My friend Sam, who was born in, and lives in, Estonia, runs his own weblog, which you should check out. His English is quite excellent. He recently left a comment in my thread on why I hate Communists.
By the way, yes, I really do hate them. Seething, burning animosity of the kind that would likely make me spit in someone's face if not punch them. Furthermore, I consider that hatred to be utterly healthy and positive. I wonder about your sanity, your decency as a human being, if you don't hate them too. It was all I could do recently not to rip a commenter a new arsehole when he said that Marxism is an "outmoded" system.
Anyway, my Estonian friend Sam recently wrote this in my comments, and you should read it so I'm re-posting it:
Why do I hate them?Because when I was a child, our family had to celebrate Christmas behind thick curtains, and couldn't talk about it outside our home.
Because my maternal grandfather gave directions to Finnish tourists on the street, resulting in their home phone being bugged for the next fifteen years.
Because ten percent of my country's population was sent to Siberia. Imagine 28 million Americans torn from their homes, men, women, children, infants - loaded on cattle trains, and moved to a bitterly cold, barren wasteland thousands of miles away.
Because everywhere I look in my country, I see the scars the bastards left behind.
Because my paternal grandfather was loaded on one of those cattle trains and deported to Siberia. He, unlike the thousands around him, managed to stay alive, and eventually found his way back. He lost all toes on both feet to frostbite.
Because my maternal great-grandfather was blacklisted his entire life under Soviet occupation, an educated man kept from working as anything but a janitor. They did this because at age 17, he fought against the Red Army in the Estonian Independence War (and won).
Because he died in 1987, a year before the blue, black, and white flag of Estonia was unfurled on the streets again, after 47 years.
Because he died before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
Because he died before we regained our independence in 1991.
Because during their famines, people ate their children, because hunger drives you mad.
Because their hands have the blood, screams, and torment of one hundred million people on them.
If you take a pen and start writing down the names of every single person who starved, froze, was beaten to death, was raped, shot, hung, stabbed, sobbed in despair and realized there was no hope, and then slowly but surely died, you'd go through countless pens, boxes and boxes of paper, and your goddamn arm would fall off.
That is why I fucking hate them. I've hated them as far back as I can remember, and as years go by, I've come to hate them even more.
And if I ever run across someone who actually defends these vile, repugnant monsters, I will hospitalize them.
All I can say is: I'll help.
You might want to check out Sam's weblog.
I'll join you.
Just for a hypothetical counterfactual scenario, do all y'all think that the total bodycount would have been higher if we had backed the fascists against the communists in WWII? Assuming that we end up in a similar Cold-War scenario in the post war era?
Im in too.
Count me in too.
I think the body count would have been the same or worse if we'd let the Nazis win. I'm not a Holocaust denier any more than I'm a Communist apologist. I hate the guts of both.
Now, all the facts of the Communist murders and their human rights violations of millions of people have been quite well known to anyone of historical curiosity, beginning in the 1930s. Remember all the cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post about being exiled to Siberia? And of course the murders and violations continued briskly after WWII, and were greatly exceeded by the Chinese, and were all too systematic in Cambodia.
During the decades between 1960 and the present, why is it that there have been so few (I recall none) public expressions such as now appear on this blog? Countless fearsome public tirades have been aimed at fascists and Nazis during that era - why the lack of balance? Is it that the public media gatekeepers did indeed harbor some sympathy for the 'opiate of the intellectuals', and can't bring themselves to permit airing such a natural reaction? Was Walter Duranty just the first of a long string?
Greg Yardley's blog, Commiewatch, was part of the Watcher's Council... but he decided to call it quits recently. Anyone with a blog who might be interested in filling his shoes should read this to find out how to join.
The creeps who decided to let Duranty posthumously keep his Pulitzer prize are obviously his successors. We really need a massive educational project to make people aware of the truth about Communism and Communists. I'm ashamed of my score on that Communism history test and I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about it. We need to teach it in the schools. The cold, hard facts. Kolyma needs to be made as infamous as Auschwitz. This blog is a beginning, and the sites Dean linked to. Just as the Nizkor Project is exposing and refuting the lies of the Holocaust deniers, so these sites are exposing and refuting the lies of the Communists and their apologists.
Stalin said that "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." What I'd like to see is, take one of those hundreds of millions of deaths under Communism, a teenage girl for example, and show, dramatize, that one girl's life and death to the public, just as "The Diary of Anne Frank" did to the Nazis.
Never forgive! Never forget! Never again!
My grandfather escaped Lithuania after watching his mother raped and killed and his father executed with a pitchfork by the communists. They were land owners and raised horses.
When I joined the Army in 1985, he made sure that I knew that he wanted me to kill communists. Lots of them.
He meant every word.
Just shows you how an idea can be corrupted into something seething and hideous. The original economic theory of communism was not inherently evil. Poorly thought utopian dreck, but not evil. Then these shitheads come along and turn it into a sick and twisted dictatorial political theory.
Fuckers.
I do not hate communists. It has taken me years to get to the point where I no longer hate communists. Communists are an expression of the culture of death and to hate them is to walk hand in hand with them down the same road that only leads to the great gaping black hole of nihilism. I do not want to share that journey with them. They do not deserve my company.
I do not hate communists because I want to eradicate their legacy. I want to repair the damage they have caused and I want the entire world to get as far away from their ideas as possible and stay there. It is the best monument I can think of to the dead.
Love, create, build a bright future, and never, ever forget what they did. It's a long struggle to get there but it is a better path to utterly nullify their legacy.
Think about it,
God Bless
There is evil in the world, evil ideologies, evil people, evil governments.
I'm not speaking from a religous viewpoint, not god and satan. But of Freedom and those governmnents ruled by tyrants who deny all freedom to those who live there.
One of the worst evils comes from those who declare that the enemy of our country is not evil, it is us who are evil because we declare a war against terror.
QuantumThnk:
Well said. Couldn't have put it better myself. That _is_ what it comes down to: Freedom vs. Slavery And I'll stand with Freedom.
Lauren: of course an ideology in its printed-on-paper form isn't "evil" as such, but we can't judge ideologies as purely intellectual exercises. When you formulate a political theory (and communism is more than a mere economic theory -- it's creators sought to explain the whole of human existence with its tenets and thus it functions almost as a religion; at the very least it is political as well as economic in scope) you must take into consideration that it will be implemented somewhere, by someone -- unless you are doing so in obvious jest. Marx was not joking when he wrote Das Kapital. He was sure his ideas were the human future, and his followers and admirers wanted to make sure that it came about.
In any case, Communism is an evil ideology because it promotes envy, because it tells people not only that they have a right to have what they don't have, they also have a right to hate the people who have what they don't have -- "what right do certain people have to own things, we want ours!" Envy leads to robbery and murder, as we can see. Not for nothing is it one of the seven deadly sins.
Marxism is inherently and insideously evil. Intentionally revolutionary, and calling for the mob (proletariat) to overthrow existing governments of whatever stripe, based on an economic theory that simply replaced overseers, and denied personal ownership of anything, the "collective" utopia Marx described has only worked in a monastery, and Marx intended to impose his monastic view by force (ironically never himself being monastic, or even particularly monagamous).
Quantum is right, and able to be correct in few words is commendable. So to summarize: Marxism (communism, socialism) is slavery with window dressing.
The whole world sucks. Life sucks and I pray I expire in a relatively peaceful manner.
Hate is just as real a human emotion as love. Hate is fostered by the survival instinct. Humans must kill other humans to satisfy this hate instinct. Actually, the human race has evolved into loving hate. That's ironic because the 2 emotions are supposed to be diametrically opposite.
At the end of the day we all love to hate, and hate to love. But killing is as natural as taking a shit!
Actually, fear and love form the better diametric opposition, psychologically speaking. Hate and love are both conceptually "attractive," although love is a positive attraction, and hate is a negative attraction (basically, you want something you love close to you because you want to enjoy it, and you want something you hate close to you so you can destroy it). In this sense, fear is a negative repulsion (you want something you fear far away from you so it cannot harm you) and opposed in more senses to love than hate is. [/tangent]
That is absolutely true. Actually, love and hate go together because if you love, i.e., value, something or someone, you necessarily hate whatever destroys or threatens that which you value. There, because I love freedom, I therefore hate Communism and all Communists just as I hate all Nazis.
Is it just me or does eddie sound like a 17 year old suffering from teen angst and smoking dope?
Or maybe he is a profound existentialist thinker...hmmmm.