Post #438,762
3/22/21 6:20:02 PM
3/22/21 6:20:10 PM
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Sorry for the mistaken recollection.
I realize that there is nuance in your positions that do not often come across in short posts here, but you don't make it easy sometimes. Just one example: #391087: I've never been afraid to stand alone if I believed my positions were well reasoned. For instance, I never believed the Soviet Union was a threat. I never believed the Mujahadeen were our allies. I never believed communism was a bad thing. I held those positions despite almost my entire country saying I was wrong. When only a handful of countries in world history have claimed to be "communist" and in most/all of them many, many people died trying to escape, then saying something like Stalinism =/= Communism is a dodge. And not even a stylish Dodge. My $0.02. Cheers, Scott.
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Post #438,764
3/23/21 10:25:59 AM
3/23/21 10:25:59 AM
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Capitalism is not as humane as many believe.
Don’t get me wrong: regimes that took the name “communist” – from Stalin’s to Pol Pot’s – committed unspeakable, monstrous crimes. But for the right, a revival of interest in Marx’s pre-Stalinist vision of communism is the most striking and chilling example of its own collapsing ideological supremacy: “communism” is synonymous with tens of millions of deaths and nothing else. Capitalism, by contrast, is presented as a largely bloodless, blameless engine of human prosperity.
The story of capitalism is more complicated than that. If you want to read effusive praise of capitalism, you’ll find it in Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto: the revolutionary dynamism of the capitalists, they wrote, had created “wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals”. But capitalism is an economic system drenched in the blood of countless millions.
Capitalism was built on the bodies of millions from the very start. From the late 17th century onwards, the transatlantic slave trade became a pillar of emergent capitalism. Much of the wealth of London, Bristol and Liverpool – once the largest slave trading port in Europe – was made from the enslaved labour of Africans. The capital accumulated from slavery – from tobacco, cotton and sugar – drove the industrial revolution in Manchester and Lancashire; and several banks today can trace their origins to profits made from slavery.
Even when the international slave trade began to crumble, the blood money of colonialism enriched western capitalism. India was long ruled by Britain, the world’s pre-eminent capitalist power: as Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts explores, up to 35 million Indians perished in needless famines as millions of tonnes of wheat was exported to Britain in times of starvation. Here was a cash cow for British capitalism, becoming the country’s main source of revenue by the end of the 19th century. The west is built on wealth stolen from the subjugated, at immense human cost.
It was the 20th century when capitalist Europe began to import the mass horrors it had previously inflicted on others. The Great Depression – still the most severe crisis of capitalism – helped to create the conditions of popular discontent that led to the rise of the Nazis. In the early period of Hitler’s regime, big business, fearful of the power of the German left, made its grubby compromises with National Socialism, seeing the Nazis as a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon both communism and trade unionism. German businesses made huge donations to the Nazis both before and after their rise to power, the industrial conglomerate IG Farben and Krupp among them. Many businesses profited from Nazi slave labour and the Holocaust, including IBM, BMW, Deutsche Bank and the Schaeffler group.
It is possible to believe in capitalism passionately, or simply be resigned to it as the only viable system, but also acknowledge that it has its own dark shadows and complicities with murderous episodes in human history. It serves a useful political function, of course, to suppress the idea that there is an alternative to capitalism, resting on different principles and values. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/26/communists-capitalism-stalinism-economic-modelbcnu,
Mikem
It's mourning in America again.
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Post #438,765
3/23/21 12:20:11 PM
3/23/21 12:20:11 PM
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Whataboutism isn't productive.
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Post #438,767
3/23/21 1:36:40 PM
3/23/21 1:38:33 PM
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Also, talk about your "dodges". That was Charger 500 R/T.
bcnu,
Mikem
It's mourning in America again.
Edited by mmoffitt
March 23, 2021, 01:38:33 PM EDT
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Post #438,770
3/24/21 5:34:20 PM
3/24/21 5:34:20 PM
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Google Lens tells me...
that it's a 1959 Dodge Sierra station wagon.  But it also looks like the 1959 range had about eleventy-seven different names (Custom Royal, Custom Royal Lancer, etc.). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Cheers, Scott.
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Post #438,774
3/25/21 3:01:32 AM
3/25/21 3:01:32 AM
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403 Forbidden
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Post #438,775
3/25/21 8:40:26 AM
3/25/21 8:40:26 AM
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Sorry, I think it's the "no https images here" thing.
(Same reason, as I understand it, that most avatars aren't showing up any more.) :-( Maybe this will work. HTH! Cheers, Scott.
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Post #438,776
3/25/21 8:51:35 AM
3/25/21 8:51:35 AM
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That worked
Christ that's an ugly car.
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Post #438,777
3/25/21 10:05:09 AM
3/25/21 10:05:31 AM
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Sorry. I meant your Dodge was a 500 R/T.
It's a popular thing to condemn Communism with a misleading (at best) claim about how "every country that tried it turned into a dictatorship while committing uncountable atrocities." I don't think the atrocities committed by Capitalists are any less evil (particularly in the US) and it is hard to listen to that sort of statement from anyone who lives in the luxury of the evils perpetrated by Capitalism criticize Communism for the very same types of things that Capitalists did. I'll stick with the US. I think it is beyond dispute that the success of Capitalism in this country is built on a foundation of slavery, genocide and outright terror that has not been equaled. For example, many nations have developed nuclear weapons but only one has demonstrated the willingness to use them against the elderly, men, women and children and that nation did so twice and threatened to do it a third time. How's that work with the "morally superior" argument Capitalists often astonishingly try to make? Perhaps we could try to find some of the handfuls of indigenous who survived the Capitalists attempt to wipe them out and ask them if they see any parallels with what Stalin did or even Capitalist Germany in the late 30's and early 40's.
You'll forgive me if I cannot take seriously complaints about how evil Communist doctrine has been deployed from a Capitalist. Without the child labor, slavery, maltreatment of the masses and theft from other nations, no Capitalist nation could exist. It's unwise in the extreme for a Capitalist to start talking about crimes against humanity committed by nominally Communist nations. A Capitalist doing that is engaged in the most hypocritical whataboutism. bcnu,
Mikem
It's mourning in America again.
Edited by mmoffitt
March 25, 2021, 10:05:31 AM EDT
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Post #438,778
3/25/21 10:53:12 AM
3/25/21 10:53:12 AM
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The only thing I mentioned was people dying trying to flee. HTH.
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Post #438,779
3/25/21 11:05:56 AM
3/25/21 11:05:56 AM
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Some of those things are orthogonal
When you say capitalism has only worked because of the exploitation of minorities, that's a reasonable argument. The labor of the subjugated is a direct input to the capitalist system.
But when you tie that to military strategy and the use of nukes, I don't see how that was inherent to capitalism. We used them first because we made them work first, and it happened while we were engaged in a huge bloody war. I'm not saying that makes it right or wrong, just that the unique circumstances weren't about the economic system.
If anything, given the number of German refugee scientists on the Manhattan project, it would make more sense to attribute development of nukes to fascism.
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