Being a Communist

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by DaShi
I personally didn't know anything about this until Chinese people pointed it out. Talk to them about it. It's quite noticeable. You know, there is no system of charity here. Just last week, I saw a restaurant manager literally throw a poorer man's bicycle into the mud to make room for a car of a customer. In fact, he asked the driver if he was a customer before doing it. You don't live in mainland China. I'm not saying that the Chinese are bad people. They just have a different culture with different values developed from a different history. I am saying that Chinese culture isn't suited to communism. Even Mao recognized that.

What you said doesn't have anything to do with your previous statement

You initially claimed that Chinese people do not have a sense of community and "There really isn't a sense of kinship". That's ridiculous. Chinese society is very much a communal one. Do you really think that Chinese society is based on the individualism seen in the West?

The initial focus of Chinese society is the family and then the extended family and then the much wider family clans. In other words, kinship.

The family ties are supplemented by neighbourhood, city or provincial ties. When people move around the country or immigrate, they search out for people from their old communities.

You claimed that Chinese "rarely socialize with strangers". But that's true for every society. Most people spend most of their time socializing with their friends.

It is true that Chinese business people prefer dealing with people they know and trust, in other words, people within their community.

If there is no charity in Mainland China, it does not mean that Chinese society is uncaring. It reflects the fact that under communist rule there was no need for charity because everyone lived at the same level and received the same services. Charity was forbidden because it was seen as being a way for the rich to relieve their guilt.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

the Socialists would have continued to be as impotent as they were before the revolution.

You mean the 1846 revolutions? The BOURGEOIS revolutions? The ones in which the liberals and socialists undertook?

That was the last time we cooperated, running dog. After that, you realized our power and got scared of us (at that time, socialists hadn't divided into Socialists and Communists, we were all both). But no, I did not mean the 1848 revolutions (1846 was the Polish Uprising against Russia), but the Soviet and subsequent revolutions. The ones where you realized we could run a society without you.

One of the big problems people today have is they take what they know today, and project it backwards in time. In the 1930s, no one outside the USSR knew what Stalin was up to, not even the Trotskyists, and we hated the guy more than you did, and we had people there, still in the government.

A million people joined and left the Communist Party of the United States in the 1930s (even Ronald Reagan tried to join). Their influrnce was even bigger. Some guy may not have joined the Communists, but when they led a strike and got results, you can be sure people took an interest in what they had to say.

A lot of people were convinced there was going to be a revolution in the U.S. in the 1930s, and they weren't happy about it. So they did what they could to make the lives of working people better, increased wages, created social security, unemployment, etc. When you've got nothing, that Communist sounds pretty reasonable. When you're on the dole, he may sound reasonable, but at least you aren't going to starve to death. It takes the immediacy and necessiity out of the equation.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Oy, and I thought Zylka thought too highly of himself.

FDR was only scared of the Communists, of course. Him and his advisors never could have thought of all those programs if they weren't scared of Communist threat!

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Tingkai


What you said doesn't have anything to do with your previous statement

You initially claimed that Chinese people do not have a sense of community and "There really isn't a sense of kinship". That's ridiculous. Chinese society is very much a communal one. Do you really think that Chinese society is based on the individualism seen in the West?

The initial focus of Chinese society is the family and then the extended family and then the much wider family clans. In other words, kinship.

The family ties are supplemented by neighbourhood, city or provincial ties. When people move around the country or immigrate, they search out for people from their old communities.

You claimed that Chinese "rarely socialize with strangers". But that's true for every society. Most people spend most of their time socializing with their friends.

It is true that Chinese business people prefer dealing with people they know and trust, in other words, people within their community.

If there is no charity in Mainland China, it does not mean that Chinese society is uncaring. It reflects the fact that under communist rule there was no need for charity because everyone lived at the same level and received the same services. Charity was forbidden because it was seen as being a way for the rich to relieve their guilt.

In mainland China, it is rare to see a Chinese person go out of their way to help another. In traffic accidents, no one asks if anyone was hurt. Crowds just gather around to watch or pass judgement. My point mainly is that there is no 'love thy neighbor' attitude amongst many people here. Perhaps I was a bit extreme before to say that Chinese people don't make any connections with eachother. This is mainly in mainland China, where most people are Chinese. Outside of China, it is a different story.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Oy, and I thought Zylka thought too highly of himself.

FDR was only scared of the Communists, of course. Him and his advisors never could have thought of all those programs if they weren't scared of Communist threat!

He may very well have (after we had been fighting for them for decades), but he never would have been able to get them implimented if the people running America weren't scared of revolution.

That decade largely went down the memory hole in this country. We remember three things, the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and Roosevelt. Nothing else happened an Roosevelt saved us.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara

Originally posted by notyoueither
When were the Bolsheviks elected in a free election, Che?

September of 1917, the Bolsheviks were elected to the Soviets, the government the people of Russia, not the Tsar, created, in a landslide.

1) was anyone else running

2) who, exactly, was voting?

How did it come to them the moral authority to plunge the country into a civil war which, as you described, cost so many millions their lives?

The Civil War was started by the aristocrats and capitalists, not us.

Umm... they were in power. There was a civil war. Afterwards, you were in power. How did they start it?

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Tingkai
Okay, so out of the past six presidents, only four of them went to Yale. That' representative of the American public.

Why should they be representative of the public? Why isn't it enough that they represent the public?

Should a certain percentage of our presidents have Down's Syndrome, too?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Kucinich
1) was anyone else running

Every party

2) who, exactly, was voting?

Everyone.

Umm... they were in power. There was a civil war. Afterwards, you were in power. How did they start it?

Wrong. The was a revolution. Six months later, the Allies backed the start of a civil war. The years later, we were still in charge.

[Kuciwalker]

Wrong. The was a revolution. Six months later, the Allies backed the start of a civil war. The years later, we were still in charge.

What exactly is the difference between a revolution and a civil war, besides the amount of fighting?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Kucinich
What exactly is the difference between a revolution and a civil war, besides the amount of fighting?

One is the replacement of one government by another. The other is a war. Not all revolutions start or are the results of civil wars. Some are quite peaceful. The Bolshevik revolution was one of the peaceful ones, except for the Cruiser Aurora firing blanks and scaring the guards at the Winter Palace into surrendering, and a massacre of Red Guards in Moscow by the Whites.

And, of course, not all civil wars have something to do with revolutions.