this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
293 points (99.3% liked)
Excellent Reads
1578 readers
25 users here now
Are you tired of clickbait and the current state of journalism? This community is meant to remind you that excellent journalism still happens. While not sticking to a specific topic, the focus will be on high-quality articles and discussion around their topics.
Politics is allowed, but should not be the main focus of the community.
Submissions should be articles of medium length or longer. As in, it should take you 5 minutes or more to read it. Article series’ would also qualify.
Please either submit an archive link, or include it in your summary.
Rules:
- Common Sense. Civility, etc.
- Server rules.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What happened to these children was horrific, but framing it as a communism vs democracy/capitalism is pointless jingoism. The USA and other Western nations have their fair share of atrocities committed against children.
The thousands of children who were stolen from their families and abused/killed in Residential Schools were mistreated and abused in a society that viewed the practice as "democratic", "enlightened" even.
The idea of deformities making children "unfit" is just a form of eugenics, which was fully endorsed by the US prior to WWII.
To say nothing of Japanese internment camps, indiscriminate bombing of schools and homes in the Middle East, thousands of teens tried and imprisoned as adults in the failed war on drugs, children being stolen from their families and imprisoned on the Southern border, and countless other atrocities committed against children by our great nation. And right now the Western world is financing a military campaign in Gaza which has killed an unfathomable number of children.
Communism may be no better, but it's hard to argue it's worse.
The numbers are quite literally orders of magnitude apart
That's a bold claim, do you have a source?
According to the linked article in the OP, 170k children went through this Romanian system.
According to numbers just from Canada's residential School system, over 150k children were stolen from their families and beaten, abused, and often killed in pseudo-prisons. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canada-residential-schools-unmarked-graves-indigenous-children-60-minutes-2022-02-06/)
Numbers for the US are hard to come by, but the US dept of the interior estimates that "tens of thousands" of indian children died in their residential School system. (https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/dup/inline-files/bsi_investigative_report_may_2022_508.pdf)
This isn't a competition to see who is worse. Virtually every country on earth has committed unspeakable atrocities, many of them are still doing so today. Acting like this was a product of communism doesn't add anything useful to the discussion and just carries water for the parties who continue to commit similar atrocities under Western Capitalism.
That's authoritarianism calling itself communism. Just because they call it that doesn't make it so, and you're buying into their propaganda if you call it communist.
If you actually apply a Marxist analysis here, the system in the Soviet Bloc after the revolution failed in the 20s was a clearly capitalist one, the thing Engels described as the state becoming the "national capitalist" in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific". The very fact this was done to bolster "the economy" and sorted people into their ability to provide value to be exploited by the state economy is making that quite clear.
Capitalism does not mean western democracy, neither does having red aesthetics and abstract ideals and convictions make you communist - only the actual material base and relations of production and value are what should be looked at.
Communism was the best thing that ever happened to Russia, and Russia was the worst thing to ever happen to communism.
We advocate against human rights violations, not for them. What, you think capitalism cradles and comforts children? Russia has only ever known corruption by the wealthy and powerful. Stop guzzling what you're fed and realize that progress takes time and failure and effort. Just because Russia couldn't pull it off, you think it's impossible for the West to make it work?
A lot of the communist cosplayers on here don't care about communism, its just a facade to cover their support for the CCP and Kremlin.
They could at least stan Vietnam and Cuba instead
I rarely hear about either on here, but I see comments from "communists" all the time.
Such odd organizations to willingly support, assuming those are actually people and not troll farms.
Yeah, a good portion are shills running LLMs.
Some are rightfully frustrated with things like corporate overreach and environmental apathy. They're looking for an alternative and when they noticd a bunch of accounts who seem to be their peers supporting an alternative... they see what they want to.