For the Communist Lefties who so often Visit this site...

[adam1]

I'm not a communist, but I'll take the oppertunity to answer this.
Leninists and Trotskyists are not very different, most differences are found in their economic ideas. Lenin believed in revolution whenever it could be achieved, not at the end of capitalism prophesized by Karl Marx. They both said they believed in the withering away of the state.

Stalinists tend to have strong disbelief in the human race and have heard wrong information or are ignorant to correct information of the USSR under Stalin. They believe we must be forced to conform to a communist way by a strong state.

[Irie Dave]

Does anyone have the numbers of how many people were killed under them as well as Mao? From what I've heard it's a lot.

[adam1]

USSR Under Stalin numbers vary 10 - 30 million.

China under Mao numbers are usually said to be above 30 million.

But I'm skeptical of such high numbers.

[Ian]

+Sheesh, we go and kill 650,000 Iraqi civillians and the liberal media sayswe're the bad guys? We got nothing on Joe Stalin.+


Sorry, again with the bad joke and misplaced sarcasm

[Ry]

I am just going to say this because I am tired of giving this speech. So I will just say something about Marx. Marx was doing philosophy and he was talking about what he believed was a natural progression of history and some very distant society where religion was gone and people worked for a common good under the direction of a benevolent government.

It was not supposed to mean that government just by its nature was good and that the way to end the evils of capitalism was to switch over to the evils of state captialism and force people into big government by starvation war and a police state. Social evolution was to preseed political revolution otherwise the new government made up of the same self interested idiots as the last one would just make an even bigger mess and they did.

[Irie Dave]

+Sheesh, we go and kill 650,000 Iraqi civillians and the liberal media sayswe're the bad guys? We got nothing on Joe Stalin.+


Sorry, again with the bad joke and misplaced sarcasm

I don't think the media is liberal it's neoliberal, neoconservative & Zionist, but I do find it weird how like they'll be anti-war activists who are against the killing of a million (it is actually a million now) people in Iraq yet they'll think highly of Lenin & Mao.

[Iconoclast]

I don't like your ideology. But while you're here, would one of you explain what the major differences between Stalin's ideology, Trotsky's ideology, and Lenin's ideology are?

Lenin believed in a socialist state completely encompassing the entire Russian empire that would eventually spread by natural revolution into the rest of Europe .

Trotsky believed in total revolution and complete Communism , to the effect of breaking up the entire Russian Empire giving each and every people its own independence . His economics was one of pure Communism with complete equality of people . This was the principal reason why Trotsky ran into much opposition leading to his eventual exile .

Stalin was a fundamentalist Communism , thanks to his effort he put Russia from a backward economy and made Russia into the Worlds second most Industrialized nation until the Nazi/Capitalist invasion . Stalin was what made Russia into a Global superpower .

** Do not believe any stories of Stalins atrocities such as the deaths of 30 million persons , this is Capitalist propaganda to discredit Communism .The census figures for the period of 1920 to 1941 showed a jump in population from 137,727,000 in 1920 to 196,716,000 in 1941 . This completely contradicts the telling period of Nazi/Capitalist barbarity in which 20+ million humans were murdered showed a drop in the 1946 census figures to 170,548,000 persons .

Stalin was also a freedom fighter for Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

[Iconoclast]

+Sheesh, we go and kill 650,000 Iraqi civillians and the liberal media sayswe're the bad guys? We got nothing on Joe Stalin.+


Sorry, again with the bad joke and misplaced sarcasm

I don't think the media is liberal it's neoliberal, neoconservative & Zionist, but I do find it weird how like they'll be anti-war activists who are against the killing of a million (it is actually a million now) people in Iraq yet they'll think highly of Lenin & Mao.

That's because leftists are driven by an impulse to combat things deemed successful. Nietzsche's ressentiment.

[Ry]

Russia had three major wars in a row that was the principle reason for starvations not the style of government. And Mao was supported by none other than the US federal Reserve. Both Mao and Stalin were neighbors to and enemies of Japan who attack both of them. Japan had beaten both Russia and China in the past and was winning in WWII and yet the oil embargo went out against Japan and the US went to war with Japan and had Stalinist Russia and China as allies. Ironically right after the Japanese were removed from Korea and China who they totally dominated the US invaded Korea and the Communist Chinese backed by Russians have a proxy war with the US there and win it.

[Irie Dave]

So is this not true:

Stalin and the Ukranian Massacre
by Eric Margolis

Five years ago, I wrote a column about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my article, they knew nothing of the 1932–33 genocide in which Stalin's regime murdered 7 million Ukrainians and sent 2 million to concentration camps.

How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many young North-American Ukrainians? For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives. Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of Ukraine's population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into history's black hole.

So has the extermination of the Don Cossacks by the Soviets in the 1920's, and Volga Germans, in 1941; and mass executions and deportations to concentration camps of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Poles. At the end of World War II, Stalin's gulag held 5.5 million prisoners, 23% Ukrainians and 6% Baltic peoples.

Almost unknown is the genocide of 2 million of the USSR's Muslim peoples: Chechen, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Tajiks, Bashkir, Kazaks. The Chechen independence fighters today branded "terrorists" by the US and Russia are the grandchildren of survivors of Soviet concentration camps.

Add to this list of forgotten atrocities the murder in Eastern Europe from 1945–47 of at least 2 million ethnic Germans, mostly women and children, and the violent expulsion of 15 million more Germans, during which 2 million German girls and women were raped.

Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people. In 1932 he sent Commissars V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch, and NKVD secret police chief G. Yagoda to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization

Ukraine was sealed off. All food supplies and livestock were confiscated. NKVD death squads executed "anti-party elements." Furious that insufficient Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch "the Soviet Adolf Eichmann" set a quota of 10,000 executions a week. Eighty percent of Ukrainian intellectuals were shot.

During the bitter winter of 1932–33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being shot or dying of starvation and cold. Cannibalism became common. Ukraine, writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future Bergan-Belsen death camp.

The mass murder of 7 million Ukrainians, 3 million of them children, and deportation to the gulag of 2 million (where most died) was hidden by Soviet propaganda. Pro-communist westerners, like the New York Times' Walter Duranty, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, toured Ukraine, denied reports of genocide, and applauded what they called Soviet "agrarian reform." Those who spoke out against the genocide were branded "fascist agents."

The US, British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine. The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically, Hitler and Mussolini. Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and many senior communist party and NKVD officials were Jewish, Hitler's absurd claim that communism was a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across fearful Europe.

When war came, Roosevelt and Churchill allied themselves closely to Stalin, though they were well aware his regime had murdered at least 30 million people long before Hitler's extermination of Jews and gypsies began. Yet in the strange moral calculus of mass murder, only Germans were guilty.

Though Stalin murdered 3 times more people than Hitler, to the doting Roosevelt he remained "Uncle Joe." At Yalta, Stalin even boasted to Churchill he had killed over 10 million peasants. The British-US alliance with Stalin made them his partners in crime. Roosevelt and Churchill helped preserve history's most murderous regime, to which they handed over half of Europe.

After the war, the Left tried to cover up Soviet genocide. Jean-Paul Sartre denied the gulag even existed. For the Allies, Nazism was the only evil; they could not admit being allied to mass murders. For the Soviets, promoting the Jewish Holocaust perpetuated anti-fascism and masked their own crimes.

The Jewish people saw their Holocaust as a unique event. It was Israel's raison d'être. Raising other genocides would, they feared, diminish their own.

While academia, media and Hollywood rightly keep attention on the Jewish Holocaust, they ignore Ukraine. We still hunt Nazi killers but not communist killers. There are few photos of the Ukraine genocide or Stalin's gulag, and fewer living survivors. Dead men tell no tales.

Russia never prosecuted any of its mass murderers, as Germany did.

We know all about crimes of Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler; about Babi Yar and Auschwitz.

But who remembers Soviet mass murderers Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria? Were it not for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we might never know of Soviet death camps like Magadan, Kolyma, and Vorkuta. Movie after movie appears about Nazi evil, while the evil of the Soviet era vanishes from view or dissolves into nostalgia.

The souls of Stalin's millions of victims still cry out for justice.