Poll of the Day > Communist symbols as offensive as Nazi symbols?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Communist Nations killed way more people than the Nazis, shouldn't those symbols be technically more offensive?
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Nah, the Russians eventually helped us kick Hitler's ass so they get a free pass.
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Oops_All_Berrys posted...

Communist Nations killed way more people than the Nazis, shouldn't those symbols be technically more offensive?

They did, and in many cases they are seen as offensive, especially to those groups who suffered under communist rule.

That being said, the communists were generally more equal-opportunity-slaughterers where the Nazis opted to single out specific groups for butchery - specifically Jews, non-whites, the Romani, and gays (as well as leftists and intellectuals, if we're counting those imprisoned and killed for their opinions rather than for who they were). Accordingly, that's how their symbols are frequently used today - Nazi symbols are used by hate groups to rally for white supremacy, while Communist symbols are usually used to agitate (sometimes violently) for equality and economic change. Hence why communist symbols are generally more tolerated than Nazi iconography.
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Both are unamerican.
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communism good commence, orange man bad

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/A1ntnF3PJOL._CLa%7C2140,2000%7C711csE3FOSL.png%7C0,0,2140,2000+0.0,0.0,2140.0,2000.0._UX522_.png
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darkknight109 posted...

That being said, the communists were generally more equal-opportunity-slaughterers where the Nazis opted to single out specific groups for butchery - specifically Jews, non-whites, the Romani, and gays (as well as leftists and intellectuals, if we're counting those imprisoned and killed for their opinions rather than for who they were). Accordingly, that's how their symbols are frequently used today - Nazi symbols are used by hate groups to rally for white supremacy, while Communist symbols are usually used to agitate (sometimes violently) for equality and economic change. Hence why communist symbols are generally more tolerated than Nazi iconography.

Basically. Communism's association with genocide was a matter of the Soviet's practices, not the ideology itself. Nazism's association with genocide was entirely a matter of the ideology. As such, Communism's more acceptable as an ideology than Nazism, and their respective symbols follow suit.

_AdjI_ posted...

darkknight109 posted...

That being said, the communists were generally more equal-opportunity-slaughterers where the Nazis opted to single out specific groups for butchery - specifically Jews, non-whites, the Romani, and gays (as well as leftists and intellectuals, if we're counting those imprisoned and killed for their opinions rather than for who they were). Accordingly, that's how their symbols are frequently used today - Nazi symbols are used by hate groups to rally for white supremacy, while Communist symbols are usually used to agitate (sometimes violently) for equality and economic change. Hence why communist symbols are generally more tolerated than Nazi iconography.

Basically. Communism's association with genocide was a matter of the Soviet's practices, not the ideology itself. Nazism's association with genocide was entirely a matter of the ideology. As such, Communism's more acceptable as an ideology than Nazism, and their respective symbols follow suit.

There's a slippery slope here... because without the genocide, if that was kept wholly secret, people would still be praising the Nazis. Hilter was TIME's Man of the Year, they hosted an Olympics, they were one the strongest economies on the Earth.
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Oops_All_Berrys posted...

Communist Nations killed way more people than the Nazis, shouldn't those symbols be technically more offensive?

More offensive? Not exactly.

Nazi symbology exclusively symbolizes genocide and white supremacy.

Communist symbols are more unclear. They are offensive symbols, especially to people who escaped from communism. But they aren't specific symbols of hate.

An example of a difference here (from an american perspective) is someone with communist symbols is probably a dumb kid in high school in a rebellious phase using something offensive to get attention. Someone wearing swastikas goes into a black church and starts shooting.

The whole "Hitler killed more than Stalin" statistic always felt kind of weird to me because it usually only counts the Holocaust. Hitler's warmongering and the extremely militaristic ideology of Nazism was devastating, and I would argue far more ill intentioned than almost anything done by Communist nations.

We coexisted with Soviet Russia for nearly a century. We couldn't even make two decades with the Nazis. It would have been horrific if they'd been as long lasting as Soviet Russia or Red China.

I think one of the most horrifying statistics I heard is that prisoners of war kept in the Communist gulags for decades had a better survival rate than the Russians who had been kept prisoner in Nazi camps for just a couple years.
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Lokarin posted...

_AdjI_ posted...

darkknight109 posted...

That being said, the communists were generally more equal-opportunity-slaughterers where the Nazis opted to single out specific groups for butchery - specifically Jews, non-whites, the Romani, and gays (as well as leftists and intellectuals, if we're counting those imprisoned and killed for their opinions rather than for who they were). Accordingly, that's how their symbols are frequently used today - Nazi symbols are used by hate groups to rally for white supremacy, while Communist symbols are usually used to agitate (sometimes violently) for equality and economic change. Hence why communist symbols are generally more tolerated than Nazi iconography.

Basically. Communism's association with genocide was a matter of the Soviet's practices, not the ideology itself. Nazism's association with genocide was entirely a matter of the ideology. As such, Communism's more acceptable as an ideology than Nazism, and their respective symbols follow suit.

There's a slippery slope here... because without the genocide, if that was kept wholly secret, people would still be praising the Nazis. Hilter was TIME's Man of the Year, they hosted an Olympics, they were one the strongest economies on the Earth.

This is a bit of revisionist history hard at work. People like to say that Hitler's government was the one that lifted Germany out of its post-WW1 economic malaise, but that would more rightly be attributed to the governments that preceded him, particularly under Paul von Hindenburg.

Not to mention, Hitler was far from universally revered, even back before the atrocities he committed came to light. American conservatives loved him because he was seen as one of the most ardently anti-communist leaders in Europe. That said, even early on he was seen as a warmonger who played pretty fast-and-loose with human rights and had the nasty tendency to murder, attack, or otherwise intimidate any opposition to his rule (and even after killing off most of the opposition, he still hung around 40% in the polls, and never managed to secure an actual elected majority within the Reichstag).
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Communism by itself is widely viewed to be flawed and ineffective, but it isnt inherently evil

You cant say the same about Nazis and racial cleansing
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Meanwhile, Malaria is still killing a half million every year... which is good. Because it's down from a full million only 10 years ago

And it's fully preventable on the cheap, if anyone cared.
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Blighboy posted...

We coexisted with Soviet Russia for nearly a century. We couldn't even make two decades with the Nazis. It would have been horrific if they'd been as long lasting as Soviet Russia or Red China.

There are several reasons why America co-existed with the communists far longer than the Nazis, none of which have to do with their ideology or relative body counts:

1) Probably the biggest one is that there were no such thing as nuclear weapons when Hitler came to power, but when relations soured between the US and the USSR near the end of WW2, nuclear weapons were on the field and suddenly the whole game changed. MAD was a potent deterrent to open warfare (and even then, a few close calls tells us that even that almost wasn't enough).

2) The main antagonists against Nazi Germany were some of the US's closest allies (chiefly France and the British Commonwealth); by contrast, most of the countries that the USSR was fighting/conquering did not enjoy as close ties with the US, so there was less of an impetus to get involved (and the USA, pre-WW2 and even for a while afterwards before the Cold War really took off, were substantially more isolationist than the US of today).

3) The USSR was, simply, far, far more powerful than the Nazis ever were. I dislike saying that any one nation was the reason for victory/defeat, given the incredible scope and scale of the conflict, but if you were to award the honours, the USSR is probably the MVP of the Allied war effort during WW2. Consider that the Soviets had more dead than the Americans had soldiers and that the Eastern front - where the Soviets fought the Nazis almost unsupported - was larger than the other three theatres of the war combined. And despite their horrendous losses, the USSR not only emerged from the war strong, they had enough left in the tank to become one of the two global superpowers (where the other had basically had next to no damage on its own territory). Even disregarding the question of nukes on both sides, had the US ever seriously decided to fight the USSR, it's very much an open question of who would have been victorious in the end.
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Oops_All_Berrys posted...

Communist symbols as offensive as Nazi symbols?

Neither are in themselves offensive. It's people in which the offense lies.
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Lokarin posted...

Meanwhile, Malaria is still killing a half million every year... which is good. Because it's down from a full million only 10 years ago

And it's fully preventable on the cheap, if anyone cared.

Unpopular opinon: Diseases are a good thing for the future of humanity. The population needs to be controlled.
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darkknight109 posted...

There are several reasons why America co-existed with the communists far longer than the Nazis, none of which have to do with their ideology or relative body counts:

I think the invasion of western Europe was quite relevant actually.
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GanglyKhan posted...

Lokarin posted...

Meanwhile, Malaria is still killing a half million every year... which is good. Because it's down from a full million only 10 years ago

And it's fully preventable on the cheap, if anyone cared.

Unpopular opinon: Diseases are a good thing for the future of humanity. The population needs to be controlled.

This has been bandied about as an excuse for literally centuries and it has never once been proven accurate.

Every time some major disease gets cured, we don't suddenly enter into an age of famine and extreme poverty - life, as it turns out, continues to get better. Which, really, makes sense when you think about it (people don't have "extra children" just in case they lose a couple to disease).

Saying diseases are good smacks of "I've got mine" selfishness. After all, everyone who is in favour of population control intrinsically assumes that they're not part of the population that's going to be culled as a result.
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Blighboy posted...

darkknight109 posted...

There are several reasons why America co-existed with the communists far longer than the Nazis, none of which have to do with their ideology or relative body counts:

I think the invasion of western Europe was quite relevant actually.

You mean the thing I listed as my second reason?
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darkknight109 posted...

Saying diseases are good smacks of "I've got mine" selfishness. After all, everyone who is in favour of population control intrinsically assumes that they're not part of the population that's going to be culled as a result.

Nah, man, I would gladly see to the world taking a trip on Ebola'a Wild Ride even though that means I too, would be at risk.

Humankind is too ignorant and short-sighted to prolong itself. There's an extremely high chance that we will be our own downfall because we weren't matured enough as a collective race to develop a way of ensuring our future, outside of natural disasters and the like.

I would rather have 33% of the population get wiped out now than 100% later. I would legitimately be okay with dying if it meant that. My life is short in comparison to human history whether I live to be 40 or 100. At least being part of the statistic that keeps us alive for a while longer is a death worth serving.
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GanglyKhan posted...

I would rather have 33% of the population get wiped out now than 100% later.

purple man good
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Wiping out half the population would mean things would be exactly the same but the lines at Disney world would be half as long, worth it.
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darkknight109 posted...

You mean the thing I listed as my second reason?

Militaristic expansion was a key component of Nazi ideology. Expansion was not a component of Communist ideology post-Lenin.

Russia acted in a manner to avoid direct conflict at all costs, mostly out of self interest, and sought to create a wall of buffer states between themselves and the West. The Nazi regime consistently glorified the idea of a conflict that was arguably unwinnable from the start.

I don't think it's fair to completely divorce the ideologies from what actually occurred. I think of the two only one could be reasoned with (and eventually was).
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binoculars

They should be, really. It's a symbol of cruelty and oppression that just survived so well because of propaganda during WWII more than anything. Stalin was arguably a worse person than Hitler, but it's semantics. I'm willing to bet parts of Eastern Europe have worse memories of the hammer & sickle than the swastika.
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the guy who shot franz ferdinand got out of jail once he became an adult
Stalin stole everyones grain, tried to trade it with the allies for machines, they wouldn't take anything other than gold, so that started a famine in ukraine

people when they talked about communism the secret police would come after you if you talked about it too intellectually, they preferred you talked about it as if it's one of the arms of the state or how it's good for the people.

Zareth posted...

Nah, the Russians eventually helped us kick Hitler's ass so they get a free pass.

They were both evil. We were simply forced to side with one of them.

Don't forget the threat of nuclear war, as well as Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

TheWorstPoster posted...

Zareth posted...

Nah, the Russians eventually helped us kick Hitler's ass so they get a free pass.

They were both evil. We were simply forced to side with one of them.

Don't forget the threat of nuclear war, as well as Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

Too bad we are the threat in all of those wars. You high?

TheWorstPoster posted...

Zareth posted...

Nah, the Russians eventually helped us kick Hitler's ass so they get a free pass.

They were both evil. We were simply forced to side with one of them.

Don't forget the threat of nuclear war, as well as Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

Wasn't the Vietnam war an independence war from France?

_AdjI_ posted...

darkknight109 posted...

That being said, the communists were generally more equal-opportunity-slaughterers where the Nazis opted to single out specific groups for butchery - specifically Jews, non-whites, the Romani, and gays (as well as leftists and intellectuals, if we're counting those imprisoned and killed for their opinions rather than for who they were). Accordingly, that's how their symbols are frequently used today - Nazi symbols are used by hate groups to rally for white supremacy, while Communist symbols are usually used to agitate (sometimes violently) for equality and economic change. Hence why communist symbols are generally more tolerated than Nazi iconography.

Basically. Communism's association with genocide was a matter of the Soviet's practices, not the ideology itself. Nazism's association with genocide was entirely a matter of the ideology. As such, Communism's more acceptable as an ideology than Nazism, and their respective symbols follow suit.

communism targets a group, it's just not (necessarily) a racial group, it's whoever is determined to have "power". in Soviet Russia it was the Kulaks (rich farmers).

maybe you could say that the communists had a relatively small genocide that just happened to directly lead to astronomical death rates due to famine (which is what happens when you slaughter all of the most competent farmers in the country), whereas the nazis had a significantly larger genocide. then I suppose the nazis were technically worse, but that's not saying much.
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BlackScythe0 posted...

Oops_All_Berrys posted...

Communist Nations killed way more people than the Nazis, shouldn't those symbols be technically more offensive?

More offensive? Not exactly.

Nazi symbology exclusively symbolizes genocide and white supremacy.

Communist symbols are more unclear. They are offensive symbols, especially to people who escaped from communism. But they aren't specific symbols of hate.

An example of a difference here (from an american perspective) is someone with communist symbols is probably a dumb kid in high school in a rebellious phase using something offensive to get attention. Someone wearing swastikas goes into a black church and starts shooting.

Plenty of highschool kids vandalized shit with swastikas just to be edgy. Teens do dumb shit I wouldn't use them for your example. Me personally I rocked the anarchy logo and drew it alot as a teen. Now that I'm grown and matured some I realize the most likely scenario anarchy would lead to would be shitty and a horrible life. (Though one I'd still rather take then live under a truly oppressive government)
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https://goo.gl/images/C9vCqL

Rabble, rabble, something something Horseshoe Theory, rabble rabble.
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darkknight109 posted...

Every time some major disease gets cured, we don't suddenly enter into an age of famine and extreme poverty - life, as it turns out, continues to get better. Which, really, makes sense when you think about it (people don't have "extra children" just in case they lose a couple to disease).

This runs counter to the rest of the paragraph. People do have more children when there's a higher mortality rate, that's why birth rates drop in healthy countries.
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Kyuubi4269 posted...

darkknight109 posted...

Every time some major disease gets cured, we don't suddenly enter into an age of famine and extreme poverty - life, as it turns out, continues to get better. Which, really, makes sense when you think about it (people don't have "extra children" just in case they lose a couple to disease).

This runs counter to the rest of the paragraph. People do have more children when there's a higher mortality rate, that's why birth rates drop in healthy countries.

And they surge in countries post-war.
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Oops_All_Berrys posted...

Communist Nations killed way more people than the Nazis

Fun fact: Mao is accused of killing 40 million people who never existed in the first place. An anti-communist historian by the name of Yang Jisheng estmiated that there should have been 40 million more people born in China during Mao's reign than actually were born, and Jisheng counted this alleged loss of projected population growth as "deaths."

Wikipedia

Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng concluded there were 36 million deaths due to starvation [during the Great Chinese Famine], while another 40 million others failed to be born, so that "China's total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
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Blighboy posted...

The whole "Hitler killed more than Stalin" statistic always felt kind of weird to me because it usually only counts the Holocaust. Hitler's warmongering and the extremely militaristic ideology of Nazism was devastating, and I would argue far more ill intentioned than almost anything done by Communist nations.

21 million Russians died defending the USSR from Nazi invasion. I wonder why nobody ever attributes those deaths to Hitler?
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Kyuubi4269 posted...

darkknight109 posted...

Every time some major disease gets cured, we don't suddenly enter into an age of famine and extreme poverty - life, as it turns out, continues to get better. Which, really, makes sense when you think about it (people don't have "extra children" just in case they lose a couple to disease).

This runs counter to the rest of the paragraph. People do have more children when there's a higher mortality rate, that's why birth rates drop in healthy countries.

And they surge in countries post-war.

It's like they're replacing the lost population from a high mortality rate.
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GanglyKhan posted...

I would rather have 33% of the population get wiped out now than 100% later.

100% of the population isn't going to be wiped out by overpopulation. That's not remotely how overpopulation works. Overpopulation just raises the stakes as far as competition for resources go, meaning people end up dying if they can't compete. Those who compete successfully will see a reduction in quality of life, but they won't die.

Of course, even considering this ignores that human overpopulation just isn't a major risk. Most developed countries actually have negative population growth if you discount immigration. That's a consequence of a number of factors, including lower infant mortality (don't need to have as many kids if the first 1-2 are more or less guaranteed to survive), women being able to work (since they aren't expected to spend their reproductive years pumping out babies and subsequently trying to keep 20 of them alive), and diversification in available work (so children can choose different professions from their parents, diminishing the "carrying on my legacy" motivation). It's easy to be scared by looking at some developing countries' birth rates and wondering what's going to happen if their death rates drop, but what's going to happen is a relatively brief surge in population growth before birth rates drop to be closer to death rates and you end up with sustainable growth.

Quite simply, the world is not going to end if malaria is eradicated, nor any other major diseases. Not even close.

Sahuagin posted...

communism targets a group, it's just not (necessarily) a racial group, it's whoever is determined to have "power". in Soviet Russia it was the Kulaks (rich farmers).

Communism itself is just a financial theory. While that theory does promote animosity between the working and upper classes, any application of it to support attacking a group of people is separate from the theory itself, and is instead a matter of somebody manipulating that animosity (which, in all honesty, is going to be there regardless of whether or not communism spells it out explicitly). That's very different from an ideology that explicitly identifies certain groups as being inferior and in need of eradication for the advancement of a master race.

_AdjI_ posted...

Communism itself is just a financial theory.

it's more than just theory since there are *instances of it*. it's only just theory if you want to sweep the real thing under the carpet.
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ComradeSeraphim posted...

Blighboy posted...

The whole "Hitler killed more than Stalin" statistic always felt kind of weird to me because it usually only counts the Holocaust. Hitler's warmongering and the extremely militaristic ideology of Nazism was devastating, and I would argue far more ill intentioned than almost anything done by Communist nations.

21 million Russians died defending the USSR from Nazi invasion. I wonder why nobody ever attributes those deaths to Hitler?

because statlin put a gun to their back

that's like saying why doesn't anyone ever attribute 2 million deaths to lbj and nixon or 50 - 150k to bush.

Zareth posted...

Nah, the Russians eventually helped us kick Hitler's ass so they get a free pass.

No Stalin and his regime do not get a free pass because they were the enemy of our enemies, come on, man.

RoboXgp89 posted...

ComradeSeraphim posted...

Blighboy posted...

The whole "Hitler killed more than Stalin" statistic always felt kind of weird to me because it usually only counts the Holocaust. Hitler's warmongering and the extremely militaristic ideology of Nazism was devastating, and I would argue far more ill intentioned than almost anything done by Communist nations.

21 million Russians died defending the USSR from Nazi invasion. I wonder why nobody ever attributes those deaths to Hitler?

because statlin put a gun to their back

that's like saying why doesn't anyone ever attribute 2 million deaths to lbj and nixon or 50 - 150k to bush.

Draft wasn't a thing with bush so that's kinda different. Nobody was forced to join the military.
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Sahuagin posted...

_AdjI_ posted...

Communism itself is just a financial theory.

it's more than just theory since there are *instances of it*.

No, there are (arguably) implementations of it.

Also, state capitalism is not communism.
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antifa supersoldiers are killing 40 million people every SECOND
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RoboXgp89 posted...

ComradeSeraphim posted...

21 million Russians died defending the USSR from Nazi invasion. I wonder why nobody ever attributes those deaths to Hitler?

because statlin put a gun to their back

that's like saying why doesn't anyone ever attribute 2 million deaths to lbj and nixon or 50 - 150k to bush.

You really think the only reason that the Russian people fought to defend their homeland from a Nazi invasion was because Stalin forced them to do it? Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, it's more likely that they were genuinely motivated by a patriotic desire to defend their homeland from a military invasion by a foreign army, and Stalin didn't have to use any kind of special force to motivate them?

Also, I regularly see radical leftists hold American Presidents accountable for the people who were killed during their time in office.
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ComradeSeraphim posted...

RoboXgp89 posted...

ComradeSeraphim posted...

21 million Russians died defending the USSR from Nazi invasion. I wonder why nobody ever attributes those deaths to Hitler?

because statlin put a gun to their back

that's like saying why doesn't anyone ever attribute 2 million deaths to lbj and nixon or 50 - 150k to bush.

You really think the only reason that the Russian people fought to defend their homeland from a Nazi invasion was because Stalin forced them to do it? Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, it's more likely that they were genuinely motivated by a patriotic desire to defend their homeland from a military invasion by a foreign army, and Stalin didn't have to use any kind of special force to motivate them?

Also, I regularly see radical leftists hold American Presidents accountable for the people who were killed during their time in office.

I'll go one further down this rabbit hole with you. After Napoleon and Hitler invading them to the St. Petersburg line twice, the main reason the USSR was so heavily invested in the Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War because they decided "never again". After Stalin salted the earth literally on the retreat, I'm damned sure Russian has dead man switches on their nukes same as us.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

I'm damned sure Russia has dead man switches on their nukes same as us.

Just did a quick google search and it looks like yep, they do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment_of_Strategic_Air_Command#Special_Weapons_Emergency_Separation_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
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dainkinkaide posted...

Also, state capitalism is not communism.

Production in the USSR was geared toward producing for government quotas, rather than consumer demand. Therefore, it's arguable that it wasn't capitalism.
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dainkinkaide posted...

Also, state capitalism is not communism.

Good thing state capitalism is a poorly constructed propagandist term designed to shield the many failures of communism while inappropriately placing the blame at capitalism's feet.

Capitalism has a lot of problems, but you're really not doing alternative economic systems any favors by blatantly lying about their problems.

CaptainData posted...

dainkinkaide posted...

Also, state capitalism is not communism.

Good thing state capitalism is a poorly constructed propagandist term designed to shield the many failures of communism while inappropriately placing the blame at capitalism's feet.

Someone should tell that to Lenin's ghost, because Lenin believed that state capitalism was an important intermediate step towards pure socialism.

But even if we call it "state socialism", which some may consider a more accurate description (but certainly not Wilhelm Liebknecht), it's still not communism.
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Poland likes neither nazism nor communism
a lot of eastern bloc countries actually welcomed the Nazi's at first

Stalin through his people into a meat grinder with no support. That has nothing to do with the 1-3 million that starved in Ukraine, the 5 million white russians that died because of the communist, all of the people who had to give up their stuff, all the beatings, the gulags.

Stalins war was just as long and terrifying as Hitlers. Had Hitler taken over he would've torn up the Russian census, no one would have known a thing. Same with Stalin, Stalin actually deported all of the jews years earlier to a town on the border of Mongolia, it started with a D.