Tbh it probably does suck to live somewhere like Cuba whose economy has been strangled by blockades, but it's a "stop hitting yourself" sort of logic to blame it on communism.
You don't get 125,000 people risking their lives to cross shark-infested waters on shitty overcrowded dinghies to leave just for funsies. One must consider the material conditions
I think state instruments of power will make mistakes and cause undue harm if they exist, and yet we need them to exist to fight a literal war with the most powerful military force in human history, by several orders of magnitude. I think there are genuine issues that arise there. I just don’t think the vast majority of people raising concerns about the harms of communism are worried about the specific errors that have actually occurred and were unforced. They’re too busy repeating talking points about how cruel Castro was to the slave owners.
The solution is clearly to have a first revolution which establishes a socialist state and then a second revolution after the capitalist states have all been defeated. (I am only half-joking)
while i personally despise trotsky because his adventurism regarding his views on permanent revolution endangered the soviet union and communism as a whole, the concept itself is valid. the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants from time to time after all, even if that quote specifically was made by a chud the sentiment is real. without the occasional violence in society to shake up the class structure, hereditary power and corruption will entrench itself into an utopian classless system given enough time and that endangers the project of communism as a whole, so we need purges, not reeducation, murder, the death penalty carried out on reactionaries basically until the end of time to maintain communism. communism is not pacifism, humans are innately violent and a utopian system would require it.
This isn’t very accurate. Plenty of people suffer under communism, or at least nominally communist governments. I mean, are we gonna pretend post-Stalin leadership was good? Or citizen sin AES that have to allow free market policies in their countries to survive are 100% happy?
That's kind of a loaded statement, since China is currently booming due to its adoption of capitalism, and participation in the global economy.
The US is currently experiencing late stage capitalism, while China is currently enjoying its golden years, though it did just experience a pretty bad housing market crash I hear.
I don't think anyone really considers pol pot a communist mate. And who was it that ended the Khmer Rouge hmm? Communists.
He was brainwormed from the start, lacked a lot of theory that we usually consider essential, and seriously was deeply reactionary. He was communist when he wanted China's support(announced in 1977), and then in 1981 he disbanded the communist party when he wanted capitalist support. The man was a monster and an opportunist that did whatever he had to.
But don't believe me, here's quite an important quote:
"We are not communists ... we are revolutionaries" who do not 'belong to the commonly accepted grouping of communist Indochina."
-- Leng Sary, 1977 Former Minister for Foreign Affairs of Cambodia
Declaring Pol Pot's actions the fault of communism when the Khmer Rouge were only publicly declared ""communist"" for the 4 years of 1977-1981 when the Khmer rouge existed in total between 1951 and 1999 is utterly absurd and is only the kind of thing that people who don't know the history do.
If anything they had a hardline anticommunists stance from the moment they were thrown out by the actual communist vietnamese in 1979, and they found support among capitalists, notably Thailand who used them as a buffer against communism spreading to Thailand.
Wikipedia puts the name change at 1971. In what way was the Khmer Rouge not a Communist party? They were literally forcing the entire population onto agricultural communes. One quote from a foreign minister doesn't move the goalpost.
Vietnam didn't ride in to heroically liberate Cambodia from "pretend communists", it was literally in response to military aggression ordered by Pol Pot.
I don’t know a single communist who defends Pol Pot. Dude was a genocidal revisionist who coopted socialist language to justify a fundamentally anti-socialist project, killing millions in the process.
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were supported by the US as the legitimate holder of Cambodias UN seat(in opposition to actually communist government that came to power after he was deposed by the actually communist Vietnamese) until 1993
The United States (U.S.) voted for the Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Rouge-dominated Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) to retain Cambodia's United Nations (UN) seat until as late as 1993
After he was overthrown, the United States continued to recognize Pol Pot as the legitimate leader of Cambodia at the United Nations.[3] Between 1980 and 1986, Pol Pot's exiled forces received $85 million in funding from the United States and their operations were run by 50 CIA agents in Thailand. U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski also encouraged China to support Pol Pot. In August 1990, a former member of the U.S. special forces disclosed that he had been ordered to destroy documents showing that the U.S. was supplying Pol Pot with munitions from Thailand.[1]
I can’t find the document, but I remember something about US intelligence funding Pol Pot, but funneling the money through China because they couldn’t fund them openly.