: Can communism as practiced by the Soviet Union, for instance, be considered evil? Do you dispute the body count of communsist governments. For the sake of this argument I will concede that pure marxism was not practiced in the USSR. My point to Sam was that the "Black Book of Communism" has claimed some 85 to 100 million murdered directly by their communist governments. Perhaps, because there is no perfection in this world, we can qualify degees of evil by tallying body counts. There isn't much argument being offered to dispute what is in the book. It was prepared by a group of well respected french researchers."Well respected" being the ultimate anonymity; a deus ex machina construction...
As I responded to you before, Stuart, the yearly death toll among 0-5 year olds in the Third World due to malnutrition and related causes is 14.6 million deaths a year, according to the 1996 UN Human Development Report (which you should be able to find in a library).
There is currently enough food to feed the world's population; indeed, many of the African countries most sorely hit by starvation are producing a grain and produce surplus. Where does this food go? The West. Why does it go there; because of the money debts the African countries owe the West.
Capitalism is culpably responsible for the deaths of almost 100 million children every decade in the Third World. So much for your highly-touted little black book.
The real solution to this would be to scrap capitalism. The best chance they have in the meanwhile is to write off these Third World debts as unsustainable.
: Do you allow that there is good reason to use deadly force to stop an idealism that intends world domination but leaves death, destruction, and oppression in its path?
"We are building the foundation of a new world order"; said by the head of the World Trade Organisation.
Capitalism does all of the above, Stuart.
Funnily enough, your Christian sensitivities tend to go right out of the window when we dwell on the little sin of usury (charging interest on loans); or what Christ did to the moneylenders at the temple...
: Get all the books you can on McCarthyism, Nikhil. While the icons of
: this period of time are now popularly denigrated as being hyper-reactionaries, it is interesting to note that all the movie studios of that day were asking the government to monitor their businesses because of the fact that they had become a target of subversive communist activity. McCarthy was only a hyper-reactionary, anti-communist witch hunter if the "Black Book on Communism" isn't true or is true but McCarthy didn't know about the atrocities. On the other hand, McCarthy might have seemed subdued by comparison to what should have been the proper moral response to whatever the communist body count tallied in the late forties. Perhaps McCarthy knew more then than you think he did. Maybe not.
Have you left no human decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of human decency?
(Which is I think the best response to Stuart's pro-MacCarthyite rambling...)
Gideon.
