In honor of May Day, I'm wearing this t-shirt

I think the important thing to do is to hate liberals, rather than mourn the dead.

JF Thomas - you obviously miss the point. Communism is still being promoted as a good thing that we should strive for.

Shouldn't we also take time to remember the victims of another horrid global mistake, which was declared "accomplished" 5 years ago today by some guy on an aircraft carrier?

I hate to appear to be defending communists, which I am not,

I applaud your noble sentiment.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the atrocities and genocide has continued. From Rwanda, the Balkans, to Darfur. Communism has very little to do with it.

Are you saying that 100 million victims of communism are getting more than their fair share of exposure compared to say Rwanda etc.? Have you noticed that Darfur is in the media regularly and indeed the main complaint of the politically correct against China was its indifference towards Sudan (and 1000 estimated victims in Tibet recently)? The multi-millions killed by essentially the same regime, which by the way dwarf anything done by the Japanese, not to mention Kuomintang, are just fine with this crowd. Or are you saying that Hitler's smaller share in the totalitarian tally has been underexposed and undercondemned lately?

While I applaud this sentiment, May Day has been set aside to honor workers all over the world. It celebrates the struggle for the eight hour day, not communism. Changing the focus would be equivalent to renaming Columbus Day "Indigenous People's Day."

a great non-response, although I do seem to recall that prince getting reamed out in the press and public opinion for his ignorance. could the same be said for a half witted actress walking around with her communist symbol festooned handbag in a country victimized by maoist terrorists? sorry on the china one as well-tell us exactly who it was, on the ideological spectrum, that made his little red book such a hit here in the west. it would be beyond the pale to express some continuing admiration for hitler, yet communists can still proudly proclaim their allegiances without being tarred and feathered as they deserve.

It always entertains me when Liberterians try to use the atrocities of Communism as a tool to fight labor unions and worker's rights.

I mean, it would be impossible to pick another day - Stalin's birthday or some other day, maybe - to deal with the (completely valid) concerns about the atrocities committed in the name of Communism.

65 million in the People's Republic of China

This is pretty slippery. China certainly has the label "communist", but Maoism is pretty different from Marxism and the post-Mao governments are even more different.

And that constitutes 65 percent of the claimed 100 million victims.

The truth is there's probably a big difference between deaths "in the name of Communism" and deaths that actually resulted from the application of Marx's theories.

(And, of course, this doesn't even get into the deaths that anti-communist regimes, such as Germany and Portugal, were responsible for. Quite a bit of blood to go around, I would say.)

Ejo:

Communists could try to co-opt whatever they wanted, but May Day celebrations by non-communists existed before communism, during communism, and as you can see, they exist after communism. And as I alluded to above, some of the most stalwart supporters of May Day as a workers/union holiday have been anti-communist unions.

But hey, you can celebrate whatever you want on May Day. Make it "let's try to tar all workers' movements with the stain of Stalin day" for all I care. Just don't expect a lot of followers.

Yep, I can pretty much say that, when balanced against the evil of jihadist/islamic terror, we will be on the good side. just like we were on the good side in WWII and the good side in the Cold War. Not perfect, just good. May Day was not only co-opted but also expanded by Communists. It has become a multi-purpose anti-West day.

I just want to know if The Cabbage is the blond on the linked t-shirt site. :)

I'm not feeling much solidarity here. :(

HGB

So when you teach your kids that slavery was legal in the U.S. until a bloody civil war that was won after the president seized dictatorial powers, which side will be good and which will be bad?

As I asked before, what is the point of making history into a play of good vs. evil? What could kids do with such vapid insight except to project it onto future opponents, perhaps leading to another war with, say, China?

Perhaps this editorial from today's Wall Street Journal explains why, in its explicit comparison to what is happening now in Iraq and what happened to South Vietnam in 1975--and which group in the United States prevented us from giving the South Vietnamese government a fighting chance.

So what? Vietnam turned out fine, the dominos didn't fall, and the Soviet Union eventually did. And Vietnam is now a part of the family of nations which doesn't threaten us (even though it is still authoritarian and undemocratic).

Seriously, I get the feeling a lot of conservative handwringing about Vietnam has to do with the silliest sort of short-term thinking-- they can't stand the idea that we "lost" a war. But war is not a game-- it is a policy that must, like any other policy, be evaluated in terms of whether it furthers the profferred objectives. The Vietnam War didn't stop a dangerous communist government, because the communist government wasn't as dangerous as claimed. So it didn't need to be fought by the US, and it didn't matter to the US' strategic outlook that we lost it.

So when one says, "if we had done X instead, South Vietnam wouldn't have fallen", the correct response is "how would that have made things better?". (Even if we assume the questionable premise that the South Vietnamese would have been able to hold off the North with American financing.) If Saigon hadn't fallen, presumably, the Vietnam War would have simply continued, on and on. And the North Vietnamese government would have remained not a particularly big threat. And we would have spent a lot more money on an unimportant cause.

There was no strategic benefit to the US winning the Vietnam War. And the fact that conservatives can't accept this goes to a particular intellectual blindness of conservativism-- they can't get past the issue of wins and losses and look at the broader strategic benefit or detriment of warfare.

This is pretty slippery. China certainly has the label "communist", but Maoism is pretty different from Marxism and the post-Mao governments are even more different.

And that constitutes 65 percent of the claimed 100 million victims.

The truth is there's probably a big difference between deaths "in the name of Communism" and deaths that actually resulted from the application of Marx's theories.

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is as true a form of Marxism as the others. In fact, Mao's Great Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution (together which caused much of those 65 million deaths) were quite literal applications of Marxist theory.

Collectivization under the Great Leap Forward was very similar to Stalin's collectivization, and both were based on the teaching of Marx that private property be abolished in agriculture, large scale agricultural farms be created in order to industrialize farming, and surplus from agriculture would be used to aid industrialization in the cities.

In fact, it was almost identical to Stalin's plan - which was directly sourced in Marx, and agreed upon by all Bolsheviks although each wing had a slightly different view on when and how fast to proceed.

The Cultural Revolution was also based on Marx, but it was of a more social nature.

And if you still think they aren't Marxist, please explain why Marxists of the time were so enthusiastic about them - including western intellectuals.

It is a revision of history to claim that Mao - because it turned out so badly - wasn't true to Marx's teachings. He was - in fact he was truer than the rest. The sad fact is that the more closely Marx was followed the worse the outcome. The areas where socialism has done the best is the areas where it stayed farthest from doctrine. To the extent that it has followed Marx, it has been a horrific disaster.

In my normal round of shopping I'm starting to find products made in Vietnam. Now, normally I'd never support communism by buying such products, but my alternative suppliers are all in Red China. I've pretty much given up looking for anything made in this country, by the way. Aside from a couple leather belts, the latest LL Bean catalog I got offers only canvas bags and Adirondack chairs that were made in this country.

I suspect the million or so killed by the communists in Vietnam might disagree.

1. That's a vastly inflated number.

2. Unless you believe that we should send the US military wherever any large number of people are being killed, this argument means nothing. The question, against, is what US strategic objective could have been achieved. And the answer is "none".

3. I have a feeling that far more people would have been killed, anyway, if the Vietnam War had gone on and on. More than a million died already. A persistent stalemate would have just kept the killing going.

Dilan Esper is also conveniently forgetting the funding and aid that the North Vietnamese had from the Soviets and from China...

I'm not forgetting it. It's irrelevant to the issue.

Eastern Europe persisted under Soviet domination for almost the entire post-WW2 Cold War period. Did it prevent the Soviet Union from falling?

Similarly, Cuba persisted under Soviet domination for decades.

And Vietnam, of course, did remain communist. And it didn't hurt us at all.

What pisses you guys off, as I said, has nothing to do with strategy. You guys just can't stand the fact that we lost a war. Get over it.

And so all the myriad complexities of three very different theories of politics, government, and the nation-state are reduced to one sentence. This is what I love about conservatives. "They're all alike!"

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is what Marxist-Leninist-Maoists call it; its not my sentence, its their ideology. And you ignored my other sentences. But this is what I love about liberals - you're all alike! :)

What's a few million dead proles? You can't make a communist utopia w/o breaking a few eggs, no?

Um, nobody here is "defending" communism.

good and evil are vapid insights? I think the muddle headed thinking that nothing is evil stands as a greater testament to vapidity than the good old simple minded standard of good and evil. as to the Civil War, is that a close call in your mind-Lincoln did what he had to do to win a just war. Just like Roosevelt/Truman did what they had to do to win WWII, all without the benefit of lawyers vetoing strategy. If they had followed some vapid abstraction of due process, but lost, I can't say that that would have been a good result, do you?

Why does it appear that you are trying to defend the indefensible? Don’t you have any shame?

Stop being a jerk, David. It should be possible for you to understand the difference between saying that claims have been overstated and defending communism. Stalin alone killed at least 20 million. There's nothing defensible about that.

But on your side there are a lot of people who want to claim that opposing communism is the end-all and be-all of human rights advocacy. In doing so, they want to minimize the death tolls of non-communist regimes, inflate the death tolls of communism, and deny that any communist regime ever did anything good or replaced a regime that was just as bad or worse. And then when anyone points this out, people like you scream "YOU'RE DEFENDING COMMUNISM!". No, David, we aren't. And until you guys stop saying that crap, there's no way to have an intellectually honest discussion with you.