Who do you want to vote for in 2016?

I probably could.


Hey, St. Francis...

David, you assume any Chinese that might have anything to do with Mao would favor Obama. That is ridiculous. Mao was a Fascist dictator who reined terror upon his people with the use of thugs and propaganda. He decried anything even remotely intellectual. He gathered up wealth and gave it to his cronies. He destroyed a lot of China's beautiful art and architecture because he didn't want a romantic link to the past. He shredded the farming infrastructure and then ignored the mass starvation of his people that followed. Really, how do you think Obama compares to that? Because Obama wants to make sure everyone has equal access to healthcare and that we pay as a nation for our public services? Maybe because he wants to make wealthy people pay more taxes to the country that created a place for them to get safely rich and laws that favor their business expansions? Perhaps because Obama believes there should be a safety net for people who need some help and shouldn't have to go begging at the church door? Get real. Mao was really a corporate CEO in a cheap blue suit and cap.

Huh? Don't look to me to clue you in to the thoughts of many millions.

Indeed, I think the thoughts of millions vary depending on what is happening.

But some of those thoughts are sincere.

Eh, I don't follow communists through history.
I just think.
Some of you balloon communism for your own needs.
It's almost funny, but not.

brava

Three replies to one post and none of them informative.

Obviously there are a fair number of decent folks who believed and believe that communism is the way to go, but they are not and have not been at the vanguard of Communism throughout history. If fact, they are usually the first people to be sent to death camps when the Lenins, Maos and Pol Pots come to power.

That there are are decent and fair minded people who subscribe to a particular school of thought is meaningless in terms of the impact that school has had on humanity.

No doubt there were some decent and fair minded folks who bought into the tenets of facism, minus the bestial aspects of its leaders.

Just compare that to the world's religions.

No, Mao was a Communist dictator.

Any attempt to cast him as a captialist CEO is as ludicrous as the comparison against which you argue.

Another cryptic CI comment which I will not ask him to explain as he adamantly doesn't do teaching.

Like, so?

You folks barrage everyone who ever lived in those places. You are toy people, pick and choosers; haters of evil, evil, evil. Toy boys, or toy bots.

Huh?

Excellent summary in one paragraph, Green Witch. Wish I'd said that!

Whenever one person takes over as a dictator, you know they're not thinking about the mass of citizens, but to control their country and reward their cronies. That's the only way they can stay in power.

You can read. We are all off topic.

Yes I can, but everything I read is not necessarily coherent, despite the author's best efforts.

Of course they're not CI. Who but the dictator and his minions would suggest otherwise? This is hardly an enlightening insight.

The question that remains however (and which folks on the Left seem to want to avoid at all costs) is why every time communisim has become the dominant politcal system in a nation, these sorts of mass murdering psycho-paths are present and communisim becomes the only political choice...despite the well worn and mewing response that in the abstract it's a wonderful approach, and there are a lot of well intentioned little communists.

From time to time they have been taken over by attackers. There is a lot of history about that.

I am, perhaps oddly, not all for a socialist world as developed so far, or ever, as that is not my view, but there are these buttinskis messing up their chances.

Time to time? How about every single time?

Buttinskis? Lenis, Mao, Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot et al have been described a thousand ways but this the first time I've seen them described as Buttinskis.

I know the word "Communist" has become interchangeable with "Fascist". To me it's as accurate as saying Hitler was a Christian. I don't think Marxist communism could ever be realistic, but I find it sad that the word has come to mean the very thing Marx was rallying against. Dictators are very good at cloaking their evil in the guise of good intentions - and it gives the world a reason to ignore them.

We will have to agree to disagree on Mao's behavior. He had far more incommon with a modern capitalist than a modern socialist. Plenty of CEOs grab up all the resources and wealth they can and ignore any victims in the processes. Sharing and social equality is not on the agenda. I guarantee if Mao was alive to today he would be best friends with people like Trump, Jack Welch, and the current Sam Walton clan.

You're another balloon person, descriptor of multitudes.

Funny you should mention PolPot, Finn. The US helped greatly to put him in power and then after he was ejected from Cambodia, the US diverted money meant for foreign aid to support and arm PolPot and the Khmer Rouge.

And actually, the first 3/4 of a million Cambodians and Laotians to die came at the hands of a massive US war crime where the US bombed 113,716 sites in. The US bested PolPot for total number of innocents slaughtered in SE Asia but then it really was an unfair competition. The US has always been the champion in that category.

The US was running its own death camps in Vietnam, taking away the people that it hypocritically maintained it was trying to help.



You only have to look at the US to see that.



Yup, there were a lot of Americans who loved Hitler. I believe that the Bushes were some of that crew.