Re: Socialism, again

From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Mon Oct 28 2002 - 04:14:44 MST


On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 12:36:42AM -0500, Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
> After all I am not the one trying to prove something.

Yes, you are.

> I only want you
> to show us a decent socialist country and explain how you will prevent the
> situation you had in Germany, Italy, the USSR, China, Viet Nam, Cambodia,
> Chile, Cuba, etc.

You're asking for us to prove a negative. Basic logical fallacy, that.
But I can point to some past existence proofs. The UK, 1945-50, springs
to mind; seen any mass graves there? Or Sweden, for most of the past
half century. Israel, 1947-1977. France during the 1980's. The list
of socialist regimes that didn't start filling mass graves with their
victims is actually much, much longer than the list of those that did, and
I submit that to explain the mass graves you need to look somewhere
other than socialism.

Here's a hint: the ones that killed lots of people had big-time issues
with nationalism at the same time. Nationalism is an orthogonal issue to
socialism, and if you assert that it's an unqualified evil I'd be willing
to agree with you.

-- Charlie



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:17:49 MST