At 14:58 26-5-01 -0400, John Giorgis wrote:
>At 04:52 PM 5/26/01 +0200 J. van Baardwijk wrote:
> >Stalin (and many other leaders around the world) killed many people because
> >he was a dictator; communism had nothing to do with that. Hitler killed
> >millions of people because he was a dictator (and he *certainly* wasn't a
> >communist).
>
>I'm not sure that this is true. How many regimes in the past 100 years
>engaged in the systematic killing of millions of its own people?
>
>I can think of the following:
>USSR
>Nazi Germany
>PRC
>Khmer Rouge of Cambodia
>
>Isn't the fact that Communists took three of the top four slots somewhat
>disturbing? Its not like there has been a shortage of dictators in the
>20th century for comparison.
Most of those dictators (the ones supported by the Soviet Union as well as
those supported by the US) didn't *have* millions of people to murder. That
didn't stop them from systematically eliminating the opposition.
AFAIK, communist theory does *not* include systematically killing the
opposition. As I pointed out in a previous post, the major problem was that
the leaders couldn't handle the power they were given. (The taste of power
is very addictive, after all).
Jeroen
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