Opinion of Ho Chi Minh

[SWE]

anti-communist garbage

There's no such thing.

Reagan, and Thatcher were amazing leaders

The point being, as long as Superman thinks that at least one of those people is garbage, his point makes no sense.

They're either great or communists themselves as far as I'm concerned.

<inset Bender "Oh wait you're serious" video>

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

anti-communist garbage

There's no such thing.

Reagan, and Thatcher were amazing leaders

The point being, as long as Superman thinks that at least one of those people is garbage, his point makes no sense.

They're either great or communists themselves as far as I'm concerned. I mean, it's not like communists have ever fought one another, right?

We don't talk about Trotsky.

So, err, Hitler and Franco were greats?

[Goldwater]

anti-communist garbage

There's no such thing.

Reagan, and Thatcher were amazing leaders

The point being, as long as Superman thinks that at least one of those people is garbage, his point makes no sense.

They're either great or communists themselves as far as I'm concerned. I mean, it's not like communists have ever fought one another, right?

We don't talk about Trotsky.

So, err, Hitler and Franco were greats?

I think he's calling them communists. He probably takes the (highly questionable, to say least) view that fascism is a type of communism.

[TNF]

anti-communist garbage

There's no such thing.

Reagan, and Thatcher were amazing leaders

The point being, as long as Superman thinks that at least one of those people is garbage, his point makes no sense.

They're either great or communists themselves as far as I'm concerned. I mean, it's not like communists have ever fought one another, right?

We don't talk about Trotsky.

So if Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc, etc. were actually communists, wouldn't it be easier for them to gain power, oh, I don't know, as members of the respective communist parties that existed in the countries they took power in? Also, I would think that being a communist and sending hundreds of thousands of self-described communists to concentration camps and/or murdering them would be pretty bad form in terms of being a communist, wouldn't you agree? And this doesn't even begin to address the fact that the Nazi Party and other fascist groups were funded by industrialists (a group of people who definitely have an interest in communists not coming to power, so it would be bizarre for them to fund communist groups, don't you think?), and that upon coming to power the Nazis returned nationalized industry to private control (!!!!).

But don't let the facts get in the way of your masturbatory libertarian fantasy. The truth is that for anti-communists, no measures go too far and nothing should be held back, lest the commies win. Whether you'd like to admit it or not, the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of people is not alien to anti-communism. In fact, it's a fairly systematic component of it, given that any brief 'Red Terror' pales in comparison to what follows, as the example of the Paris Commune illustrates fairly vividly.

[H. Ross Peron]

@TNF: Was that Lech Walesa with Hitler and co. in your post?

[TNF]

@TNF: Was that Lech Walesa with Hitler and co. in your post?

Yep. He was the front-man for the AFL-CIO bureaucracy/CIA/Catholic Church/Wall Street backed counterrevolution in Poland, after all.

Arthur Scargill was completely correct in calling 'Solidarity' anti-socialist.

[Clark Kent]

anti-communist garbage

There's no such thing.

Reagan, and Thatcher were amazing leaders

The point being, as long as Superman thinks that at least one of those people is garbage, his point makes no sense.

They're either great or communists themselves as far as I'm concerned. I mean, it's not like communists have ever fought one another, right?

We don't talk about Trotsky.

So, err, Hitler and Franco were greats?

I think he's calling them communists. He probably takes the (highly questionable, to say least) view that fascism is a type of communism.

What does the following look like to you?


Universal suffrage with a lowered voting age to 18 years, and voting and electoral office eligibility for all age 25 and up
Proportional representation on a regional basis
Voting for women
Representation at government level of newly created national councils by economic sector
The abolition of the Senate
The formation of a national council of experts for labor, for industry, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made of professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a general commission with ministerial powers.

The quick enactment of a law of the state that sanctions an eight-hour workday for all workers
A minimum wage
The participation of workers' representatives in the functions of industry commissions
To show the same confidence in the labor unions (that prove to be technically and morally worthy) as is given to industry executives or public servants
Reorganization of the railways and the transport sector
Revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance
Reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55.


Creation of a short-service national militia with specifically defensive responsibilities
Armaments factories are to be nationalized
A peaceful but competitive foreign policy.

A strong progressive tax on capital (envisaging a “partial expropriation” of concentrated wealth)
The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor
Revision of all contracts for military provisions;
The revision of all military contracts and the seizure of 85 percent of the profits therein.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Look, the entire schtick of fascism was that it wasn't communism, you mug.

[Clark Kent]

Look, the entire schtick of fascism was that it wasn't communism, you mug.

"We're not communists, we're just exactly like them in every single way!"

[tpfkaw]

The whole point of Croats is they aren't Serbs; the whole point of Serbs is they aren't Croats. An outside observer might look at Serbs and Croats and wonder "what's the diff?"

[SUSAN CRUSHBONE]

how does someone look at communism, with its overriding tenet of "everyone should be equal", and fascism, with its overriding tenet of "master race blah prune away the undesirables blah blah blah", and decide that yep, those are totally the same thing

like just how

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Look, the entire schtick of fascism was that it wasn't communism, you mug.

"We're not communists, we're just exactly like them in every single way!"

At the time, there was a very real risk many liberal democracies were going to collapse into communism. Fascism was entirely fashioned by the right-wing elites as a replacement for liberal capitalism that had clearly failed to deal with the communist menace in a real way.

There's a reason the backers of, say, Franco were the churches, the landowners, the army and the industrialists. And no, it's not because they were closet commies ...

[tpfkaw]

You can look at intentions or you can look at results.

In terms of results the two ideologies are pretty comparable. Actually, communism has a far worse track record if we use the lefty definition of fascism* (Franco's a fascist, Pinochet's a fascist, Perón and Huey Long definitely aren't fascists, Nixon's a fascist, Bush's a fascist, David Cameron's a fascist, Scott Walker's a fascist, Merkel's a fascist). Or also, if we use the lefty definition of communism to define fascism (only people who actually called themselves capital-F Fascists are fascists), then fascism (which came to power only in Italy and the territories it colonized or occupied) was still comparatively quite mild.

*As seen in this very thread's photo-montage.

But I actually agree that in terms of political typology it's better to look at intentions and social networks. I'm just being an annoying devil's advocate. The Jonah Goldberg thesis is more suited to political polemic than an intelligent understanding of history. (But is essential for an intelligent understanding of policy, foreign or domestic). And of course to suggest that fascists literally were communists is asinine.

There's a reason the backers of, say, Franco were the churches, the landowners, the army and the industrialists. And no, it's not because they were closet commies ...

Of course, one can flip this on its head and ask why Stalin expended so much blood and treasure on behalf of the Republican side. Is it because he was a liberal democrat?

(It's obvious why those people, and Stalin, took the sides they did - for the former it was Franco or death, for the latter it was the possibility of gaining a coreligionist in the dogma of murdering priests, landowners, officers and industrialists. It's incontrovertible historical fact that the Spanish Red Terror began while Franco was still in Morocco...)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A far more damning critique of Communism can be constructed by taking seriously the beliefs of those responsible for it and by observing what they did to try to bring about the culmination of History than by tarring it with the Fascism brush. Equally it is hard to adequately express the peculiarly repulsive nature of Fascism if you claim that it was just like all the other unpleasant forms of government around at the time.

[The Last Northerner]

To get back on topic. He gets props for help bringing an end to colonialism worldwide but still a HP.

I'm against the US' intervention in the Vietnamese Civil War more than anyone here and thinks LBJ should have been hung but lets not kid ourselves into believing he was a nice guy. He might have said he was a nationalist first and commie second but he was a founding member of the French Communist Party. During WW2, the Viet Minh (which was little more than front for the Indochinese Communist Party) probably spent as much time spreading propoganda and fighting rival movements, including Trotskyists, as much as they did  the Japanese. His proclaimation that 'all men are created equal' certainly did not match his rule. Ho was less bloody than his fellow Reds but there were still purges, gulags, Red Terror, and the whole package. A million or so people didn't leave northern Viet Nam in 54/55 for fun.

That being said, less civilians died in northern Viet Nam during his entire rule than four years of Japanese occupation.