Miami has a large community of people who risked their lives and abandoned everything to flee Cuba to go hang out with the capitalist pigdogs in the USA. Their hospitality toward communist revolutionaries would be somewhat chillier than what you'd receive on a northeastern college campus. It's unlikely this would extend to violence, but you might get some remarks.
The rabid anti-communism of Cuban diaspora in FL is so extreme it's driven them right into the GOP's arms for their votes; the amazing thing is how they've done it despite the racism just-below-the-surface there.
I don't know why leftists act confused about why they are so hated throughout the world. They are blatant about it in so much of their behavior and pretend like they're proverbially morally and intellectually superior in every single way. It's like they're never falsifiable, and if they are its because everyone else in the world is stupid in comparison.
Then there comes the persecution complex. The horror.
I think you should perhaps consider this as a data point that indicates either a) the racism you think is there isn't actually, or b) it's not as strong as you seem to believe.
Well, here in Brazil I met once a Cuban which was traveling and was a undergraduated student who wanted to vecame a filmmaker. Here we do not have the same incentives that attract dissidents nor we offer incentives in the form of citizenship for people who risk their lives in improvised boats (if US offered the same incentive for other latin american countries, lots of people in other countries would also build improvised boats and risk their lives like the Cubans do). We talked a lot about movies.Regarding Cuba and its government, his oppinion was mostly positive, with only some criticisms. And, oh, he was an alive person.
It's possible a lot of people would like to leave but can't. Also, some people would like to return, missing the cultural aspects of the country they left behind or their families, but can't because they're unable to sustain themselves there, they need to continue helping their families economically and depend on the higher wages of where they're residing, or they're afraid because it's dangerous.
Any number of things may be true. But one cannot sensibly infer those things from this sample of people that is very far from being a random sample, but is actually a heavily selected sample. If you're really interested in the state of things "back home", don't seek out a group of people who are very likely to be slanted toward having a particular view (whether that view be positive or negative), and when they express that view conclude that all must have that view. All may have that view, but to conclude that it is actually the case, based on such terrible evidence, is totally absurd!
I'll grant you that it's not a random sample and that there will be some skewness in opinions. But ignoring the wider context of the journey that these people must have made, and considering the nature of totalitarian governments, it seems to me that you're taking an obtuse position.
It seems that you have come to agree with me, but haven't realised it yet! You're saying that we must look at more than just the skewed sample, and that's exactly my point.
I don't think that's correct. The point is you can't just dismiss based on selection bias.
You could say that the survivors of the Titanic didn't want to drown, sure, but you're selecting for the people who survived. The people who all drowned might have wanted to!
I.e. there's a balance. People basically always migrating in one direction must tell you something other than "those exact people just wanted to".
I'm a different person. But the previous person said "yes it is a skewed sample, but the sample is still useful information" and you said "exactly - we should look outside the sample for information".
> One should also be aware of the massive selection bias in views you're going to hear.
And I presume that you feel the ones who died trying to escape would have a different opinion of communism than the ones who lived to produce your selection bias?
> "for many other people he represents a depostic regime that routinely violates human rights"
"The Democratic People's Republic of Murderistan is a human rights violating hellhole, so that's what you want whenever you say you support Democracy. There is no selection bias from people from there because they should know what Democracy is if anyone does".
> "The Democratic People's Republic of Murderistan is a human rights violating hellhole, so that's what you want whenever you say you support Democracy. There is no selection bias from people from there because they should know what Democracy is if anyone does".
I think the difference is that we have more than one example of masses of people fleeing to democracies, even if they have to do so illegally, while there are no examples of masses of people fleeing to communist countries.
It's pretty obvious what the non-armchair citizens of various governing styles prefer, and what they don't.
Show me the countries (ok, even one country) in the world where people are happy that they are/were under communism. In other words, it's not selection bias when everybody holds more or less the same opinion.
Anyway, you're being illogical. A flawed argument will remain just as flawed when it is used to reach a true conclusion as when it is used to reach a false conclusion.
If you want to prove me wrong, show that it is sensible to infer from the fact that an extremely selected-for sample has some property that the entire population has that same property - and do so without appealing to a bigger picture. Because if you were to claim that appealing to a bigger picture is necessary, you would be making the selfsame claim that I am making.
You seem to be focusing on something quite beside the point. Anyway.
Under communism, China went from being "the sick man of Asia" to the most economically successful and politically powerful country in Asia, no?
It's the greatest single power on Earth other than the USA, no?
But perhaps under a capitalist regime China might have had even greater success?
Well, let us see:
How does one compare the stumbles of early Communist China to the consistent failure of capitalist India? Which path would you have preferred for your country?
China only started to succeed once Deng Xiaoping abandoned Marxist/Maoist theories of planned economy and embraced globalism in the 80's. The Chinese discovered they could game the globalist "free market" with low cost of labor, a weak currency, state-directed manipulation (dumping, etc.), and widespread IP theft. China's success in recent decades proves nothing about the virtue of Communism; the success would have not have happened without an pre-existing global capitalist order to parasitize. China's behavior has more in common with monopolist companies like Amazon than it does with Marx.
Didn't they start to succeed immediately with Mao (mass education, elimination of war-lords, expelling of foreign powers, etc.), and aren't the further successes you mention only possible due to Mao's achievements?
"Expelling of foreign powers" (i.e. Japan) happened due to WWII ending and China being allied with the winning side.
As for the others, these are modernization/consolidation of power which don't require Marxism to happen. Whether the KMT or someone else could have achieved these without a "Great Leap Forward" (30~45 million dead) is another question, but I think the answer is "probably".
> Under communism, China went from being "the sick man of Asia" to the most economically successful and politically powerful country in Asia, no?
I don't believe that's true, no. China does have a lot of natural resources, and a large population, and also it's true that any very authoritarian regime, fascist Italy under Mussolini being another good example, can do things like create good infrastructure, because it can have long-term bets. That is an accelerator for long-term economic growth. But the actual economic growth has come from China allowing capitalist economic systems to develop, where the people doing the work or risking the cash make decisions. Of course, Communism dies hard, and so if you say the wrong thing you can be "reminded" that the Party is all-powerful[0], but China has done well to allow individual people create value, evidenced by its economic growth.
OK, so, by Communist China you meant China after Mao took power but before capitalist economic systems developed.
Everything that has happened in China is possible only because of the victories of communism. From a non-existent school system (Mao managed to attend school because his father was the wealthiest in his village, but the schooling was nothing but rote memorisation of poems) to a well-educated population. From a nation controlled by war-lords to a nation controlled by the CCP. From a nation occupied by various foreign powers to a nation controlled by its own people, capable of controlling its borders. These were not the achievements of capitalism.
China had authoritarians before communism. Many countries has authoritarian leaders contemporaneous to Mao but achieved nothing. Mao's successes were not what "any" authoritarian could have achieved. It needed to be an authority with faith in the masses of its people, and an authority altruistic enough to put aside its own immediate interests for the good of the people. Fascism shares some of these qualities, but the fascists were expansionist, impatient, etc. Fascism lost, Mao won.
> Fascism shares some of these qualities, but the fascists were expansionist, impatient, etc
Well; fascism (or Nazism, maybe?) was socialistic ideas but on national boundaries rather than class boundaries. Hitler (mostly) wanted to kill non-Germans. Communist uprisings tend to kill their own citizens, and nonsensical edicts from hyper-powerful beaurocrats tend to starve same.
I don't want to defend Mao/Stalin, fuck em both, but: If you're counting deaths by starvation under a communist regime as "death by communism", then you have to count deaths by starvation under capitalism as "death by capitalism". Poverty kills a whooooole lot of people, and the current system is broken specifically because the billionaires who benefit are specifically blocking any attempts to fix the system - like oil lobbyists who prevent climate action. We could have ended world poverty in the 1980s, we had the resources and it would have been overall profitable for the world economy. We can't afford to not end world poverty.
Of course, communism is a system where the workers have control over their workplace, and by "the workers" I mean "random government bureaucrats that supposedly represent the workers", and by "have control" I mean "they have their choice of vote in the single-party election for the government that appoints said bureaucrats".
> If you're counting deaths by starvation under a communist regime as "death by communism", then you have to count deaths by starvation under capitalism as "death by capitalism".
No you don't. It's not all starvation deaths. Mao deliberately - through the insane power Communism bestows on the state - told farmers what to farm and how to farm, and punshed harshly those who disobeyed. And because they obeyed, and only a child who still thinks their parents know everything would think the state (parent-surrogate to many Communists) knows more about farming than farmers, millions starved. Even worse in some ways (while it's stupid to trust the state with farming techniques, it was at least trying to make farming better) - the Soviet Union imposed harsh quotas on Ukraine, causing the death of 3.5-5m people in the Holodomor.
This is what you should expect when you give your "bureaucrats that supposedly represent the workers" all the power, trusting that they can do all the hard and expert work in allocating resources both extremely well, and without any human failings such as corruption or violence.
Markets aren't perfect at resource allocation, but they are very very good at it. Replacing the experts at it whose livelihoods depend on doing it very well, with bureaucrats who know nothing about it, and whose livelihoods are guaranteed either way, and who might get disappeared if they displease their superiors' whims, seems impossibly naive on the face of it.
So you agree to put the bigger death toll of Chinese famine from 1850 to 1873 in "death by capitalism"? It was the capitalist powers that caused this destroying the country infrastructure after a war because such powers wanted to open markets in the country and were even sponsoring drug trafficking for this end.
Yes, they were byproducts of capitalism development: England wanted to expand markets and profits. China was a barrier. This caused a war and the devastation of that country. The rebellions were a byproduct.
To be fair, China always had great famines, at least twice each century. This changed only recently, which in fact is a good argument pro-revolution: after one last famine, it never happened again. The same cannot be said for other countries that were colonized or invaded by capitalist powers; and the famine and problems caused by them during XIX century in China were much worst than the famine after the revolution.
You may be confusing the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864, 20-30M dead) with the Boxer Rebellion (1899, 100,000 dead)?
The Taiping Rebellion was a civil war between the Taiping (ethnic Hakka, Han subgroup) and Qing dynasty (ethnic Manchu). While yes British opium was a destabilizing factor, so was rampant Qing corruption, religious/ethnic zealotry, etc. China had constant wars for millennia, and this war coincided with the invention of modern guns and artillery while still using pre-modern tactics, which (like the American Civil War) made it especially deadly. Its disingenuous to pin an internal and ill-timed conflict on "capitalism".
