RE: The Evils of Communism (was RE: American Attitudes)

[Pat10355]

Gautam Mukunda wrote:
<<The Soviet Union under Stalin killed _at least_ 20 million of its own citizens.  
There was nothing under the Czars that was remotely comparable.>>

Is this purely a function of the evils of communism, though, or also a reflection of 
the fact that we have gotten _much_ better at killing large numbers of people in the 
past 100 years?

Also, does the relative ease of killing off a concentrated, urbanized population vs. a 
scattered rural population have anything to do with it?

I'm not saying it's solely a function of these factors. Obviously, the US has the same 
killing technology and urbanized population and we haven't killed 20 million people. 
But I don't think you can discount these factors entirely when comparing death rates 
under 20th-century communists to the era of the czars.

On another tangent, don't these deaths have more to do with totalitarianism than 
economic systems? Was it communism or the fact that he was a dictator that let Stalin 
kill so many? Could he have been a capitalist dictator and killed 20 million?

Patrick Sweeney
[EMAIL PROTECTED]