Who do you hate more?

[rmsharpe]

What about the invasions of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia?
What about the botched invasion of Poland?
The annexation of the Ukraine?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by rmsharpe
What about the invasions of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia?
What about the botched invasion of Poland?
The annexation of the Ukraine?

You obviously haven't been reading the thread. Poland ATTACKED Russia.

The Ukraine was only "independent" under the treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a German occupied satellite, and once Versailles was signed, BL was no longer in effect, hence, the Ukraine was still considered part of Russia.

As for Transcaucasia, Lenin tried to have Stalin expelled from the party and government over the invasion. The invasion was against orders. But, as Lenin had a stroke shortly thereafter, it went nowhere.

[David Floyd]

Imran,

Have you ever met a Chinese person or studied Chinese history aside from the PRC at all? I'm not being facetious when I say that PRC may have been less racist than previous Chinese regimes.

I understand that it may have been less racist, my point was that Communist nations often exhibit very racist tendencies and policies, and furthermore, racism is not confined to any particular political system.

Some numbers say 18 million spent time in the gulags from '29 to '53 and I'm thinking going to prison and not dying is probably better than, well, getting exterminated. The difference was that the Soviets were happy to work you as much as they could, where the Nazis decided the Hell with that, we'll just put these people in ovens.

I understand, I was just making a pedantic response to your claim about the number of people who spent time in the gulags. You mis-phrased your point, and I was just being kind of anal about it. I understand that spending time in the gulag was not necessarily the automatic death sentence that time in an extermination camp was.

And you aren't going to care if you died while fighting in a revolution for your rights or being hung as a Quisling, because you are dead either way right?

If I'm going to die anyway, I'd rather be on a more moral footing.

Again, you're missing the point. We aren't discussing fighting a revolution for your rights, such as the American Revolution. We are talking about two brutal regimes that came into being and immediately proceeded to strip people of their individual rights, followed closely by stripping individuals of their lives.

Pol Pot was brutal, but Mao? The policies of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution may have been disasterous and caused famine, but that's hardly the same as being brutal. After all, as I've pointed out, intent matters.

Sorry, but that dog don't hunt. When you rely on political dogma, rather than proven agricultural science as a mechanism to feed the people you are responsible for (responsible for because of the absolute dictatorship you assumed over them) then, when that dogma fails and 30 million die, guess who is getting held responsible? That's right, you are. Mao may not have intended to kill 30 million people, but he damn well should have known better, and either way at the end of the day, those people were as dead as surely as if they had been shot or gassed.

Who is worse, the aggressor or the one who helps out the aggressor? Yeah, I think a vast majority would say the oppressor.

Yeah, you're right. That doesn't change the fact that Soviet-German cooperation can be defined in the context of two evil, manipulative, absolute dictators conspring to grab as much territory from the rest of the world as possible, at which point both planned to turn on the other and grab the rest as well.

Also, perhaps the only reason the Soviet Union survived the war was because of MASSIVE US aid. So, is the US as bad as the Commies because it funded them in order for their survival?

Undoubtedly the only reason the Soviets survived was massive aid from the US. Although in hindsight, the US could have won the war on its own, even given a complete German occupation of the Soviet Union, we didn't know that at the time. To paraphrase an Orthodox proverb, in times of great danger it is permitted to walk with the devil until you cross the bridge. In other words, by cooperating with the Soviets to defeat the Nazis, not only did the West INTEND to produce a better result (no Nazis), but the END RESULT was positive (no Nazis, and because of a strong Western and especially US presence in the world, no more Soviet Union, either).

Are you ****ing insane? Who cares about intent?! What about people who actually believe that the end doesn't justify the means? You know, people who believe in morality.

The OP was about which regime I hate more. Although the Nazis set out to murder around 10 million people, international communism succeeded in killing around 100 million. Just because the communists didn't intend to kill that many doesn't absolve them from full responsibility for the act, and in fact, it only makes later communists like Mao even more culpable for following the lead of countries (the Soviet Union) whose policies had already resulted in the deaths of millions.

See: India.

Not sure everyone would agree with you there, as imperialism in India DID bring industrialization to the region, and, arguably, enabled India to resist Japanese domination in WW2 which I think we can all agree would have been far worse.

It also had absolutely horrid effects and has created problems that will last for generations (ie, the borders drawn in Africa and the Mid East for one).

Africa and the MidEast? You mean two regions - the MidEast ESPECIALLY - where people have been slaughtering each other wholesale for thousands of years, regardless of where the borders were drawn?

... which also was overthrown by the Vietnamese, who were Communists too.

Which doesn't absolve the Cambodian Communists of responsibility. Just because you can argue that Vietnamese communism was more moderate than Cambodian communism doesn't exhonerate the system.

Like I said, lets compare the years and percentage of the population as well as the intent. Asia has far more people and most of the people died due to dumb economic policies, NOT because they wanted to exterminate a whole group of people.

Well, first of all, if you want to compare percentages, the fact that communism killed an order of magnitude more people under it's control than the Nazis did is probably right in line with the greater number of people controlled by communism over a larger number of years. Either way, you're missing the point that SUCCESSIVE communist regimes utterly failed to see what PREVIOUS communist regimes caused, and simply perpetuated the slaughter. Mao has no excuse because he should have seen the problems caused by the Soviets, the North Koreans have no excuse for the same reason, the Cambodians have no excuse because of the Chinese, and so forth and so on.

The Polish-Soviet War was based on disputed territories (Polish territories gained in WW1 which were formerly Russian before the Great War) and the lack of a border defined by the Treaty of Versailles. The Poles had just as much territorial ambitions, btw (taking Galcia and Volhynia). It seems that neither wanted a major war and it was stumbled into by accident (not unlike our own War of 1812).

A lot of those wars seemed to be a reclamation of the lands the Western countries had taken away from the Soviets after WW1.

Yes, some of those lands were taken away after WW1. The vast majority of those lands were inhabited by people who were conquered by the Russians, and had no desire to be part of either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Is your point that the Soviets wanted nothing to do with Czarist Russia, except for the conquests of Czarist Russia?

And fighting a 3 year Civil War right after your existance will tend to make you upgrade your military.

Oddly enough, after the US Civil War, the US drew down it's military to a level barely exceeding what existed in 1860. The English didn't create a military juggernaut after the English Civil War, either.

It was likely the timing of it. Didn't expect him to betray the Soviets until Britain was out of the picture. All reports say Stalin didn't trust Hitler to keep his word... but Stalin thought he had more time.

How utterly cynical. Stalin was more than happy to allow German aggression against everyone else, and indeed to support that aggression in every way possible up to and including military intervention on Germany's side, yet when Germany turned on the Soviets, Stalin was completely and utterly SHOCKED.

Because your moral center is deficient, IMO. To not care about intent is, frankly, simply monsterous and opens the door to an ends justify the means analysis. Millions dying because you have dumbass economic policies, while horrible, is a far sight better than putting them into ovens.

As I recall from our previous debates, don't YOU usually argue that might makes right, which is a very analagous argument to the end justifies the means?

chegitz,

Tibet was considered by China to be an integral part of China for many hundreds of years. When Mao stood in Tienanmen Square in October 1949 and declared, "China has stood up." he was stating that the dismemberment of China was over and that China would be returning to its former glory, which means restoring its old borders.

The old borders that it had conquered, you mean?

What the Tibetans wanted or needed wasn't really the issue.

Really? If what the Tibetans wanted or needed wasn't very important, then where is the justification for Mao's revolution in the first place? In other words, if it's simply acceptable to ignore the principle of self determination whenever you please, so long as the people you are trying to control were once conquered by your nation under a different government, then isn't that a double standard if you just fought a revolution based on self determination?

Also, I think the same argument I used above with Imran applies here. Are you arguing that Mao's government wanted nothing to do with the monarchical and nationalist governments of China, except for their historical conquests?

That said, the Chinese invasion led to a considerable improvement in the life of the average Tibetan, since they were no longer serfs and slaves.

So I take it you agree that slavery led to a considerable improvement - in the long term - in the lives of black people? Good, we're getting somewhere

Eighty percent of the deaths in the camps occred from 1941 -1945, when all Soviet production was aimed at the war effort. Common thieves and murderers were rather low on the list of folks to get food when soldiers were hurling themselves into the maw of the Nazi war machine.

Another way of looking at that: Even when the Soviet State was struggling for it's life, Stalin still considered it both acceptable and imperative to operate a gulag system for people whose only crime was opposing communism, or losing a battle due to communist, not military, ineptness. If you are going to imprison people, you still have a moral imperative to care for them. If you do not, then I rather suspect we can throw out most of the Nuremburg verdicts - unless, of course, your point is that might makes right.

Yes, but that's over seventy years as opposed to just twelve. Furthermore, it is for all Communist countries, not one. If one were to compare all of capitalism for the same period against all of Communism, we come out by far the better.

Only because you have the rather peculiar view that capitalism is anything that isn't communism. While I'm sure you can find scholars to support that view, that's rather like the Creationist trotting out token scientists who support Creationism or Intelligent Design. Yeah, they exist, but they're mostly considered crackpots by the rest of the academic community.

The likelihood of you being starved to death in the Ukraine was much lower than the likelihood of you being sent to a death camp by the Nazis.

You sure? I'm going to channel Wiglaf, and challenge you to check your facts, again.

Between 1932-1933, it is estimated that approximately 7 million people, or 25% of the population, died of famine. That's exclusive of Ukrainians who were sent to the gulags, or summarily executed, which would probably add another few hundred thousand to that total.

During the entire period of Nazi rule, it is estimated that 12 million people were killed in the Holocaust - Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, gypsies, Christians, democrats/liberals, etc. That's approximately 14% of the German population of ~80 million, although it includes a period lasting 6 times as long as the Ukrainian famine.

You sure I had a better chance of surviving the Ukrainian famine than I did the Nazi regime? Math would dictate otherwise.

Mao didn't set out to kill millions. It was a result of him thinking he knew more about agriculture than agricultural scientists precisely when flood and drought were about to strike China.

Hmmm, an undereducated peasant presuming to know more about agricultural science than agricultural scientists based upon political dogma. Funny, tens of millions died. Gosh, that was unpredictable You can't seriously argue, on the one hand, that Mao policies WEREN'T responsible for those deaths, while on the other hand arguing that (for example) Bush's policies ARE responsible for our current economic problems.

Everwhere the imperialists invaded ended up poorer, more wretched, and the death rates skyrocketed.

You mean, similar to what happened in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and in Pol Pot's Cambodia, and in North Korea - North Korea especially, in that it's difficult to imagine a worse administration in Korea than that of the Imperial Japanese Army, yet somehow the Communists came up with one.

Actually, Poland attacked the Russia in 1919. The Soviets defeated the invasion and invaded in 1920, and because of Stalin, lost the war and ended up having to surrender a huge section of territory and peoples. Poland then attacked Lithuania. Poland also conquered and annexed independent Galicia. They were on a tear. So when the Soviets attacked in 1939, they were simply stripping Poland of all the territory they had conquered from their neighbors in 1919-20.

Actually, Poland invaded the Ukraine, which, after receiving it's independence in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was invaded by the Soviets prior to the formal end of the treaty in 1922. While the Poles may not exactly have been trying to liberate the Ukraine, there wouldn't have been a Soviet-Polish war at all if the Soviets didn't try to reconquer old Czarist territory that (briefly) gained its independence. Again, an example of the communists trying to repudiate everything about the former government except for it's conquests - a classic example of having your cake, and eating it, too.

No, it was because they were expecting to go to war with Germany.

In the 1920s/early-mid 1930s? That only serves to prove my point - the Weimar Republic wasn't really hostile towards anyone, nor did it have the capability to be. Any Soviet plans to fight Germany in that time frame were plans based upon aggressive war. And in any case, if the Soviets feared the Germans, then why the hell did they assist in German rearmament, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles?

Maybe, maybe not. That's still a sucky basis on which to decide which you hate more.

Still can't see why. The Nazis were demonstrably evil, and killed 12 million people. The Communists were/are demonstrably evil, as they killed around 100 million people. Sure, there are good communists who wouldn't kill anyone, just as there were good Nazis who wouldn't kill anyone. Either way, though, math and logic both dictate that I have a better chance of surviving the Nazi regime than the average Communist regime.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by David Floyd
I understand that it may have been less racist, my point was that Communist nations often exhibit very racist tendencies and policies, and furthermore, racism is not confined to any particular political system.

Or rather, the societies are very racist and the Communist system cannot alter that ingrained social stigma. Just like how the US's 14th Amendment couldn't alter the stigma attached to black people in the society. Though in that case, as in they case of most communist countries, they tried.

OTOH, Naziism had at the BASE of its political system a racist belief in the superiority of a certain group of people.

Again, you're missing the point. We aren't discussing fighting a revolution for your rights, such as the American Revolution. We are talking about two brutal regimes that came into being and immediately proceeded to strip people of their individual rights, followed closely by stripping individuals of their lives.

They aren't exactly the same regardless of how much you want it to be so. One actively sought out genocide, as a central tenant (Mein Kampf speaks to it while the Communist Manifesto says little to nothing about brutal actions to undertake).

Sorry, but that dog don't hunt. When you rely on political dogma, rather than proven agricultural science as a mechanism to feed the people you are responsible for (responsible for because of the absolute dictatorship you assumed over them) then, when that dogma fails and 30 million die, guess who is getting held responsible? That's right, you are. Mao may not have intended to kill 30 million people, but he damn well should have known better, and either way at the end of the day, those people were as dead as surely as if they had been shot or gassed.

There is a reason that negligence is not treated as harshly as premeditation. Intent matters, regardless of all your equivocation. Intent has mattered in every single legal system in history and it matters in the judging of history.

Yeah, you're right. That doesn't change the fact that Soviet-German cooperation can be defined in the context of two evil, manipulative, absolute dictators conspring to grab as much territory from the rest of the world as possible, at which point both planned to turn on the other and grab the rest as well.

So how much did Stalin grab from the "rest of the world"? I missed where he declared war on China. Wasn't Stalin's political credo "Socialism in One Country"? Turning away from trying to foster socialist revolution in other countries and instead focusing on internally developing socialism in the Soviet Union?

Although the Nazis set out to murder around 10 million people, international communism succeeded in killing around 100 million. Just because the communists didn't intend to kill that many doesn't absolve them from full responsibility for the act

No one says it does, but it makes the acts far, far less evil. There is a reason why we are so outraged by acts in Kosovo or Rwanda/Burundi or the Sudan, but starvation in Kenya doesn't hit us the same way.

Not sure everyone would agree with you there, as imperialism in India DID bring industrialization to the region, and, arguably, enabled India to resist Japanese domination in WW2 which I think we can all agree would have been far worse.

Most people who are being honest with themselves would agree. The British absolutely destroyed native Indian industries and made them solely into raw material producers, which is one of the reasons there is such abject poverty nowadays.

Africa and the MidEast? You mean two regions - the MidEast ESPECIALLY - where people have been slaughtering each other wholesale for thousands of years, regardless of where the borders were drawn?

Well if Communism can be blamed for racism that has existed for generations, I'd think you'd have no problem with that.

Secondly, how much slaughter in the ME existed prior to colonization? The Crusades? The Mongols? Tribal wars in the deserts of Saudi Arabia? Ancient civilizations fighting for control until the Persians conquered the entire region? Frankly, Europe has probably had more slaughter prior to colonization than the Middle East did.

Either way, you're missing the point that SUCCESSIVE communist regimes utterly failed to see what PREVIOUS communist regimes caused, and simply perpetuated the slaughter. Mao has no excuse because he should have seen the problems caused by the Soviets, the North Koreans have no excuse for the same reason, the Cambodians have no excuse because of the Chinese, and so forth and so on.

Firstly, the failure of Stalin's collectivization was not revealed until Khrushchev revealed what actually happened in 1956. Prior to then, the Communists thought it was a success, because that was what the USSR was telling them and there was no one saying anything else (this was to be a recurring habit, btw).

Mao decided to try an ALTERNATIVE to Stalin's collectivization plan to make agricultural and industrial progress in tandem and without all the pain of the USSR's rapid industrialization. The Great Leap Forward was, instead of following exactly what the Soviets did, something entirely new, that Mao thought would be better.

North Korea was fine until Kim Jong-il came into power and the lack of economic aid after the Soviet Union collapsed in addition to floods and following that a drought (God was not pleased with Kim Jong-il). In order to prevent a complete breakdown due to the inability to grow food or really import much from abroad, Kim Jong-il decided on a military first policy.

The Khymer Rouge was the most radical of all of the regimes, which took all private property, closed schools, hospitals, outlawing banking and currency, and relocating people from urban to rural land to turn the whole country into collectivist farmers. The forced people to work 12 hours a day and didn't believe in western medicine (I guess thinking it was too bourgeois). They were, easily, the most evil Communist regime for their willful reckless negligence, and they also starting killing the intelligent folk too, in a deliberate campaign of death.

So saying these states perpetuated failed policies is incorrect. They had their own spins on economic policies which is sufficiently different from previous regimes.

Oddly enough, after the US Civil War, the US drew down it's military to a level barely exceeding what existed in 1860. The English didn't create a military juggernaut after the English Civil War, either.

In both of those Civil Wars, the enemy had been vanquished completely and they didn't have powerful foreign allies. I doubt the US military would have drawn down so much if the CSA managed to finagle an alliance with Britain and France.

As I recall from our previous debates, don't YOU usually argue that might makes right, which is a very analagous argument to the end justifies the means?

Are you arguing then that might SHOULD make right? Because, of course, those are two different things.

[GePap]

Still can't see why. The Nazis were demonstrably evil, and killed 12 million people. The Communists were/are demonstrably evil, as they killed around 100 million people. Sure, there are good communists who wouldn't kill anyone, just as there were good Nazis who wouldn't kill anyone. Either way, though, math and logic both dictate that I have a better chance of surviving the Nazi regime than the average Communist regime.

Wow, did you go to the Enron school of accounting to come up with those numbers?

And how do you come up with just 12 million for the Nazis? According to you, people who die to to policy actions of the regime are counted as victims, even if their deaths were not directly intentional.

So how many people died as a result of Nazi policy?

Well, we know of 6 Million "subhumans" killed outright.
There were also 4.5 to 5 Million Germans killed by the war begun by the Nazi state. In fact, given that you are a young male, you would very likely have been fighting in the Eastern Front, and lucky to have survived. Heck, according to the numbers in Wiki (easiest source), Germany lost 10% of its population in the war, the only countries to do worse were Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the USSR.
Even if we arbitrarily blame 1/3 civilian deaths in those areas on Stalin and Soviet policies, we still have around 10 Million more dead there. Add the approximately 2.5 to 3 Million Soviet Prisoners of war purposely left to die from neglect by the Nazis.
That gives us 24 Million dead, and that is leaving out many victims, like anyone from Western Europe.

This of course only because the Nazi's lost. Had the Nazi's won, they planned to starve the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe to make space for German settlers.

All of that from one single regime in one single country. To compare that to the acts of well over a dozen regimes in four continents over a span of 70 years is disingeneous at best. It also ignores the significant differences between various kinds of Communist regimes.

[Heraclitus]

While I agree with your post on the whole, I need to remind you that 6 million other people besides the 6 million Jews died in German extermination camps. This included Roma, Slavs, Homosexuals, Communists, Criminals, ect.

[ramseya]

I'm surprised Al Qaeda isn't higher up in the polls... give them a country like Germany or Russia and they'd probably greatly exceed the atrocities of the Nazis or communists.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by David Floyd
chegitz,

The old borders that it had conquered, you mean?

David, stop being obtuse. You're not BK. You're smart. Regardless of how the Chinese state obtained its historical borders, they were historical borders. Or are you now going to argue that the United States should evacuate all non American Indians and return the country to its original peoples?

Really? If what the Tibetans wanted or needed wasn't very important, then where is the justification for Mao's revolution in the first place?

I think it was fairly obvious I wasn't justifying it. I was stating facts. I don't agree with everything Mao did, or frankly, much of what Mao did, especially after taking power. Great revolutionary, lousy governmental leader.

Also, I think the same argument I used above with Imran applies here. Are you arguing that Mao's government wanted nothing to do with the monarchical and nationalist governments of China, except for their historical conquests?

A good part of the Chinese revolution was to overcome the humiliation at the hands of the imperialists China had suffered since the First Opium War. Restoring the historic borders was part of that process. This has **** all to do with communism and has everything to do with Chinese nationalism, which is what Mao's revolution was. BTW, if Chiang had won the civil war, he very likely would have invaded Tibet too.

So I take it you agree that slavery led to a considerable improvement - in the long term - in the lives of black people? Good, we're getting somewhere

I didn't say anything about long term. The Chinese invasion of Tibet led to an immediate improvement in the lives of the Tibetan people.

Another way of looking at that: Even when the Soviet State was struggling for it's life, Stalin still considered it both acceptable and imperative to operate a gulag system for people whose only crime was opposing communism, or losing a battle due to communist, not military, ineptness.

Only if you consider murder and theft to be political crimes? Furthermore, I'm not sure why you wouldn't think it necessary to arrest people who are opposing your state when it is fighting for its life against Nazi Germany. Every country, including the U.S., did it. Poet Ezra Pound was charged with treason!

If you are going to imprison people, you still have a moral imperative to care for them. If you do not, then I rather suspect we can throw out most of the Nuremburg verdicts - unless, of course, your point is that might makes right.

In a survival situation, rules change. I'm not you. I don't believe in absolute morality. I believe in conditional morality. If you cannot spare food for the criminals, sux to be them. They shouldn't have committed the crime. WWII was not a picnic.

Only because you have the rather peculiar view that capitalism is anything that isn't communism.

It's not peculiar. Your view, that only a society that looks exactly like what Adam Smith described is capitalism, is the peculiar one, and one that is historically very recent, dating back to roughly the middle of the last century. Smith didn't even call his policies capitalism. It wasn't until a German emigre began analyzing the social system and gave it a name that it came to be called capitalism. I don't suppose I need to tell you that German's name was Karl Marx.

Between 1932-1933, it is estimated that approximately 7 million people, or 25% of the population, died of famine. That's exclusive of Ukrainians who were sent to the gulags, or summarily executed, which would probably add another few hundred thousand to that total.

Well, unlike you, I've actually looked at the data from the Soviet archives. Between 1932 and 1934, there were an extra 3.3 million deaths above and beyond the normal demographic in the area hit hardest by the famine, which included Eastern Ukraine and the Kuban region. Regardless of official pronouncements, the Soviets kept good records.

In addition, slightly less than one million people were executed for political crimes, the vast majority of whom were communists, especially anyone associated with the political tendency with which I previously associated, Trotskyism.

Finally, you have the Gulag prisoners who died during the war. The responsibility for those deaths must be shared both by Stalinism and Naziism. As I said, for all of Stalin's reign, there were, at most, ten million extra deaths that can be attributed to his direct or indirect responsibility. Nazism, on the other hand, killed over 40 million people, only 12 million of whom were in the camps. The other 28 million were war deaths, for which Nazism bears the responsibility.

You sure I had a better chance of surviving the Ukrainian famine than I did the Nazi regime? Math would dictate otherwise.

You math was good, but your initial figures were in error. In addition, you included all the people killed in the Holocaust (and none of the war dead), when most of the people killed in the Holocaust did not live in Germany. Half lived in Poland and the USSR.

Hmmm, an undereducated peasant presuming to know more about agricultural science than agricultural scientists based upon political dogma. Funny, tens of millions died. Gosh, that was unpredictable You can't seriously argue, on the one hand, that Mao policies WEREN'T responsible for those deaths, while on the other hand arguing that (for example) Bush's policies ARE responsible for our current economic problems.

I don't argue that his policies weren't responsible. I do, very much, argue that his policies were responsible for the deaths of millions. The difference between Bush and Mao is that Bush was trying to kill people. Mao was trying, ineptly, to make the lives of the Chinese people better. While I don't want to die, I'd much rather be killed by accident than on purpose.

You mean, similar to what happened in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and in Pol Pot's Cambodia, and in North Korea - North Korea especially, in that it's difficult to imagine a worse administration in Korea than that of the Imperial Japanese Army, yet somehow the Communists came up with one.

It's easy to look at North and South Korea today, and extrapolate backwards that this was always true, but it would be inaccurate. It's a curious fact of Japan that most Koreans living in Japan are citizens of North Korea. This is because, when given a choice, the Korean nationals living in Japan chose North Korean citizenship (since they weren't allowed to chose Japanese citizenship, ****ing racist Japanese) Up until the mid 70s, the economy in the North was better than in the South. The North recovered much more quickly after the Korean Civil War than the South did, and the North didn't even have to sell off a generation of its children to American adopters to afford it.

Frankly, that you could consider the DPRK worse than Pol Pot's regime shows how separated from reality you are.

I'm sleepy now, so I'll look at the rest of your post later.

[Heraclitus]

In any case the USSR's anthem was kickass.

[Heraclitus]

Better than the Nazi one anyway.

[BeBMan]

This is an interesting threadi, I learned lots of new things about the RIAA and stuff

[Heraclitus]

Well I think the lack of disscusion on the RIAA is because we all agree they are much worse than the Nazis.

[Monk]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
In any case the USSR's anthem was kickass.

Better than the Nazi one anyway

They're fundamentally the same anthems of present-day Germany and Russia, only different words are being sung today.

YouTube removed the Nazi feature but not the Soviet one, so I suppose they've made up their minds on the issue too.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
While I agree with your post on the whole, I need to remind you that 6 million other people besides the 6 million Jews died in German extermination camps. This included Roma, Slavs, Homosexuals, Communists, Criminals, ect.

The other 6 million was a number made up to create some sort of "equality" of suffering. The Slavs for example are more than accounted for (Soviet prisoners or war, soviet civilians). The numbers of victims of what would be termed "the Holocaust" (Roma, Homosexuals, Disabled individuals) probably come out to less than 1 Million more. As for communist and criminals, which communists and which criminals? After all, you can count Commissars killed as Soviet War casualties, which they probably are, or count German communists placed in the camps in 1934, but their numbers are in the tens of thousands, not higher.

That is why I reject the "12 million" label, which is exactly what DF used.