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386-SX 25Mhz VGA
Jan 14, 2003

(C) American Megatrends Inc.,

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

Well, aside from the fact that kicking off your book with "Dedicated to the knowledge that anyone who aids the USA in its international terrorism is committing a crime against humanity" is bound to raise a few eyebrows even among communists,
I wouldn't call that a fact or even particularly controversial outside of the United States.

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R. Guyovich
Dec 25, 1991

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

How trustworthy is the Austin Murphy book, I have it but the "US ATROCITIES, COMMUNISM IS GREAT ACTUALLY" intro and table of contents set off a lot of alarm bells and I never read it

it's very polemical but the sources check out, i'd give more detail but i'm out of town and away from my copy

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


GunnerJ posted:

You could make another parallel in the two different trajectories of industrialization in the North and South of the US. Economic history in this period not really my strongest area of knowledge so this could be talking out of my rear end, but a lot of the reason why the South lagged so far behind can be traced to Jeffersonian Republicanism and its agrarian, anti-urban ideal, whereas the North and especially Northeast was the last bastion of Federalism, the party of Hamilton with his experiments into government-subsidized industrial development. Now, you could say, "What about slavery?" and that's a fair point, but since Marxism is a bit of a hot topic in this discussion, this isn't necessarily a flaw in the argument. Ideology flows from relations of production in Marxist analysis, and it does so everywhere, in the Early Republic/Antebellum US and in Meiji-era Japan and the early USSR. If reliance on slavery for production of cash crops impeded industrialization in the South, we still have to ask why Southerners did not, in larger numbers or with more institutional support, decide it might be a good idea to move their economy towards industrialization and at that point you'll run into ideas about the moral superiority of slavery compared to industrial wage labor.

It's not really any mystery why the South stuck with slavery. Slavery-fuelled cash-crop agriculture and raw material production was simply more profitable than manufacturing. According to standard neoclassical Econ 101 theory this is perfectly natural. Such production was very labor intensive and slavery was a way of driving labor costs down to 0. It's also what led to ISI becoming popular in Latin America, artificially making manufacturing more profitable was a way to reduce reliance on raw material exports and primary industry.

GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?

icantfindaname posted:

It's not really any mystery why the South stuck with slavery. Slavery-fuelled cash-crop agriculture and raw material production was simply more profitable than manufacturing. According to standard neoclassical Econ 101 theory this is perfectly natural. Such production was very labor intensive and slavery was a way of driving labor costs down to 0. It's also what led to ISI becoming popular in Latin America, artificially making manufacturing more profitable was a way to reduce reliance on raw material exports and primary industry.

Wasn't really treating it as a mystery, just spitballing. And yeah, slavery was a lot more profitable than is often acknowledged, so I guess ideology wasn't really playing much of a causative role.

Prism Mirror Lens
Oct 9, 2012

~*"The most intelligent and meaning-rich film he could think of was Shaun of the Dead, I don't think either brain is going to absorb anything you post."*~




:chord:

386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:

I wouldn't call that a fact or even particularly controversial outside of the United States.

Implying that almost everyone in the world is committing a crime against humanity (by way of, like, paying taxes or producing food for America) is, while arguably not WRONG, pretty unhelpful and weird unless you're a 15 year old who's just discovered Chomsky. I could say "oh, well, I guess the author MEANT only people directly involved..." but that doesn't bode well for the rest of the book. As far as the 'US does atrocities' bit goes I'd tell people to read Killing Hope instead since its actually widely reviewed and critiqued

HorseLord
Aug 26, 2014

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

Well, aside from the fact that kicking off your book with "Dedicated to the knowledge that anyone who aids the USA in its international terrorism is committing a crime against humanity" is bound to raise a few eyebrows even among communists,

What?

E: Oh, you're pretending the author means literally anyone who's ever in any way interacted with America, even though by your own wording you know they actually means "anyone who aids the USA in its international terrorism", which is a very different thing.

You are smart enough to know that participating in America's atrocities is not the same as consumer trade. Jesus Christ.

HorseLord fucked around with this message at 10:40 on May 18, 2016

Prism Mirror Lens
Oct 9, 2012

~*"The most intelligent and meaning-rich film he could think of was Shaun of the Dead, I don't think either brain is going to absorb anything you post."*~




:chord:
Which is the more Correct communist viewpoint - that we are all, willingly or unwillingly, caught in the trap of global capitalism and our comfortable daily life contributes to massive systemic oppression, violence and injustice, or that the problem is there are a bunch of bad criminal guys somewhere committing war atrocities?

(This of course has nothing very real to do with the quality of the book, I'm just having a poke at the author, its a bit of fun mate)

Prism Mirror Lens fucked around with this message at 11:44 on May 18, 2016

HorseLord
Aug 26, 2014

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

Which is the more Correct communist viewpoint - that we are all, willingly or unwillingly, caught in the trap of global capitalism and our comfortable daily life contributes to massive systemic oppression, violence and injustice, or that the problem is there are a bunch of bad criminal guys somewhere committing war atrocities?

Both, for gently caress's sake.

386-SX 25Mhz VGA
Jan 14, 2003

(C) American Megatrends Inc.,

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

Implying that almost everyone in the world is committing a crime against humanity (by way of, like, paying taxes or producing food for America) is, while arguably not WRONG, pretty unhelpful and weird unless you're a 15 year old who's just discovered Chomsky. I could say "oh, well, I guess the author MEANT only people directly involved..." but that doesn't bode well for the rest of the book. As far as the 'US does atrocities' bit goes I'd tell people to read Killing Hope instead since its actually widely reviewed and critiqued
OK, I mean you're assuming silliest intentions from a small section and refusing to look at the book because of that.

Prism Mirror Lens
Oct 9, 2012

~*"The most intelligent and meaning-rich film he could think of was Shaun of the Dead, I don't think either brain is going to absorb anything you post."*~




:chord:
I'm not refusing, I'm asking whether it's worth reading compared to books which are more widely known, which he cites anyway, and which don't say that the USA has policies little different to Hitler in the intro (come on, this IS kind of stupid)

HorseLord posted:

Both, for gently caress's sake.

Second one's a bit Occupy don't you think?

HorseLord
Aug 26, 2014
No, there's objectively huge shitkings in position of power who use that power to do poo poo things. These are our enemies.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

Second one's a bit Occupy don't you think?

How is it not accurate to suggest that recent world leaders have instigated aggressive wars with no good basis for doing so, resulting in thousands of immediate deaths and destabilizing an entire region leading to even more deaths?

If that is not a war crime I'm not sure what is.

Baka-nin
Jan 25, 2015

icantfindaname posted:

It's not really any mystery why the South stuck with slavery. Slavery-fuelled cash-crop agriculture and raw material production was simply more profitable than manufacturing. According to standard neoclassical Econ 101 theory this is perfectly natural. Such production was very labor intensive and slavery was a way of driving labor costs down to 0. It's also what led to ISI becoming popular in Latin America, artificially making manufacturing more profitable was a way to reduce reliance on raw material exports and primary industry.



Or it could just be that the Southern states were dominated by slave owners who put their class interests above that of the wider society, it was easier for them to maintain themselves through the continuation of slavery then take the risks inherent in adapting to a new market relationship. Much like how the capitalists who accrue wealth from fossil fuels do everything they can to halt the adoption of renewables environment be damned.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Baka-nin posted:

Or it could just be that the Southern states were dominated by slave owners who put their class interests above that of the wider society, it was easier for them to maintain themselves through the continuation of slavery then take the risks inherent in adapting to a new market relationship. Much like how the capitalists who accrue wealth from fossil fuels do everything they can to halt the adoption of renewables environment be damned.

That doesn't disagree with anything I said at all?

Baka-nin
Jan 25, 2015

icantfindaname posted:

That doesn't disagree with anything I said at all?

Err yes it does, you were waffling on about a macro economic attempt to explain the rationale behind maintaining an antiquated economic system with reference to 20th century industrialisation plans in South America(which is very strange since neither situation is remotely similar). I'm saying they didn't care, because the status quo suited them just fine, and reform and change presented great risks, pretty basic dialectics. Can you find any examples of slave owners conducting economic surveys about the pros and cons of the slave plantation system versus wage labourers in an industrial market, or even a free agrarian economy, whereby they concluded that business as usual was the more rational choice, for the reasons you've stated? And that these conclusions were widely accepted by the plantation owners as class? Because if you can't then your just taking your economic assumptions and trying to make reality fit into your preconceptions.

Baka-nin fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Jul 5, 2016

Hilario Baldness
Feb 10, 2005

:buddy:



Grimey Drawer
Read and reread the first three chapters of Capital like 5 times now and I think I understand his basic approach by now, and actually do kind of like it. I only 6234089234 more chapters to go! :haw:

-Blackadder-
Jan 2, 2007

Game....Blouses.
Almost didn't find this thread.

Anyway, recently, I was reading about the Khmer Rouge (just on Wikipedia so I don't know how reliable or thorough it was) and what struck me most was how brutal it was.

I mean, I think most people have their own ideas about how government should be run and how society should function so they can understand the motivation behind Pol Pots little social engineering experiment because we've all thought about how "we" would do things if we were in charge. Certainly, Pol Pot had some childish, overly simplistic views of the world ("hey, these rural and tribal peoples seem to live pretty chill lives maybe if we all lived like that the strife that comes from classicism would be solved") but I can see what he was trying to do.

What I don't understand is why he was so brutal about it and accepted such high casualty rate. I mean, at this point he's not really fighting a war, he's just trying to put together his own, albeit warped, idea of a Utopian society. Regardless of the merits of his idea, why did "...and we're gonna have to kill an absolute poo poo ton of people" come into the equation? His thoughts on "New People" seem to suggest that he believed people from the cities were so brainwashed by urbanization that they were unsavable and would not be able to adapt and conform to the new society. But it just seems like such a cold way to go about it, it was like he saw human beings as lab rats or an ant colony. This dude and the other guys he put in charge directly under him went to college at a French university, ffs. What the hell are they teaching at French universities that convince people that, that level of death is an acceptable loss? You'd think they'd come back with higher standards for civilized living and behavior just from living in French society.

One thing that's always been amazing to me is that the whole marxist, socialist, communist thing starts from a great place with the best of intentions for helping the underclasses and providing a decent life for everyone and so one assumes that people who are passionate about it actually care about other human beings and are the polar opposite of cold, greedy, unemphatic robots like the capitalist ruling classes so often are, and yet these same people so often end up brutally killing a ton of people for the most childishly stupid of reasons.

-Blackadder- fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Dec 30, 2016

Philip Rivers
Mar 15, 2010

Gotta crack a few (hundred thousand, million, tens of millions) eggs to make an omelette!

Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

Ah yes, noted Marxist Pol Pot, a man unintentionally put in place by Nixon, and later backed politically and financially by Carter, Reagan and Thatcher.

The cold war was full of duplicitous assholes. Pol Pot is an interesting one given for all the talk about how moustache-twirlingly evil he was, there's always a drop-off in volume that it was those godless communists from Vietnam who ousted the Khmer Rouge, and it was the Western anti-communist bloc who supported his government-in-exile.

GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?
Thread title should possibly be changed to "Give Me Your Hot Takes About Marxism, Socialism, and Communism"

Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

GunnerJ posted:

Thread title should possibly be changed to "Give Me Your Hot Takes About Marxism, Socialism, and Communism"

There's so many valid criticisms about all three topics and yet it's always people who have no idea about the topics but read the latest op-ed about some rear end in a top hat who historically waved a red-tinted flag.

GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?

Tesseraction posted:

There's so many valid criticisms about all three topics and yet it's always people who have no idea about the topics but read the latest op-ed about some rear end in a top hat who historically waved a red-tinted flag.

I've been reading up on this stuff and it turns out, sometimes people with the highest ideals and best intentions end up doing really horrible poo poo??!?

Anyway, here's a proverb about eggs that Robespierre or Cromwell said I'm pretty sure. Peace out.

-Blackadder-
Jan 2, 2007

Game....Blouses.

Tesseraction posted:

Ah yes, noted Marxist Pol Pot, a man unintentionally put in place by Nixon, and later backed politically and financially by Carter, Reagan and Thatcher.

The cold war was full of duplicitous assholes. Pol Pot is an interesting one given for all the talk about how moustache-twirlingly evil he was, there's always a drop-off in volume that it was those godless communists from Vietnam who ousted the Khmer Rouge, and it was the Western anti-communist bloc who supported his government-in-exile.

Tesseraction posted:

There's so many valid criticisms about all three topics and yet it's always people who have no idea about the topics but read the latest op-ed about some rear end in a top hat who historically waved a red-tinted flag.

I think you've got me a bit wrong here or are perhaps on a hair trigger from previous debates. The point of my post wasn't to be critical of Communism, etc. I got all that about the Khmer Rouge being supported by the U.S., support that continued even after the Khmer Rouge was ousted by the NVC from my reading, but I wasn't making a ideological debate about capitalism vs communism. I'm well aware of the America's long history of supporting death squads and genocidal dictators simply because they happened to be fighting communists, it was and is the height of idiocy on the US's part.

The point of my post was just that I was floored that Pol Pot went about his plan with such brutality and I was looking for some insight into why things went down like that. Perhaps I'm ascribing more ethical motivations to him than he deserves, and the answer to my question really is as simple as that he was just nuttier than a fruitcake. I was just wondering what was going on in his head. How does one go from lofty goals like trying to create a society where everyone is equal, no one goes hungry, etc to bashing babies' heads in against tree trunks.

-Blackadder- fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Dec 30, 2016

Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

Pol Pot was a racist baby with a severe inferiority complex. Turns out that when such a person gets in charge he then proceeds to be a genocidal baby killing anyone he feels might have wronged him at any point in time. See: his persecution of intellectuals because it's really obvious one of them called him a fuckin' idiot at some point in his formative years.

I appreciate to the outsider it sounds like a No True Scotsman issue but he really was just a racist who found that socialist rhetoric got people on side. It's hardly novel - Hitler did the same.

Philip Rivers
Mar 15, 2010

Me in 2077: was Trump a communist??

Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

Philip Rivers posted:

Me in 2077: was Trump a communist??

Certain elements of the American voter base in 2016: is Trump the most socialist candidate running??

Me, then, and most likely all the way to my nuclear blast death: hahahahahahaha

Philip Rivers
Mar 15, 2010

Atomic hellfire is a good way to cleanse false consciousness I hear

Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

Philip Rivers posted:

Atomic hellfire is a good way to cleanse false consciousness I hear

Clearly not or Uncle Joe woulda tried it.

Badger of Basra
Jul 26, 2007

Philip Rivers posted:

Atomic hellfire is a good way to cleanse false consciousness I hear

No Posadism in this thread please.

-Blackadder-
Jan 2, 2007

Game....Blouses.

Tesseraction posted:

Pol Pot was a racist baby with a severe inferiority complex. Turns out that when such a person gets in charge he then proceeds to be a genocidal baby killing anyone he feels might have wronged him at any point in time. See: his persecution of intellectuals because it's really obvious one of them called him a fuckin' idiot at some point in his formative years.

I appreciate to the outsider it sounds like a No True Scotsman issue but he really was just a racist who found that socialist rhetoric got people on side. It's hardly novel - Hitler did the same.

Fair enough. And if it matters, it doesn't sound like No True Scotsman to me. Based on the initial responses my post got, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the history of this thread has been somewhat of a battleground on this point. So I get that you were just reacting to people apparently trying to use him as an example of why communism is terrible and we should all just pledge allegiance to Ayn Rand or whatever, but I can assure you that I'm just about the furthest one could get from that side of the aisle. I was just looking for insight into some of the more brutal aspects of his actions from a Marxist perspective, but based on what you guys are saying it sounds like there wasn't anything more going on in his head than being an ignorant, crazy rear end in a top hat.

-Blackadder- fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Dec 30, 2016

Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

Over in the Dark Enlightenment thread (currently located in PYF due to a comedy of its birth) a man named Phil Sandifer analyses Curtis Yarvin / Mencius Moldbug and concludes that his brand of alt-right thought is basically failed Marxism - he sees the problems with society but instead of realising the contradictions of capitalism or the like, he just blames black people. It comes down that a lot of people resonate with the feelings that something is hosed up in society, but don't necessarily take a communist/socialist outlook from that. Pol Pot felt things were hosed up because his country wasn't great and he wanted to Make Cambodia Great Again, but he wasn't actually interested in examining the problems of the economy or education system, he just tried to take things back to a 'simpler time' and also chose to be a brutal genocidal maniac about it.

This would be a worrying snapshot of what to expect from Trump, but frankly while he's awful and will be awful, America's legal institutions are much stronger than bombed-to-gently caress Cambodia.

-Blackadder-
Jan 2, 2007

Game....Blouses.

Tesseraction posted:

Over in the Dark Enlightenment thread (currently located in PYF due to a comedy of its birth) a man named Phil Sandifer analyses Curtis Yarvin / Mencius Moldbug and concludes that his brand of alt-right thought is basically failed Marxism - he sees the problems with society but instead of realising the contradictions of capitalism or the like, he just blames black people. It comes down that a lot of people resonate with the feelings that something is hosed up in society, but don't necessarily take a communist/socialist outlook from that. Pol Pot felt things were hosed up because his country wasn't great and he wanted to Make Cambodia Great Again, but he wasn't actually interested in examining the problems of the economy or education system, he just tried to take things back to a 'simpler time' and also chose to be a brutal genocidal maniac about it.

This would be a worrying snapshot of what to expect from Trump, but frankly while he's awful and will be awful, America's legal institutions are much stronger than bombed-to-gently caress Cambodia.

That's an interesting point and one that I also picked up on from my reading. It's very much like the Right's whitewashed "Leave it to Beaver" view of the "idyllic" 1950's, and how if we could just get back to that point, everything would be good again. It seems like there is a strong undercurrent of the Golden Age fallacy and Appealing to Tradition in that line of thinking.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

-Blackadder- posted:

Fair enough. And if it matters, it doesn't sound like No True Scotsman to me. Based on the initial responses my post got, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the history of this thread has been somewhat of a battleground on this point. So I get that you were just reacting to people apparently trying to use him as an example of why communism is terrible and we should all just pledge allegiance to Ayn Rand or whatever, but I can assure you that I'm just about the furthest one could get from that side of the aisle. I was just looking for insight into some of the more brutal aspects of his actions from a Marxist perspective, but based on what you guys are saying it sounds like there wasn't anything more going on in his head than being an ignorant, crazy rear end in a top hat.

I suppose there are some people who read Marx and then decide "well we just need to shoot all the bad people and then we will have utopia" but they didn't really read Marx very well because he is fairly clear that the revolution can't really be forced, it'll happen when it can't not happen, and not before.

Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

-Blackadder- posted:

That's an interesting point and one that I also picked up on from my reading. It's very much like the Right's whitewashed "Leave it to Beaver" view of the "idyllic" 1950's, and how if we could just get back to that point, everything would be good again. It seems like there is a strong undercurrent of the Golden Age fallacy and Appealing to Tradition in that line of thinking.

Absolutely! And you saw elements of it in Mao apologists who try to downplay the gently caress-ups of the Great Leap Forward. Mao's heart was mostly in the right place but his brain was located somewhere around his left arsecheek.

Ultimately if the real world sucks a lot of people assume reverting poo poo like a bad coding experience will solve the bugs.

Baka-nin
Jan 25, 2015

-Blackadder- posted:

I think you've got me a bit wrong here or are perhaps on a hair trigger from previous debates. The point of my post wasn't to be critical of Communism, etc. I got all that about the Khmer Rouge being supported by the U.S., support that continued even after the Khmer Rouge was ousted by the NVC from my reading, but I wasn't making a ideological debate about capitalism vs communism. I'm well aware of the America's long history of supporting death squads and genocidal dictators simply because they happened to be fighting communists, it was and is the height of idiocy on the US's part.

The point of my post was just that I was floored that Pol Pot went about his plan with such brutality and I was looking for some insight into why things went down like that. Perhaps I'm ascribing more ethical motivations to him than he deserves, and the answer to my question really is as simple as that he was just nuttier than a fruitcake. I was just wondering what was going on in his head. How does one go from lofty goals like trying to create a society where everyone is equal, no one goes hungry, etc to bashing babies' heads in against tree trunks.

Well two things regarding Pol Pot, its important to keep in mind that the Khmer Rouge was motivated primarily by extreme nationalism, the reason they fell out with Vietnam and carried out severe ethnic cleansing against minority Vietnamese or mixed Cambodians were motivated by his desire the restore the Khampuchean nation (a lot of its historical territory is now in modern Vietnam) and fears that Cambodia would become a client of a united Vietnam.

The brutalities in the fields were an attempt to build a strong economic base for the new regime by extreme rice cultivation. http://libcom.org/library/%E2%80%9Cif-we-have-rice-we-can-have-everything%E2%80%9D-%EF%BB%BF%EF%BB%BF-critique-khmer-rouge-ideology-practice

quote:

And did the Khmer Rouge promise to build a ‘thriving communist future’ with their 4-year-plan?42 Even if Angkar never officially invoked Marxism-Leninism43 their theoretical documents show them as especially thickheaded-nationalist and paranoid Marxists-Leninists. The documents talk of “socialism”, not communism, all the way through44 , and the policies were about agricultural surplus and foreign currency income – however nuts the strategy to achieve this might have been and however unreal the other assumptions were (e.g. a constant rice price on the world market).

I.e. use the large pool of manpower to overcome all the other shortcomings, like lack of agricultural equipment, fertilizer, infrastructure etc. They believed that the world market price for rice would just increase every year, so by focussing almost exclusively on rice growing they could feed their population and use the surplus to buy everything else they would need.

This is often overlooked, but in order to get a new model society Pol Pot really needed to build a strong and vigorous and above all independent nation in order to start it off. Also the Khmer Rouge was never really much of a political party it remained a coalition of armed groups who ruled over their territories through violence and intimidation.

There's a documentary called Enemies of the People that's worth watching, it interviews Nuon Chea under house arrest. Nuon Chea was the second most powerful man in the Khmer Rouge and its main ideologist. He denies most of the crimes of the regime but he does admit some of them, and he justifies the crimes he admits by patriotism. He says everything the Khmer Rouge did, they did because they loved the country. Cambodia is less a warning about utopian idealism run amok and more about the dangers of nationalist pragmatism.

Baka-nin fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Jan 5, 2017

Cerebral Bore
Apr 21, 2010


Fun Shoe
Simply put the fact that the Khmer Rouge wanted to revert society to an agrarian stage is in itself enough to disqualify them from being any kind of Marxists. The core idea of the Marxist theory of history is that society necessarily advances through successive economic stages and that this is a good thing, which means that if you try to go back to some kind of bizarro agrarian slave economy you're sure as poo poo not with the program.

TomViolence
Feb 19, 2013

PLEASE ASK ABOUT MY 80,000 WORD WALLACE AND GROMIT SLASH FICTION. PLEASE.

Nearly any third world nation during the cold war that pursued a nonaligned or pro-soviet foreign policy, or intervened heavily in the domestic economy against the interests of foreign capital got labeled communist, the actual ideology in play was largely irrelevant. Whether the character of the government was socialist or nationalist, democratic or authoritarian, explicitly marxist or some kind of homebrewed synthesis, the main things that got you called a communist were telling capital to gently caress off, telling colonisers to gently caress off, telling uncle Sam to gently caress off or trying to control your economy using any method that looked remotely like central planning. It's for this reason that regimes as diverse in ideology and policy as Manley's Jamaica, Nehru's India, Nkrumah's Ghana, Nasser's Egypt and Pol Pot's Cambodia all got tarred with the communism brush at one time or another and became playthings and occasional antagonists of US foreign policy.

hakimashou
Jul 15, 2002
Upset Trowel
It's the worst thing people have ever come up with.

Baka-nin
Jan 25, 2015

TomViolence posted:

Nearly any third world nation during the cold war that pursued a nonaligned or pro-soviet foreign policy, or intervened heavily in the domestic economy against the interests of foreign capital got labeled communist, the actual ideology in play was largely irrelevant. Whether the character of the government was socialist or nationalist, democratic or authoritarian, explicitly marxist or some kind of homebrewed synthesis, the main things that got you called a communist were telling capital to gently caress off, telling colonisers to gently caress off, telling uncle Sam to gently caress off or trying to control your economy using any method that looked remotely like central planning. It's for this reason that regimes as diverse in ideology and policy as Manley's Jamaica, Nehru's India, Nkrumah's Ghana, Nasser's Egypt and Pol Pot's Cambodia all got tarred with the communism brush at one time or another and became playthings and occasional antagonists of US foreign policy.

True, I remember reading about the military dictatorships in Central America, and how the Generals believed they were in a struggle against communism in the name of Christian Civilisation. But their death squads targeted everyone from the small Communist parties, to Christian Democrats and the Catholic church.

But to be fair a lot of this was because the words socialism, and communism were blatantly misused by its own supposed adherents. The Khmer Rouge did lead the Communist Party of Kampuchea, they just didn't have a Communist platform. Nkrumah, Nasser and Manley all claimed to be Socialists, they just ruled through state institutions from above and had no desire to help the working class emancipate itself from wage labour. The Labour party still claims to be Socialist which would make Blair's Britain officially socialist, and I don't think I have to give a reason why that's an absurd statement.

Its weird how a word that means "workers control their means of production" is such a hard concept for so many to grasp. But there we go. Also the Soviet Union wasn't too pi


hakimashou posted:

It's the worst thing people have ever come up with.

But enough about your posting :smugdog:

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Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene

-Blackadder- posted:

The point of my post was just that I was floored that Pol Pot went about his plan with such brutality and I was looking for some insight into why things went down like that. Perhaps I'm ascribing more ethical motivations to him than he deserves, and the answer to my question really is as simple as that he was just nuttier than a fruitcake. I was just wondering what was going on in his head. How does one go from lofty goals like trying to create a society where everyone is equal, no one goes hungry, etc to bashing babies' heads in against tree trunks.

In Theravada Buddhism, especially the kind found in Cambodia, Arhats have an incorruptible nature that cannot regress and their enlightenment is sudden.

Assuming that Pol Pot at least partially understood himself in that context, you can couple it with the idea that there was a time when "Arhats" were common (in line with the primitive communism espoused by the KR) but they are no longer common. In line with another common Theravadan view, that means that something is obscuring people's natural tendency towards goodness (+ nationalism, so this can be refined to the Khmer people's natural tendency towards goodness). In Pol Pot's nationalistic view, that would be the Chinese and Vietnamese influences which need to be purged.

Unlike Mahayana Buddhism where you have a more universal view of salvation (as seen in works like the Bodhisattvacaryāvatārain) Theravada Buddhism has a much narrower understanding. So, what do you do with negative influences that have no chance of salvation for themselves but also may prevent the salvation of others?

These are very basic cultural concepts that Pol Pot would have grown up with. Take these unexamined biases, swap out "Buddhism" for "Marxism" (which also removes pesky booj morality from the equation) and how Pol Pot came the the conclusions he did are pretty clear.

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