[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Rich, don't be all backpedaling now. Your original premise was that communism didn't kill 100M people. Now you want to discuss nuances of different kinds of Communism. And put it on some sort of sliding scale with Communism on one end and Capitalism on the other. I find that to be kind of ignorant. What kind of nuanced Communism worked in each of these different approaches to it?

I didn't say that the total deaths by all Communist governments didn't total up to 100 million, I'm saying that not all Communist governments commit democides and not all democides are committed by Communists. The danger in believing that is that by bad things are always or always done by Communists is that this can cause one to assume that Capitalist societies are immune to abuses, that the freedom to buy a Big Mac means that all other freedoms are guaranteed. This kind of blindness is why Marx thought his revolution would occur in England and Jews assumed the worst persecution they would suffer in the 20th century would be in Russia, Poland and France.




Notice that while most of the table lists Communists dictators, almost half are not Communist. The ones who did not make the list, like Pinochet, are significant not for the number of indivduals murdered, but because of their ties to the US.

President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, who served as his
national security advisor and Secretary of State, supported a right-wing
coup in Chile in the early 1970s, previously declassified documents show.

But many of the actions of the United States during the 1973 coup, and
much of what American leaders and intelligence services did in liaison with
the Pinochet Government after it seized power, remain under the seal of
national security. The secret files on the Pinochet regime are held by the
C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the
Pentagon, the National Security Council, the National Archives, the
Presidential libraries of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, and other
Government agencies. According to Justice Department records, these files
contain a history of human rights abuses and international terrorism:

* In 1975 State Department diplomats in Chile protested the Pinochet
regime's record of killing and torture, filing dissents to American foreign
policy with their superiors in Washington.

* The C.I.A. has files on assassinations by the regime and the Chilean
secret police. The intelligence agency also has records on Chile's attempts
to establish an international right-wing covert-action squad.

* The Ford Library contains many of Mr. Kissinger's secret files on
Chile, which have never been made public. Through a secretary, Mr.
Kissinger declined a request for an interview today.