[ExI] communism/authoritarianism

[Anton Sherwood]

(Wow, was it really only yesterday?
  I feel like I've put off this reply for a week.)

> On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 3:22 PM William Flynn Wallace wrote:
>> Today a column by Walter Williams, a conservative economist I
>> follow, features the total deaths of people under communism.  Truly
>> horrible.
>>
>> However, I got to looking at the countries involved and wondered if
>> you also factored in the deaths under authoritarian but not
>> communist governments, like the Nazis, if communism would not come
>> up with communism as the main culprit, but authoritarian
>> governments.  [...]

I saw an interesting claim once: that the USSR punished officers who 
refused to carry out "atrocities" but Germany did not.

(I think this was in one of the essays in a collection published by the 
Future of Freedom Foundation, «The Failure of America's Foreign Wars».)

("Atrocities" was the word used by that writer; is there a difference 
between "atrocities" and "war crimes"?)


On 2020-9-17 10:17, Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote:
> Were those governments really communist though? I mean I would
> state socialist and from an economics perspective it's centralized
> planning that's their key feature. I feel it's a misnomer to call
> them communist, though at this point it's kind of like trying to
> rescue the term 'liberal.'  [...]

Fine, but we can still contrast tyrants who TOTALLY ILLEGITIMATELY call 
themselves Communists with those who don't.

-- 
*\\*  Anton Sherwood  *\\*  www.bendwavy.org