Now Even Being an Active Anti-American Terrorist Doesn’t Make You Off-Limits for The Obama Administ

[Sava]

Getting kicked in the balls is worse than getting punched!

Nuh UH!

UH HUH!

NUH UH!

[Zevico]

[QUOTE=notyoueither;6049551]How many tens of millions of people in the developing world died in proxy wars? I'm sure they died happy knowing that at least it was not a major conflict.

Islamic fundamentalism, Islamism, Communism and Nazism all bear marked similarities. In so far as the adherents to the former two have made some embrace of "modern" political ideologies, it is the latter two "modern", "Western" ideologies which they have embraced. Taken together they are not so different. They are all utopians--and for that reason, all equally dangerous. To reach utopia, they have each committed grave, evil acts in the furtherance of their goals.

Comparing socialism and Islamic fundamentalism on the moral plane is futile. Socialism is an evil of the very worst kind. So too is Islamic fundamentalism. Querying whether Socialism is a greater or lesser evil than Islamic fundamentalism is a profitless inquiry. Is it not enough to say that both have wrought great suffering upon the world to reach their sought-for utopia

Some other observations:

(1) If one were so inclined one could craft a comparitive study of Islamism and Socialism or Nazim, merely because the latter two influenced the doctrines of the former. Islamism was born during what was arguably the intellectual zenith of the socialist-communist and Nazi movements in the 20's-40's. Islamic fundamentalism and Islamism drew perhaps on Nazi ideology, in that they both adopted the same method of race/religion-based propaganda to attract and sway the masses. In the same way, it is no accident that Haj Amin-Al Husseini, the head of the Al-Aqsa Mosque during the 1920's-1940's, spent World War II in Berlin calling for Muslims to ally with the Nazis. The influence and sway of Nazism in the Middle East at that time was immense and, indeed, it remains immense to this very day. Socialism too, with its promise of "societal justice", appealed to the Islamists; the founder of modern Islamism, the Egyptian writer Qutb, despised socialists for their atheism but was attracted to their thinking on economics. There is also evidence that he received covert funding from the Nazis in an attempt to mount an anti-British coup during WW2. All of them did this, of course, "for the greater good" (as they conceived of it).

(2) It is entirely untrue to say that the Communists were not racists. In fact they embraced racism as a means of capturing political support; and Russian race-based supremacism was ever the fall-back of the communists, who were happy to commit mass ethnic cleansing, kill millions outright, and condemn others to mass starvation if need be.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Comparing socialism and Islamic fundamentalism on the moral plane is futile. Socialism is an evil of the very worst kind. So too is Islamic fundamentalism. Querying whether Socialism is a greater or lesser evil than Islamic fundamentalism is a profitless inquiry. Is it not enough to say that both have wrought great suffering upon the world to reach their sought-for utopias?

tell that to the socialist French, or Germans or Swedes or...

[Zevico]

tell that to the socialist French, or Germans or Swedes or...

By socialism I meant Communism. I understand why you might be confused as I used both terms and should at least use just the one for consistency.

[Aeson]

Well, that and all the wars of aggression, cruel laws, oppression of women, etc. Compared to the Yezhov Terror, though, they were still pretty sane and rational. You don't seem to appreciate just how bat**** insane Communism could be. Also, where did "genocidal" come from?

I was thinking more of the Timur/India type of killing 1 out of every 15-20 people on the planet and piling their skulls into pyramids type stuff. Or the branding of eyes, or having limbs torn off your body by camels. Or wanting to you know, wipe the Jews off the face of the earth and don't mind if they take them and the rest of the world along with them (they just don't have the capability you know). Though the fact that they can publicly (indeed the public in those cases does it) stone women to death because the state thinks they had sex with someone the state didn't want them to have sex with (in some cases not even by their consent)... that's just as bad as someone disappearing.

I appreciate how bat**** insane people can be. Something you seem to miss and mark down as a result of their ideology rather than their insanity. There are perfectly nice communists, as there are perfectly nice Muslims or capitalists or whatever. Then there are ones in each that would do everything evil they could think about if given the power to do what they want. Ideology in such cases is just a cover.

The real difference is that even the worst Communists cared about power on this earth, and so MAD would work. MAD doesn't work with people who just want their virgins in heaven, because killing everyone on earth would just be a way to get there.

[Aeson]

Also, where did "genocidal" come from?

The widespread targeting of people's of certain ethnicities to be put in concentration camps or simply killed is something you can find instances of in either case.

[onodera]

By socialism I meant Communism. I understand why you might be confused as I used both terms and should at least use just the one for consistency.

You didn't mean communism. Communism, like free market, is an almost unreachable due to the purity of the concept socioeconomic state. Socialism is a form of economy with no private ownership of capital.

[Elok]

I was thinking more of the Timur/India type of killing 1 out of every 15-20 people on the planet and piling their skulls into pyramids type stuff. Or the branding of eyes, or having limbs torn off your body by camels. Or wanting to you know, wipe the Jews off the face of the earth and don't mind if they take them and the rest of the world along with them (they just don't have the capability you know). Though the fact that they can publicly (indeed the public in those cases does it) stone women to death because the state thinks they had sex with someone the state didn't want them to have sex with (in some cases not even by their consent)... that's just as bad as someone disappearing.

1. Timur was a garden-variety despot, not a theocrat.
2. Back when they actually had power, the Muslims simply treated Jews, like Christians, as pathetic second-class citizens. Which is actually better than the Christians gave them, so a number of Jews took shelter in Islamic states. The current death-to-Jews rhetoric, while born of ancient hatred, is largely an expression of public discontent over Israel.
3. The mistreatment of women is not even in the same league as the purges. The one is oppressive, the other arbitrarily removes whole swathes of a country's population.

I appreciate how bat**** insane people can be. Something you seem to miss and mark down as a result of their ideology rather than their insanity. There are perfectly nice communists, as there are perfectly nice Muslims or capitalists or whatever. Then there are ones in each that would do everything evil they could think about if given the power to do what they want. Ideology in such cases is just a cover.

While I generally agree with this sentiment (it holds true in many cases), again, you do not seem to appreciate how utterly insane communism can get. The worst Muslim states of the past, present, and probably future, while nasty, were able to make their societies function to some extent, because their goal was a functional society guided by the principles of their ideology. By contrast, the worst communists--Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Kims--acted with the goal of furthering their ideology, even when it meant doing something flagrantly stupid and self-destructive.

Look at North Korea. The country's been on life support for decades, spending ludicrous sums of money on guns, police, prisons and reeducation programs, trying to produce the great communist citizens of the future while the communist citizens of today starve to death. It's only just holding on to life because the Kims' ideology does not preclude them from playing nuclear blackmail. Or look at Stalin, wiping out kulaks simply because they belonged to a "bad" class. It wasn't just immoral, it was very bad for the country's prosperity, but he did it anyway, because his ideology dictated that he do so. Same with collective farms, eradicating the intelligentsia, "re-education," and listening to that jackass crank Lysenko because his bad science was more appetizing than Darwin's decadent capitalist-contaminated notions. See also Mao's brilliant plan to have every peasant in China process iron in his backyard, or have hordes of students beat the snot out of their professors before roaming the countryside terrorizing random people. And so on. Islam, our bugbear of the moment, simply cannot match the perversity of communist totalitarianism--because their plan to improve society is largely moral and metaphysical, rather than the deformed bastard child of bad economics and bad science.

The real difference is that even the worst Communists cared about power on this earth, and so MAD would work. MAD doesn't work with people who just want their virgins in heaven, because killing everyone on earth would just be a way to get there.

Which is why OBL went and blew himself up, instead of sitting around in a safe house for years while sending out useful idiots to raise havoc? And why Iran is constantly starting wars with Israel instead of cleverly using them as a scapegoat? Your assertions don't match the available evidence.

[onodera]

None of this **** was stuff I learned in history class. My teachers were pinkos. If you want me to take you seriously, you have to sound like someone who isn't trying to protect his national pride.

Why shouldn't Frenchmen protect their national pride when you discuss their revolutions? Why shouldn't the Iranians protect their national pride when you discuss theirs? Why shouldn't I? Robespierre, Khomeini and Lenin weren't the best people in the world by far, but you can't deny that their actions represented something their countries will be remembered for?
Maybe we didn't build a successful version of socialism, maybe another country will and will be remembered for this. But we will be remembered to be the first country that tried. And failed, with terrible consequences, but at least we ****ing tried.

Capitalism may have benefitted from us being afraid of the communists, but I'd rather live in a world where millions of people didn't have to suffer under the thumb of economic and political dictatorship.

I'd rather live in a world where people don't have to suffer too from any sort of dictatorship too, but this doesn't have anything with socialism or capitalism. You can have both in a democratic country. I am quite happy to reap the benefits of capitalism myself, I already earn more than a median American, but doesn't this worry you? I am not that rich, but even in the wealthiest country on the planet there are more people who are poorer than me than those who are not. And this inequality is what makes capitalism work. No one's goal is to make people better off.

You can have dictatorship without the abuses of communism, onodera. There have been plenty of capitalist dictatorships and they've been almost universally better than their socialist and communist counterparts.

I do not deny that you need a democracy to run a country successfully. It can even make capitalism work better than socialism under a dictatorship. Could you please give me a list of such counterparts? I think North Vietnam has been much more successful than South Vietnam.

Additionally, the idea of communism without dictatorship is pure fantasy. Economic control inevitably leads to social and political control. So let's not trot the "communism wasn't implemented properly" dead horse out of the stable.

If you opened your mind and tried to learn what communism actually is (from books by people who actually invented the term and studied the theory of communism and didn't corrupt the word by linking it with Stalin's dictatorship), you would understand that communism is incompatible with dictatorship, just like an ideal free market is. You're talking about socialism here.
What's so bad about economic control? Every country uses some sort of it. Lack of economic control will lead to companies and individuals abusing their market position. I sincerely doubt that communism can be implemented in a society that is not post-scarcity, so we're a long way off, but socialism is a much better platform for reaching post-scarcity than capitalism is.

[Aeson]

1. Timur was a garden-variety despot, not a theocrat.

That would be like me saying all the Communists who did bad things weren't really Communists. Marx didn't kill anyone did he?

Timur was Muslim. His state was Islamic. Without a lot of research into it, that's the worst leader of an Islamic state I could think of being under.

2. Back when they actually had power, the Muslims simply treated Jews, like Christians, as pathetic second-class citizens.

Timur told his soldiers to bring back 2 heads each. Most of them probably ended up being Hindu heads, but he didn't seem to care if they were Muslim (Baghdad) or otherwise. Of course he was on a wild offensive that saw much of the civilized world raped along the way. I really don't see how that's any nicer than disappearing people.

While I generally agree with this sentiment (it holds true in many cases), again, you do not seem to appreciate how utterly insane communism can get.

I understand exactly what happened. Unlike you, I just don't think that stoning a woman to death, or tearing people's limbs off with camels, or raping and murdering millions of people is better than disappearing people to the gulags or whatever.

The bottom line is that you said you'd rather live under the worst Islamist than the worst Communist. It's a silly distinction. Either would kill you as soon as look at you. Not because they're Islamist or Communist... but because they were evil people.

Which is why OBL went and blew himself up, instead of sitting around in a safe house for years while sending out useful idiots to raise havoc? And why Iran is constantly starting wars with Israel instead of cleverly using them as a scapegoat? Your assertions don't match the available evidence.

Iran couldn't do anything if they wanted to. What they would do if they had the ability is a guess. In that specific case, they probably wouldn't use them. Israel doesn't seem real convinced of that though, perhaps because they could use other organizations to do the dirty work.

As for OBL, I don't know for sure what he would have done if he had any real power. He did directly attack the US while essentially his whole movement (and everything even remotely associated with it) could be wiped out by us. He must have been figuring that something that didn't happen would have happened. Doesn't seem to speak highly for his ability to reason as to what is in his, or his people's best interests.

[Elok]

Timur was only a little more Muslim than Vlad the Impaler was Christian. Calling him an Islamist is a big stretch. He styled himself heir to the pagan Khans, he attacked Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and it's not even entirely clear what he believed himself. Even so, if it came to living under his rule--not being invaded by him, for crying out loud, you can't compare an ongoing invasion to the peacetime rule of a country--I'd still prefer that to Kim Jong Il. Or Pol Pot. Timur wasn't much of an administrator in peacetime, but he wasn't completely bonkers. Since I get the feeling that, despite your protests to the contrary, you don't actually know how crazy communism got, here's a fun link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_R...le_of_Cambodia

Or, if you don't want to read that, here are the highlights:

--Entire urban population transferred to the countryside, made to work farms where they generally starved because none of them knew how to farm
--Western medicine outlawed, doctors killed unless they could hide
--Western education outlawed, teachers killed unless they could hide
--Almost complete cessation of imports in the name of self-sufficiency
--Currency abolished
--Corps of brainwashed teenagers used as tools to commit atrocities
--Extermination of foreigners, anyone belonging to any religion, artists, intellectuals, and people with glasses who were simply assumed to be nerds (really)

Do these strike you as the actions of people who were primarily interested in holding on to power and just used ideology as an excuse? Or who could be described as rational? They ran the country into the ground, and their story is hardly unique. Something very similar seems to have gone on in North Korea (to the limited extent that we can tell what goes on in North Korea), as well as in China during the fifties, and under Stalin...yeah, I'd definitely rather be living under Muslims. Even a total craphole like Afghanistan is run on a more rational basis.

[Aeson]

I've already read all that Elok, your feelings aren't very insightful it seems. I had the whole "communists are the most evil thing in history" shoved down my throat with examples while I was growing up too. It's just absurd cold war rhetoric. Some of them were horrific... but I just don't agree with you that what communists did was special or unique in history as far as atrocities or stupidity is concerned. Genocide is nothing new. Learning and knowledge has been condemned before in Islamic nations (and Christian ones too for that matter) leading to dark ages that lasted a hell of a lot longer than communism was able to accomplish. Tribal/city state/national warfare, slavery, rape, and pillage was the norm for most of history. You are viewing a whole lot of history through rose colored glasses to pretend communists are the worst.

you can't compare an ongoing invasion to the peacetime rule of a country

Yes you can. Atrocity is atrocity. Just because atrocity is very common in invasions doesn't change that it's atrocity. It just means that atrocities like you list were actually very common throughout history.

It's also rather apt analogy to communist revolutions. While they weren't always regional struggles, it certainly was one group of people forcibly putting another group under their will, often militarily.

Do these strike you as the actions of people who were primarily interested in holding on to power...

Yes, actually.

... and just used ideology as an excuse?

That is not what I said.

[Elok]

And yet for most of history, Muslims ruled FUNCTIONAL SOCIETIES. IE, they did not completely upend civilization, try to reshape it into a utopia, and wind up damn near destroying the countries they were trying to rule. They were basically competent to rule in way totalitarian communism quite simply is not.

[Aeson]

You're comparing the worst revolutions of an ideology in it's infancy, to the average Muslim state over 1000 years? Of course it will look bad.

[notyoueither]

I think the point is (or should be) Islamism in the late twentieth century and now compared to Communism up to the fall of the Soviet Union.

There is no comparison. Islamism is at worst a nuisance to most of the world's population. Comminism was an existential threat to the planet (unless the West surrendered).