Walter Williams- excused horrors

[SapereAude]

http://economics.gmu.edu/wew/articles.html

The link to this article on the page does not currently work but they usually get it fixed quickly.

Also, it is posted on the Atlasphere.

Questioning why Americans condemn the Nazis while excusing leaders like Stalin, Che & Mao.

[SapereAude]

..and here we have a fully functional link

http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/09111...sed-horrors.php

[Maarten]

The really interesting thing is that Nazism is also just another form of socialism. There really is not much of an essential difference in the social aims and whatnot that were espoused by the Nazis as compared to Communists, for example. I guess the Commies didn't discriminate against one minority group in particular and treated everyone equally horribly, and that makes it better? =)

[D'kian]

The really interesting thing is that Nazism is also just another form of socialism. There really is not much of an essential difference in the social aims and whatnot that were espoused by the Nazis as compared to Communists, for example. I guess the Commies didn't discriminate against one minority group in particular and treated everyone equally horribly, and that makes it better? =)

Not quite. The USSR did discriminate against a minority group, but one detested by the left wing. Surely you can figure it out.

But there are some differences. None justifies overlooking the crimes comitted by the USSR and Red China, but they are worth noting in order to see how small the differences are:

1) Neither the USSR nor Red China sought to expand their territory nor their sphere of influence by waging total war against their neighbors. Instead they fomented, aided and financed "revolutionary" and terrorist groups all over the world.

2) Neither of them tried to wipe out a race of people (two races, actually, as Gipsies were also persecuted by the Nazis). They did try to wipe out a class of people: those who thought independently of the state.

3) They didn't set up extermination camps. Instead they set up work camps that slowly killed people by malnutrition while extracting every last ounce of labor they could out of them.

4) While the USSR didn't wage open warfare in order to expand, it did use the war against Nazi Germany to expand its sphere of influence, essentially subjugating half of Europe once the war was over.

The real question, though, is why haven't other people tried to make well known the crimes committed by Communist nations. To be sure some people ahve tired. There are books by survivors of the Gulags, for example, and Reagan did rightly call the USSr an evil empire.

But you want to hear something really disturbing? I know a few younger people who think the Berlin Wall was set up by East Germany in order to keep West Berliners out of their fairy tale city <shudder>

[Scott_Connery]

WWII started when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. They also gobbled up many countries that were not at all eager to be gobbled up on their march to Berlin.

[Steve D'Ippolito]

As long as we are piling on.... don't forget that at the same time the Soviets invaded and annexed outright Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and never turned them loose even nominally as they did for Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. (Yugoslavia managed not to become a Russian satellite in the first place, somehow.) It wasn't until the Lithuanians tried to secede that this began to reverse itself--and it did so ultimately by toppling the Soviet Union as a whole. (Hooray for Lithuania!)

[SD26]

Questioning why Americans condemn the Nazis while excusing leaders like Stalin, Che & Mao.

Seems like it's a faulty statement from the beginning.

I don't excuse Stalin, Che, or Mao or others.

[SapereAude]

Seems like it's a faulty statement from the beginning.

I don't excuse Stalin, Che, or Mao or others.

Did you read the column?

It didn't say all Americans. I felt that to be more specific would be redundant to anyone reading the column.

Specifically, it talks about a large movement of American intellectuals, journalists and politicians, including many advisors to our current govt. being apologists for atrocities commited in the name of socialism and communism.

But again, redundant statemtn to anyone reading the article.

[SD26]

Did you read the column?

It didn't say all Americans. I felt that to be more specific would be redundant to anyone reading the column.

Specifically, it talks about a large movement of American intellectuals, journalists and politicians, including many advisors to our current govt. being apologists for atrocities commited in the name of socialism and communism.

But again, redundant statemtn to anyone reading the article.

Read it from your second post after replying to your first post.