Oh also, one person said you were confusing Trotsky with Lenin. That person is in turn confusing Lenin with Stalin. Stalin is the bad guy of the Soviet Union.

Another said that National Socialism, or Nazism, is a political view of the far left, when in fact it is on the far right of the political spectrum. Just thought I’d point that out.

http://myr24.bloxode.com/images/113846239688.jpg

O_o;

Like you, I come back to action as the only real measuring stick. I don’t care if you’re killing me in the name of “the people”, or in the name of “the Volk”. I only care that I’m dead.

And, honestly, what’s the point of the argument. Lenin was a murderer, Trotsky was a murderer, Stalin was a particularly egregious murderer, and so was Hitler. This just in: totalitarianism sucked.

The Cold War is over, dude. Get over it.

So this particular form of goverment DOES dictate what its leaders enforce.

Apart from that, I totally agree to what you wrote.

As a side note, socialism and communism have a great deal going for them in theory. It’s when it comes to actual practising that things get hairy, but mostly on large scales. Nazi Germany was neither socialist nor communist – it was a nationalist government, which is more closely related to what the Republic of China (Taiwan) had during its foundling years. Given that the RoC has since moved on to a more democratic structure, it’s clear that nationalism doesn’t work much better than socialism or communism. However, Taiwan managed not to slaughter people en masse – so can we put to rest the idea that a form of government dictates what its leaders enforce? Hitler and his men were responsible for Nazi Germany, not nationalism, as Stalin was for the things the USSR did, and so on and so forth. Their leaders perverted governments which, in the hands of people perhaps less clever and more compassionate, might have actually worked.

^________________^

i think?

Second Thing: He did not die of a Brain “infection”. He died of severe brain damage, caused by having an Ice pick implanted in his head (albeit a day after the attack)

Third Thing: He was exiled. He went round Europe for a bit, before moving to Mexico, where he lived with Diego Rivera until they had an argument.

BTW If Trotsky wasn’t assassinated he probably wouldn’t have lived long anyway. He was suffering from extreme high blood pressure and believed that he would soon be dead of a haemorage. He was even thinking about suicide.

Notably many English peasants were killed in that country;’s push to industrialization, but it happened over a longer period of time. Stalin was in a big hurry to catch up.

Marx would never have picked Russia as the place for the communicst revolution, because they were econcomically and technologically quite backward at that time. He was looking to Germany. He also favoried human rights- the Communist Manifesto authored by him and Engels complained about how demeaning to huma values the (capitalist) factory system was. And by our standards today, it WAS.

They all were revolting against the tyranical systems in place at that time and you and I would have probably been one their side at least in theory if not actually joining them at the barricades as many others did, in support of democracy and justice.

Arthur, let me tell you something:
1) 25 years was not maximum sentence – read Solzhenitsyn (GULAG Archipelag – or whatever is that book named in English)
2) 25 years got teenagers for stealing loaf of bread, or you could get 25 years for comming late to work – really, I’m not kidding
3) threatening to kill the current political leader – if we two will sit in a pub and I’ll say “Bush should be killed”, am I threatening to kill GWB? Or if I’ll try to lit the fire using newspaper with photo of GWB? In Soviet Russia, or USSR or whatever you wish me to call it…

An anology, to make my point clear: I think that the Bush administration perverted some of the american ideals by starting an illegal war with a high death toll, by limiting some of the civil liberties the US-society was build upon, by imprisoning people for indefinite time without charges and no access to lawyers and even torturing some of them. BUT that doesn´t make the american ideals bad! It tells you a lot about Bush, Cheney etc., but not too much about democracy. One of the differences to those who perverted Marx´ ideas: US citizens can get rid of Bush without shedding blood. Democracy win!

And finally, the West wasn´t “too scared and ignorant to do anything” during those uprises, it was, alas, impossible to do anything more. Did you really forget the fact, that the Soviet Union had a lot of nuclear weapons and a large army? What would have been the right thing to do, when a nuclear warwould have been the consequence of, let´s say, more offensive measures by the west?

Oh, one last thing: It seems to me, that the comparison between ZB and Trotzky was more about the hair than about their religion. And even if it was about them being jewish that wouldn´t be racist, because being a jew doesn´t tell you anything about peoples race.

Socialism is not “communism lite”, in the communist theory socialism is the first step that will be followed by the next step – communism (in Europe socialism now has nothing to do with communism). Fascism is not the same as nazism and Nazis are not on the “left side of the political spectrum”, they used aspects of left and right and btw were responsible for all the deaths in WWII – about 60 million.

25 years in GuLAG was the maximum sentence (apart from the death penalty), and threatening to kill the current political leader is illegal almost everywhere, although Nazis and commies did in fact punish that extremly.

A country named “Communist Russia” never existed, i guess you were talking about the Soviet Union.

But it is true that brutal oppression was (and is) typical for the Nazis and the communists, therefore democracy is clearly the best system that mankind has invented so far.

Generally, most anywhere Communism (or socialism : Communism lite) goes, massive numbers of people die.

Atheism is a part of the Communist worldview. The State is the ultimate authority, and their leaders act as if their actions have no consequences.

Trotsky was a key figure in the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, second only to Lenin in the early stage of Soviet communist rule. However, he lost out to Stalin in the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death, and was assassinated while in exile.

He had as much blood on his hands as Lenin did.