Metal Reviews

Stalin, Hitler and Hussein all had mustaches. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!

And Pinochet, Franco, Videla, Somoza, Trujillo... all with mustaches.

There's really a coincidence between moustaches and being a bastard tyrant.

Stalin basically had nothing to do with Marxism besides the fact that he preceded Lenin who was a Marxist. Not sure about Pol Pot. Marx never wrote about shipping people in trains whilst not feeding them, at least as much as I've read.

What Stalin did may not say much about communism but the fact that almost every communist leadership killed too many people and failed as a whole eventually says something about it to me. It doesn't work.

Wtf? What business do I have berating the foundations of your country's goverment? What does that have to do with anything? Seriously, this post is confusing me. I admitted that what I argued was flawed; if that makes me a hypocrite or if that means I'm destroying the foundations of America or something, so be it. Do you really believe in absolutely no limitations on free speech? You are aware that hate speech is already illegal in America, along with speech that incites danger (ie, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater). Now, whether you think holocaust denial should be illegal is a different bag, though one could argue that since it is generally related to hate speech it could fall in that category; but do you really think that freedom of speech should be absolute? And as far as I can remember, absolute freedom of speech has never been encoded in the American constitution, so... what?

And as others have said, blaming Marxism for Stalin and Mao doesn't make much sense. I think we can all agree that applied Marxism doesn't work, but nowhere in Marx does it mention killing millions of your own citizens.

Looking at all the oppression, destruction and wars brought about by capitalist countries over market rights and profits says something to me. People just need to realize that Marxism and communism aren't equal; communism was/is a failure but it doesn't meant that Marx's ideas on worker's alienation and capitalism's inherent corruption are wrong.

Yes, because the practical application (communism, etc.) of a utopian work of fiction (Das Kapital) deserves yet another chance. Even more millions of deaths, even more stealing from the rich and not giving to the poor, even more crimes against the indelible, majestic inequity of humanity, even more erosion of morality and values.

Yay! But thank god that the real, horrid, unforgivable crimes, such as questioning the magnitude of the Holocaust and distrusting people due to intercultural differences, are draconically punished.

No one's arguing that. You're mistake is the post hoc ergo propter hoc assumption that Marxism causes violent dictatorships.

More than anything else, it should've learned you that marxism is completely inimical to human nature.

You could argue that. But saying that Marxism inevitably causes mass slaughter is something else.

You see? Nothing that has ever happened in the history of mankind is worse than the Holocaust.

So what's your point? That Germans are deeply ashamed of what their previous generation did and often go slightly over-the-top when refering to it?

I'd argue that mass deportation, reorganisation, redistribution of wealth and such, inherent to Marxism, always cause more than a few casualties, property of collateral damage. Also, the failings of a political-ideological doctrine can be accurately measured by the repression of its opponents.

Oh, not just here. Belgium and Holland are equally touched by profound deportation shame. Do you sometimes hear of Michael Freilich? He's like the Jewish version of the Spanish Inquisition, rails against everything even slightly offensive (ie. non-apologetic) to the Jewish community in Belgium.

But actually, my point is that the Holocaust is worked up into such a status of singularity that gradually all credibility of its repetition could fall away. As is done with Hitler, actually - demonised so utterly that one can no longer fathom another human being becoming like that.

I get your point, but it's hard to strike a balance; not reacting like that every time, say, PETA compare the slaughter of chickens to the Shoah (to distinguish it from other holocausts) in the minds of Freilich et al at least, will result in people trivialising it and not giving it the respect it deserves.

The problem is, of course, that there have been other holocausts throughout history, and like I mentioned before, all should be remembered. Children should be taught, say, that Russia and England manufactured famines to surpress native populations, commited atrocities in Australia and Africa, stole islands so they could be sold to America for army bases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulati ... ego_Garcia

Of course, where this falls apart is that Britain is a country ruled by an old-boy network that will never admit any wrongdoing:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/dec/27/eu.turkey

America learns from this, and America will never, in my view, admit its past failures and fuck-ups. Heck, do they even teach about the shameful treatment of the AmerIndians?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

for instance.

Part of what annoys me about the memory of the Shoah is that remembering it isn't so much about the memory of the Jews but, like you mentioned, the vilification of Nazis and Hitler. Not that it's wrong to do so, but all that the modern ultra-right has to do is to distance itself from them and they get clean away with it. It focuses on the perpetrators of the crime rather than the crime itself, people remember the criminals but not what happened, so it's, like you said, something distant and horrific that will never happen again, even though humanity has come damn close since.

The teaching of the Trail of Tears is that it was bad policy and rude. Students are taught only that a statistic of people died not that women, children, fathers and families starved, died from sickness and witnessed those around them dying and being forced to leave their bodies behind.

I'm actually presenting a project in my sociology course that describes how the Holocaust was made possible by industrialization. The mass efficiency created by the assembly line and scientific management enabled the genocide to be quick effective and emotionally cold. Since no other pogrom has been done in this manner maybe none of them can ever match the Holocaust in destructiveness.

So what is the opponent of capitalism if not Marxism? Marxism, in the form of his ideas, doesn't have to be insitutionalized in a government; it can help organize Ecuadorian plantation workers or Malaysian textile workers to fight for their rights as workers and to not allow the "bourgeoisie", the rich who mistreat them to take advantage of them any longer. Yet Marxism has been so repressed, mostly by ideas like yours that it is inevitably a WMD, that these workers simply accept their lot in life and capitalists, like all Americans, live in luxury eating bananas, plucked by people who drink water out of pesiticide barrels or are shot at by their company if they attempt to strike. Yeah, I really respect and enjoy living in this world which has essentially outlawed Marxism.

Would I be right in thinking you've never actually read any Marx?

("The erosion of morality and values" sounds like something the pope might have said about the English revolution in the damn 17th century.... some things never change.)

This is the thing about the USSR; any Marxist (Trotskyist) today will describe it as "state capitalist" rather than socialist. This sounds like trying to dump responsibility for it onto someone else's head, and in part it probably is, but then it also makes plenty of sense as well.

Capital, for Marx, is that portion of profits, not which is spent on consumption (i.e. new cars and private jets) but which is recycled into further profit making activities. A capitalist society is one in which the dominant source of economic growth is the continuous regeneration of such recyclable profit. And, the inevitable consequence of this drive towards recyclable profit is what generates working and employing classes who are constantly opposed to eachother's material interests.

It shouldn't really matter who owns this recyclable capital, it is still capitalism. Such was the nature of the USSR; a society dominated by capital, but simply owned by the government rather than private business.

"Marxism" has failed in practice because any elite group of revolutionaries that attempts to remould society according to a predetermined template will end up having to enforce their will on other people, hence repression. This is precisely the anarchist critique of Marxism that was emerging long before any Russian Revolution, from people such as Bakunin.

But if someone were to say it has failed as a mode of analysis, then I would pretty much have to say that person is living on cloud cuckoo land. Especially now. It's pretty obvious that Marx was right when he said that capitalism moves in cycles characterised by booms and slumps (and we recognise Keynes as a genius for pointing this out in the 1930s?!). It's pretty obvious that Marx was right when he talked about the formation of the industrial proletariat (look at what is happening in the new industrial centres of China currently, and tell me this is not a Marxian analysis in living colour).

He was wrong to say that capitalism wouldn't be able to meet the basic material needs of people consistently, and that they would inevitably starve or freeze in a recession. But WHY was he wrong about this? He didn't predict the idea of the liberal mixed economy, with welfare for those out of work, and free healthcare for even the poorest. It is that liberal mixed economy that ultimately throughout the 20th century, did "prove" Marx wrong, because it provided a strictly regulated framework in which the needs of those people exploited by capitalism could be met by the government itself.

Now, however, that is all on the way out, and those people that wrote Marxism off are pretty much looking pretty stupid at the moment. (EDIT: I should say that it looks like it is coming back in again now capitalism has fallen on its arse again. When I say "now" I mean the period beginning in the 1970s up to very recently when the welfare state and mixed economy was indeed slowly being dismantled)



You are quite right, trapt. The most visible manifestations of Marx's analysis and predictions is in the developing world, especially somewhere like China as I mentioned above, in the same sweatshops that pretty much keep the world economy stumbling onwards.

I didn't read all the posts but what I will say is this.

Brahm, you can't place any restriction on free speech, otherwise we won't be far away from being able to criticize things like religion or politics and before you know it, you'll be living like in Muslim countries, where uttering anything negative about the government/religion will get you killed.

Your reasoning is good, but the thing is once you start messing with freedom of speech, it gets hard to draw a line.

I agree with you that it can be a slippery slope and needs to be approached cautiously, but there are already restrictions on free speech in every country in the world, including the US on Canada, and I think it's a pretty far gap between a country banning Holocaust denial and a country being an authoritarian death trap where any free speech is punished. But I do get your point and definitely understand where you're coming from; but I would like to say it again: As far as I know, no country in the world protects the right to absolute free speech.