Weighing risks
Communist governments killed over 100 million people during the 20th century. It’s hard to get your head around a number that large. Here’s a back of the envelope calculation to put it in perspective.
Assume the average height of a human being is 5 feet. 500 million linear feet of corpse divided by 5280 feet per mile gives 94697 linear miles of corpse. Google Maps lists the distance from Berkeley CA to Washington DC as 2807 miles. Dividing 94697 by 2807 gives 33.7. Enough dead to line the highway from Berkeley to DC with end to end corpses, 33 wide.
But hey, the communists meant well. Marxism is fundamentally sound. The communist states of the 20th were beta releases, still a bit buggy. It’s hard to get things right the first time. The next releases will work for sure. Besides, you have to break eggs to make omelettes. I hear Cuba turned out great.
Another mortality statistic. How many people have been killed in the US due to accidents in the nuclear power industry? Exactly none, zero, so far as I have been able to determine. No other major industry can come close to that. But somehow nuclear power remains too dangerous to contemplate.
Posted on February 16th, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: Cuba, politics
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One thought on your opening sentence, “Communist governments killed over 100 million people during the 20th century.”
Because a government is labeled “communist” does that necessarily make it so. Let’s take the U.S.S.R. under Joseph Stalin. To my mind, that was a totalitarian regime run by a ruthless, arguably insane, dictator. “Communism” gets all the blame, but I see it as little more, in Stalin’s case, than a cloak to mask totalitarian, dictatorial government.
There is more going on in the history you discuss here than just communism.
Residential natural gas explosions and the resulting fires kill an average of 400 people in the US each and every year. But nuclear power is too dangerous?
I would also argue that China currently has more of a capitalist dictatorship that it does pure communism. Hong Kong showed even the old Chi-Coms how well capitalism works when it gets a chance. I think we should give capitalism a try here in the US, instead of this bullshit socialism we have now.
Dr Malo,
You illustrate my point for me.
Imagine that some nuclear power plant suffered a catastrophic failure. Hundreds were killed. The subsequent investigation determined that the failure was due to the deliberate actions of an employee.
There would be two reactions. The conspiracy buffs would yell coverup. The fatcat nuclear power industry is scapegoating a worker to deflect criticism of inherently unsafe nuclear power.
The second reaction: the fact that a disgruntled employee was able to cause the disaster is itself a design failure, demonstrating the inherent dangers of nuclear power. The second reaction makes sense.
Either way, nuclear power would be doomed.
Not so with communism. It is held to a different standard.
Stalinists killed millions, but that had nothing to do with communism. Maoists killed millions, that had nothing to do with communism. Pol Pot killed millions, well, that had nothing to do with communism either. It was all coincidence. People machine gunned trying to get over Berlin wall, they weren’t trying to escape communism. It’s not communism that drives people to dodge sharks and gunships on a raft made of old tires. It’s never communism, just some local idiosyncracy.
Bullshit. It is communism. The life the of the individual does not matter under communism. That follows logically from the premises underlying communism. Everything belongs to the collective, to be used as the collective sees fit. Everything.
There are biological systems where communism works, and works well. Ants, bees, termites. Hive organisms where the individual does not matter. Individual ants cannot survive apart from the colony. The death of individual ants does not matter; only the collective matters. Communism works extremely well for colonial insects.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” It turns my stomach when I hear that trotted out as received wisdom. Any slave holder could tell you the same thing. The master knows exactly what each slave needs, and the master decides what each slave had damn well better produce. And if the slaves complain, well, the master knows how to handle that too.
Slavery is not just wrong, it is profoundly stupid. Communism is simply universal slavery. Every place it touches becomes a hell hole, and that is not coincidence. Communism is the most murderous and grotesque curse ever to touch this planet precisely because it lives up to its inhuman philosophy.
Precisely, it is the most evil of tyrannies yet devised. You are also correct that the preceeding were only beta versions. We are now on a course to roll out a more perfect version. First we dumb down the populations of the technologically advanced, industrialized societies then incramentally give more and more power to the government by cedeing resposibility over our daily lives. Allow the government to buy your medicine and tell you which illnesses you can have and be cured. Let them tell you which light bulbs you can have in your home. Dictate to you your income. Legislate how many miles your car can travel on a gallon of gas. Let the government determein the proper level of profit a company can safely make without being investigated by congress.
The fundamental operating princpal of theis country is freedom. You have the liberty to determine your own life. This ideal has been hocked for a social security ponzi scheme and we have been suckered into believing it. In another twenty -five years the government will need 75% of everthing we produce just to pay the bills on social security. When you refuse to give the money you will be deemed a criminal. Mrs. Clinton has already begun talking about taking the profits and mandating enrollments in state mandated insurance programs. When these and many more things are ceded to the officials and governmental overseers we loose. Try rolling back a government program.
You probably won’t be lined up against the wall for the firing squad they have learned from the betas too. The producers will be shackeled to the government debt, a gulag sized rock pile that grows ever higher daily.
And for this we gave up our choices slowly and willingly, like the frog in the sause pan.