Reddit reviews Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

That's barely a sentence, old doesn't != wrong.

>Is old argument that foreging due process is wrong

Yeah people recognised that as retarted centuries ago, who's embarssing themselves here?

https://www.amazon.com/Against-All-Hope-Memoir-Castros/dp/1893554198

What will it get for leftists to condemn Cuban torture as wrong? A rat in your fag ass?

This is a fundamental misunderstanding and it is very common. Communists consider people who are against them in spirit to be the same or worse kinds of enemies as people who take up arms against the eternal revolution. Because they assume Communism is the best thing for all the people of the world, anyone who is against it, is against all of humanity. They were not his own people, you see, the were counter-revolutionaries not even worth consideration as human beings.

Armando Valladares spent those decades in prison, being tortured/starved/abused, because he objected in his mind to the Communists. His example was not special, but he had extraordinary support from people who cared about him. If anyone doesn't know his story, it is worth reading: https://www.amazon.com/Against-All-Hope-Memoir-Castros/dp/1893554198

> Honestly literally all of your examples are just a reductionist way of looking at history. Lenin existed in a time period when kings and queens still ruled most of Europe, so if you're looking at that and saying "USSR was a dictatorship", you're ignoring the historical context that MOST OF EUROPE was ruled by dictatorships. In fact, Russia's form of indirect democracy at the time, was rather advanced.

Oh come on. Are you going to make excuses for him? He created the gulag system that Stalin expanded. He created the secret police. He killed millions, uses terror and torture as political tools. Even Bertrand Russel, no right winger, found him to be crude and cruel.

>“When I met Lenin, I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of Mongolian cruelty and bigotry. When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, ‘and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree—ha! ha! ha!’ His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.”

The fact that "most of Europe" was ruled by dictatorships (well, except for two of Russia's allies, FRANCE AND ENGLAND) doesn't excuse his actions.

> In the current day Cuba actually has a rather direct form of democracy which I'd recommend learning about. In fact, their constitution was amended several thousand times by the Cuban people, before being decided upon by a public referendum. Same goes for recent amendments this year.

And with that flat-out LIE I am done with you. I live a few hundred miles from Cuba, work with Cubans, have a good friend whose family fled Cuba (and boy did his dad tell me some stories). I've read numerous books on the topic. This one stuck with me. Cuba is a dictatorship, and that's not merely me saying it. Ask Amnesty International. They don't have free elections, don't have the right to travel, don't have free access to the internet, don't have free speech, don't have freedom of worship, still live under a closed command economy, and still regularly jail people for political "crimes." They are in no way "democratic."

(sigh) This is depressing, because I actually legitimately thought better of you. No joke, no sneering snark, I disagreed with you but I didn't think you would resort to this. I'm an asshole, and I make no apologies for my contempt for Marxists, but I actually had hope with you.

This is the way it always goes. The Marxist assures me that Marxism doesn't have anything to do with the dictatorships of the communist nations... and then the very same person making that argument starts defending those very same dictatorships.

This is just so tedious. I would think, if you actually believed that these dictators were damaging the brand (so to speak) you'd hate them more than I do. After all, I'm just a capitalist jerk. I don't claim to be a Marxist. They're making you Marxists look bad. Instead, you attack the US for Cambodia... and not the leader and his followers who butchered over a quarter of the population. You claim Cuba (a dictatorship) is democratic. You excuse Lenin's institution of totalitarianism. You excuse the Chinese communists and shrug off the tens of millions they murdered with "yes, China's political structure is flawed."

Come on. Just stop. I think the first time I see Marxists really lay into these dictatorships I might be impressed. It hasn't happened yet, and this is just more evidence of my belief that Marxism is inherently totalitarian.

> cuba didn't have gulags or a four pests campaign. burkino faso didn't have gulags or a four pests campaign. yugoslavia didn't have gulags or a four pests campaign.

Yes they did

>the black panthers, the IWW, the socialist party didn't advocate gulags or the killing of crows.

As I already said, that they didn't advocate it is irrelevant, they produced them every time they got power, without exception.

>churchill deliberately starved upwards of 30 million people in bengal.

No, that would be the japanese army that starved those people, when they invaded burma and stole all the rice that used to be shipped to bengal.

> the belgian kongo, a private venture, killed nearly 8 million in cold blood. even with just these two, then, we're up to a minimum of 38 million direct murders. pick up the slack, stalin!

the bengal famine killed about 2 million people, not 30. bengal only had about 60 million people living in it, and hte death rate wasn't 50%. But why let math and facts get in the way of your moral superiority, right?

>how many peoples' life expectancies are drastically lowered because of capitalism not funding things like cures for malaria,


And the goal posts shift again! Now it's capitalism being faulted not just for failing to distribute what does exist, but failing to invent new things that don't! Alright, let's play that game then. Capitalists have not cured malaria yet, it's true. Did the socialists? No? well then they're both equal on that front. Of course, capitalism did cure small pox, and hopefully soon, polio. What diseases did great Stalin cure?

>inadequate healthcare, workers' rights violations, and general outright murder?

Given that the capitalist countries invariably have the highest standard of living, and LE, in the world, I'm going to have to go with none here.

>we have this problem in the united states, too, it's called getting murdered by cops - and here, you don't have the luxury of surviving their beatings.

The innumeracy is staggering. a few hundred people are killed by cops in the united states every year. Stalin had that many people executed every single day, for years, for made up crimes. But sure, those are totally the same problem.

>the ECP, which was made up by idiot reactionary libertarians anyway,

Did you mean to say nobel prize winning economists? Because that's the correct description. Or are we rejecting science? Because I'm pretty sure you said that this was all scientific, are you some some sort of science denier now?

>means that a central body cannot accurately gauge what people want or need. i'm not arguing for that, i'm arguing that we should use objective reasoning to figure out how much food each community needs, based on a combination of outside and inside study, to feed everyone and still have a surplus left over.

let me get this straight. You don't want a central body that to gauge want people want or need. Instead, you want "we" to use objective reasoning, to gauge how much food everyone needs based on study, then give them that much food? Do you listen to what you write? that's exactly the same thing!

>please, though, tell me about how awesome capitalism is, because wasting a third of the entire world's food supply, literally throwing perfectly edible food into landfills, while hundreds of millions starve in poverty.

You seriously want to claim that when it comes to feeding people, socialism beats capitalism? Because of all possible arguments that could be made to defend socialism, that has to be the worst one possible. No system in history has ever produced more starvation than socialism. And their did it one of two ways, either they used "objective reasoning" to work out how much food each person needed, and then got it wrong, or they deliberately murdered tens of millions of people . either way, it's a terrible idea.

>but you already said china was experiencing a famine brought about by shifting social and economic conditions at the same time, which means the great leap forward didn't cause this, the famine did. changing the mode of resource allocation doesn't mean the resources previously accumulated by capitalism suddenly blink out of existence.

No I didn't and no they weren't. Famines, of course, happen in all pre-industrial societies from time to time, but not famines that kill tens of millions. Those famines were the deliberate result of government policy, forcing the peasants to work in inefficient ways then confiscating at gunpoint any grain they produced up to their "objective" quotas.


>sorry, genocide, murder, chemical and nuclear warfare, eugenics, slavery, feudalism, fascism, colonialism, imperialism, and rape, you guys are through!

Except for feudalism, economic central planning led to every single one of those things, on the largest scale in human history.

>it turns out the actual worst idea ever is just an economic planning model that doesn't work very well but still functions. man, and here i was lamenting the nazis! if only i knew that central planning was worse than starting world war 2.

ww2 killed 50 million people. the communists killed 100. So at a minimum, economic central planning is twice as bad as starting ww2.