re: #686 windsagio

a lot of things equalled communism back in those days.

Hell, in Iran free elections apparently=communism!

What bugs me is that the threat/claim of communism has been one of the biggest rhetorical tools to destroy freedom and democracy in the 20th century… and people still bring it out at the drop of a hat.

My favorite uncle was a member of the Marxist Party in India, right after Partition. We’ve talked a great deal about why he joined up, and honestly I was quite rough with him…my position colored by knowledge of the USSR, and the other “communist” nations. As I’ve got older I’ve come to realize that were I in his position—on the ground and with twenty years of awareness of the British bilking people and stamping out questioning of the system in place—I’d probably do the same thing.

Stratch that position about the “threat of communism” and typically you’ll find a total lack of interest in the impact of colonialism and similar parasite-economies in the 19th and 20th century, or how the circulation of Marxism and its variants is a response to “capitalism” playing out not as Adam Smith’s vision, but as a giant exploitation system. When people talk about communism destroying freedom and democracy…well, communism picked up and continued an existing tradition of squashing people’s self-determination firmly in place—they just perfumed their self-serving actions with a different ideological system (…that was used very selectively, ignoring any components that might inhibit them).