13 Jan 2024 7:24 am
LowIQWTrash: "However, I'd say the record for MLM states isn't 'anything to brag about' [vis-a-vis violence] given that a large # of deaths did occur under Stalin, Mao, etc."
Yes, many atrocities have been committed in socialist societies. But, unlike the various settler colonial projects carried out to pave the way for capitalist development, they were barbarities not brought about to further the cause of socialism. Apart from the ongoing genocide of the US's indigenous peoples, for example, they weren't intended to eliminate entire groups of people, i.e., people of color such as Palestinians. They were, at times, particularly concerning Stalin, implemented to settle political and personal scores.
It's also the case that, given the Soviet Union's and China's vast landmasses and then-slow and cumbersome communication systems, many local party officials could execute people for various petty reasons that Stalin and Mao had nothing to do with. In their totality, these killings and persecutions by other means augmented Mao's and Stalin's misdeeds, which served to exaggerate the number of deaths attributed to them today.
But so, too, were justified killings, imprisonments, and exilings of civilians instituted. Many Kulaks, for example, maliciously set out to sabotage the Russian Revolution by destroying crops and livestock and carrying out other antisocial acts.
Per the violence associated with foreign wars, although the USSR did fight them, they didn't do so to exploit other peoples' resources and labor power. Unlike the US and other imperialist powers, the Soviet Union fought against imperialism and, accordingly, in solidarity with oppressed peoples, such as Angolans. Never did it invent wholly bogus reasons to invade oil-rich nations, slaughter hundreds of thousands of their people in the process, and then continue to occupy those countries while brutalizing their people for years afterward.
And yes, a bit of an aside, the then-Afghani government asked the Soviets for their military assistance in its fight against Mujahideen and other factions.
LowIQTrash: "...the economic policies carried out by National Socialist Germany, which ended the Great Depression caused by 'a certain group' of the usual suspects and reversed almost 20 years of economic damage in maybe 3-4 years. There's no precedent or peer in modern times."
Would that "certain group" be Jewish people?
LowIQTrash: "I understand you (and MLMs in general) have been told that 'Nazi Germany [wasn't] socialist and fascism is capitalism in decay.' Still, the definition of socialism I use is different from yours. National socialism is an offshoot of 'right-wing' socialism in contrast to the internationalist agenda of Marxism."
With all due respect for LowIQTrash, it isn't a matter of my being "told that Nazi Germany [wasn't] socialist and fascism is capitalism in decay." It is my 40-year study of Marxian social science that informs me accordingly. By definition, I know that socialist societies are devoid of privately owned means of economic production. German society's means of production in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was entirely privately owned. Indeed, it was not only German capitalists who financed the Nazis' rise to power but also American capitalists. Only the thoroughly ill-informed are foolish enough to believe that the said capitalists would have provided such backing had the Nazis been socialists.
Moreover, following WWII, Ford, GM, Crysler, and other corporations shamelessly requested and received "reparations" from the US government for damages "inflicted" upon their manufacturing facilities in Germany by Allied bombing raids. Had Nazi Germany been a socialist society, (no) capitalist-owned businesses would have operated in it.
(Ford, GM, and Crysler made trucks, tanks, and other implements of war for the Nazis.)