[ExI] communism/authoritarianism

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 6:53 PM Anton Sherwood <bronto at pobox.com> wrote:
> (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"?)

My understanding is that many of the atrocities carried out by the
Soviets were legal processes. For instance, the Katyn Massacre was, to
my knowledge, carried out with a specific process and the Soviet
officials doing the butchering were legally sanctioned. But the Nazis,
on the whole, tended to cover this up and usually stuff was done with
a wink and a nod. This is why you don't have much in the way of
official documents, especially from the topmost folks including Hitler
ordering this or that. (Hitler was also famous for getting his
underlings to do the stuff without his express sanction -- so he could
explain away failures, it seems.)

> 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.

Of course.

Regards,

Dan
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