Revisionism and "Holocaust Denial"

[Sava]

Originally posted by orange
Hurricane - did you read even the main points in each section? You're entitled to your opinion, but declaring that he is a fool if you don't read what he says, I would say, makes you a bigger fool than he is.

Not necessarily. If someone declared that human beings are spawned from oak trees, and wrote a book about it; my declaration that this person is retarded has no bearing on my own level of retardedness.

Perhaps if there weren't millions of substantiated witnesses to the Holocaust, then this guy would have a leg to stand on.

I'm sorry Orange, but this guy is a dumbass.

[nationalist]

Why doesn't anyone ever talk about the Soviet Holocaust? It seems like the only thing that people ever focus on is the Nazi holocaust. While the Nazi holocaust was undeniably evil and inhuman, we forget that somewhere between 25,000,000 and 40,000,000 Soviets died at the hands of the Soviet State during Stalin's reign. Why are there dozens of movies on the Nazi Holocaust and the Jewish ghettos, but so few on the Gulags? To me, forgetting these atrocities does humanity a grave disservice.

[JohnT]

Because there are more communists than Nazis, I would assume.

[nationalist]

That's not a very satisfying/comforting answer. Blatant ideological blindness trumphs the importance of 40,000,000 dead? I though that the left was supposed to be the caring, nurturing side of the political spectrum.

[JohnT]

Think again. They kill millions for their ideology. Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Lenin... the list goes on and on.

[JohnT]

Fact is, nationalist, their revisionism takes on two forms:

1. Ignore if you can, decry if you have to, the murders committed by the Left.
2. Then argue that they weren't really Communists, that they were opportunists who latched onto the Communist bandwagon and perverted the doctrine.

[nationalist]

Originally posted by JohnT
Think again. They kill millions for their ideology. Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Lenin... the list goes on and on.

I know that. It is quite a hypocritical worldview they have. Maybe western communists think that the millions of Slavs and Asians who were murdered by the Stalinistic regime were inferior to the Jews of Hitler and don't deserve sympathy.

[JohnT]

Rather, they feel that the greater good of Communism is worth the blood of tens of millions regardless of ethnic type - plenty of Jews were killed in the USSR as well as Slavs.

[Sava]

Originally posted by JohnT
Fact is, nationalist, their revisionism takes on two forms:

1. Ignore if you can, decry if you have to, the murders committed by the Left.
2. Then argue that they weren't really Communists, that they were opportunists who latched onto the Communist bandwagon and perverted the doctrine.

a little bit of red herring, but mostly ad hominem

What's worse than revisionist history, is when some categorize people with different political views as being part of a murderous, authoritarian regime.

I really don't like it when people use labels like "the Left" in order to demonize the people they disagree with.

[nationalist]

Originally posted by JohnT
Rather, they feel that the greater good of Communism is worth the blood of tens of millions regardless of ethnic type - plenty of Jews were killed in the USSR as well as Slavs.

People with beliefs like that have no right to look down on the Nazis. It puts them all in the same class, if not making the bloodthirsty Communists look even worse.

[Sava]

Did you guys know that in many Eastern European countries, people refer to the Soviets as "Stalinists" and not "Communists". It's amazing that these oppressed people were intelligent enough to see the difference.

[JohnT]

If it was Stalin that was overthrown in 1989, Sava, you'd actually have a point, you know that?

[Sava]

The political organization of the Soviet government from Stalin's death up until the fall of the Soviet union was extremely dynamic. Thinking the Soviet government of 1985 was the same as 1941 is a mistake. The Soviet Union was a collection of corrupt and sometimes brutal authoritarian regimes that at some point, hijacked an ideology. It's about the same as the "Al-Qaedas" and religious fundamentalists that have hijacked Islam.

So let me ask you, do you blame all of Islam for 9-11? or terrorism in general?

Hopefully your answer is no.

And Stalinism didn't go away when Stalin died. I don't know why you are under that assumption.

[Az]

there were relatively few prisoners of conscience in the USSR post-Stalin. they existed, but comparing this to Stalin, or Mao, or Hitler, is silly.

Besides, on the whole, people's lives under the Soviet Union were much better than they are today. I know that first source.

[chequita guevara]

11,000,000 (only 6 million of whom were Jewish) went in, 60,000 came out. That's less than a 6% survival rate. That pretty well rates as almost no one surviving.