It’s Victims Of Communism Day, 2017:
This year is a particularly important time to remember the victims of Communism because of the approaching one hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution – Bolshevik takeover of Russia. The Soviet Union was not the most oppressive communist regime. It probably did not match the even more thoroughgoing totalitarianism of the Khmer Rouge and North Korea. Nor did it kill the most people – a record held by Mao Zedong the Chinese communists. But the Soviet experiment was the principal model for all the later communist states, and it is hard to imagine communists seizing control of so much of the world without it. In addition to the significant material aid that the Soviets provided to communists in other nations, the communist seizure of power in Russia also greatly boosted the ideology’s prospects elsewhere.
Meanwhile…
Hearing that there are people in black clothes and masks in downtown LA protesting against fascism.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) May 1, 2017
“Hearing that there are people in black clothes and masks in downtown LA protesting against fascism.”
I’m guessing the way they want to “fight fascism” is to increase the power of the State. That’s like fighting AIDS by having a lot of unsafe sex in the men’s rooms of Gay bars.
Communism: an equal-opportunity “Handmaid’s Tale.”
Black masks doesn’t mean communists. The black flag is a symbol of the anarchist movement which predates communism.
To a large degree the Marxists in the XIXth century basically co-opted or infiltrated a lot of existing social movements in an attempt to gain power but it doesn’t mean people in those movements subscribe to their ideas.
I’m a non-active European Socialist and I don’t believe in abolishing private property, revolution, single party systems, or a command economy. As neither do most of us. One example is the SPD in Germany.