Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Do you know how this translates? Capitalist countries only go to war if it is in their economic best interests to do so. Its nothing to do with ideology or threat. And when was the last time a democratic country went to war against a socialist threat to its own borders?
Yes - and since we have now admitted that kind of evidence into the argument, perhaps I should mention the generations of my ancestors who slaved under the yoke of British Capitalist Imperialism - in the land of their own birth, but deprived of any natural right to own land by pure accident of birth - few of whom made it much past their 40th year whilst their erstwhile dependents were separated between the workhouse and the orphanage after their breadwinner fathers had poured out their sweat, tears, blood and finally their last breaths on the altar of economic advancement. None of that wealth ended up in their pockets or mine - but if I have inherited their genes, they were at least as capable and competent as anyone else - they just lacked opportunity. They worked out their miserable existence in the very mills and slums that Friedrich Engels visited before collaborating with Marx to find a way of rectifying such an obvious and unjust 'anomaly' of the capitalist distribution of the 'wealth of nations'. If my own father is anything to go by, they were by no means lazy - the opposite in fact...they ended up idle in the wake of the arch-Capitalist "Iron Lady" - who 'ironically' was purposefully instrumental in taking the last puffs of steam out of the iron-built industry of North West England in the late 1970s-early 1980s with no regard to what would become of the economic future of the descendants of those on whose sacrifice was built the 'greatness' of the empire she presided Canute-like over the demise of. The "market" chewed them up and spat them out and they sank to the bottom of the economic ocean along with the bloated remains of one of my father's own bourgeois employers and his workers pensions! I did not get to choose ANY of that - I inherited it from capitalism - and I will never forgive the system for it - even if I have used it to get myself out. That might be emotively expressed - but it is all fact.
Where did you get these numbers from? Can you give us a breakdown? And while you're at it maybe you could do a comparison with, say, European Capitalist expansionism - I reckon you might even beat the corrected combined total of fascism and communism by just taking into account the genocide of indigenous American peoples - probably at least 100 million deaths across North and South America. But hey, they were definitely not 'our' equals were they.
I personally renounce violence as a means of political change. But if we are saying that, how is Syria or Libya or Iraq any different to Russia, Vietnam or North Korea? My communism would be one that more closely resembles a more primitive cooperative arrangement of social affairs. To be honest, I don't think that violence is now required anyway (not that I would condone it if it were) to overthrow capitalism, because I think capitalism will overthrow itself - probably with violence, even as it was, in truth, established with violence, subjugation and slavery - facts which modern-day capitalists are apt to forget - but when we're done with the oil wars, the food wars and then the water wars will be much worse.
Where did you get these numbers from? Can you give us a breakdown? And while you're at it maybe you could do a comparison with, say, European Capitalist expansionism - I reckon you might even beat the corrected combined total of fascism and communism by just taking into account the genocide of indigenous American peoples - probably at least 100 million deaths across North and South America. But hey, they were definitely not 'our' equals were they.
Asides from the fact you aren't even willing to acknowledge the acheivements of those Communist places (such as trends in improvements in health care and literacy), it is a fair to assessment to say that Communism has worked in a number of locations, and what is widely understood as Communism has been military/authoritarian control.
That's socialism, and it's not a right.
Well OK - in fairness then you must likewise google "deaths due to capitalism" and accept the first 2 or 3 hits as authoritative. Do it - it will open you eyes as long as you are not purposely screwing them tightly shut! Obviously though, such a crude metric doesn't really do justice - and doesn't capture the real cost of either militaristic despotic 'communism' or capitalist imperialistic 'democracy'. All 20th century versions of 'communism' have been completely immersed in and universally opposed by a predominantly capitalist world economy and at least some of the deaths that are (usually) counted as being caused by communism are actually a result of the combination of capitalist enforced embargoes and communist government bad management. If we are counting famine, then you have to put down about 21,000 deaths per day, mostly in countries whose economies are dominated by capitalism - that's 7.5 million a year so even if we give capitalism a clean slate today, it won't take long to catch up to the others.