to specific historic facts or timetables. However, the opinion you put forward was not limited to the rule of communism in the USSR. The opinion you put forward was that communism is and must always be evil. That's a pretty bold statement, particularly considering you never bothered to state what aspects of communism you believe are so evil, or even exactly you mean by communism. Off-hand, I can't think of a single definition I would apply to communism, since I'm aware of several very differing beliefs that fall under that broad name.
If you want to say that certain aspects of communism made things worse in the USSR than they would have been had communism not existed, then I would say your personal experiences would make you very qualified to express that argument. However, you didn't do that. You made a broad generalization that communism is evil, without putting any limits or definitions in place. That's like my saying that vegeratians are evil, without mentioning that I'm talking about vegetarians who murder anyone they find eating meat.
My comments regarding capitalism, by the way, were not meant to spark anything ugly. They were simply designed to point out that any system has flaws, and that it is not fair to label something evil by asserting that those flaws are inherent and cannot possibly be fixed or changed.
gekko
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Look, I'll be honest with you. I don't feel like getting into this. It'd take too long. When someone has lived it, they don't need a lengthy explanation. When they have not, they do... and I simply did not and do not feel like it. Maybe some other time. This is why I suggested some reading on the topic, as the author writes about it better (and in more detail) than I can, and more importantly it requires no effort from me.
My problem is that sometimes I make the same mistake as I accuse liberals of making all the time and that mistake being that I sometimes assume that the whole world has a certain set of views on some aspects of life as someone with my backround does.
To me some things are obvious, like it is obvious to someone who can see, what the color red is, but go try to explain it to someone who was born blind.
People who were born in the West, simply are not capable of seeing reality to it's fullest when it comes to certain issues. I know that when my kids grow up, they will be no different. Then I get to a point when I need to argue issues that I thought were obvious and I simply do not feel like it most of the time. This thread has made me realize this better than I did before, so I'll be more selective from now on.
I will throw this out to you though. There's many countries with communist governments. There were many in Europe, there still are many in Africa and some in Asia. Name one where life is good, one.
-A