Re: Was he worse? We'll never know, seeing how he was the one that came out on top. - Edit 2
Before modification by Legolas at 08/11/2010 10:31:31 PM
Well, for starters, you can't blame the murders of hundreds of millions of people in those countries on "economic failures" no matter how spectacular. Mao's Great Leap Forward was designed to kill tens of millions of people, and Stalin's Holodomor was designed to kill millions of undesirables as well, not to mention Siberia, and the Great Purges ect.
Hundreds of millions now? I think you're exaggerating a good bit there. The Great Leap Forward seems to have estimates around 40 million dead, for the Holodomor I've heard about 5 million, there are others that add up, but hundreds of millions seems like a rather large exaggeration all the same.
And would you care to give me a source for your claims that the Great Leap Forward was intended to kill millions? It certainly did end up doing that, but I'd like to see some evidence if you claim that - or anything like it - was intentional. For the Holodomor, I am indeed aware of the debate about whether it was intentional, though I don't believe there's a consensus on that.
Sending people to Siberia and similar purges in China are of course different, but those are far smaller numbers we're talking about.
So if we're going to talk intentional murder, it's numbers in the millions, possibly low tens of millions if one takes the stance the Hodorlomor was indeed fully intentional. You're exaggerating a lot. But of course, it's still exponentially larger than the amounts killed in Italy or Spain, if one ignores the Holocaust, or even if one includes those victims of the Holocaust that came from Italy or lands under Italian control). So it's hard to disagree with your statements about the Soviet Union and China - it's the assumption you seem to make that something comparable would've happened in Spain that I am really finding fault with. The left-wing in Spain prior to Franco's rebellion that started the civil war certainly wasn't of such a kind that it would have done anything in that direction. No doubt they were radicalized by the war, and would have oppressed their enemies if they'd won the war in a similar way to what the victorious fascists did (they already committed some atrocities during the war in the territories they controlled). But that sort of disastrous megalomaniac economic policies, or such purges on an enormous scale long after the respective revolutions were well and truly won? I see little reason to assume that.
No matter which way you slice it, I'd rather not be able to speak Italian in public than, say, slowly starving to death, being executed for imagined conspiracies, or being shipped to Siberia. The communists, in ever single case, were worst than any fascist regime. Granted, I don't consider Hitler a fascist (for obvious reasons), but even if you tossed Hitler in the mix, the big two (Russia and China) would still be worse than the Nazi's in terms of a body count.
The big two are worse than everybody else in terms of body count, agreed. And so is Cambodia, at least in percentage terms - well, Cambodia is the worst of all, really. But the rest didn't belong in that list, and so I can't agree with the generalization about every communist regime being worse than any fascist regime, either. Vietnam had large amounts of dead civilians too, but then it was war, and South-Vietnam killed large amounts of innocent civilians just like North-Vietnam.
And I tossed Cuba in the mix for the tens of thousands of Cubans who Castro and Che made "disappear" after the revolution was won in 1959.
That really doesn't make them any different from Franco's Spain at least - I'm not sure about the numbers in Mussolini's Italy.