RE: God is a Mass Murderer
May 10, 2020 at 3:10 am
(This post was last modified: May 10, 2020 at 3:11 am by Belacqua.)
(May 10, 2020 at 1:46 am)Agnostico Wrote: Lets compare the Socialist countries we know to your criteria
I think we have to deal with these leftist ideologies almost as we deal with Christianity: there is huge variety within them, and no one agrees on what the "real" version consists of.
Fighting among different branches of communists has been about as vicious as commies vs. others. I saw the room in Mexico where Trotsky was killed -- you can still see the icepick marks from where his former colleagues assassinated him.
So for example a lot of commies would say that no country has ever achieved communism. The Soviet Union maybe tried, but failed. The others ended up with various kinds of oligarchies or top-down rule. Certainly the workers' utopia that Marx wanted has never existed. It may be that the failure of all the attempts means that such a utopia is impossible, but that's not really something we can know for sure. (I like to joke that perfect communism is possible if you have a group of only 13 people, and one of them is Jesus.)
Apparently Marx said, "I am not a Marxist," meaning that even in his lifetime what people were doing in his name didn't have his approval.
I suspect that in ideologies as in religion, some people are not willing to accept that there are variations. The OP wants to claim that Christianity is only a certain way -- the way he wants to criticize. Maybe Sungula wants to make similar claims about communism -- he KNOWS what it is. But there will be lots of commies who call themselves commies who refuse to accept any checklist of things we write up for them.