This article was originally published on Fightback!news on 31 December 2014. See also: Feeling of 'solid Western support' behind Kiev's renewed assault on Donbass on RT. For more news on the fight by the people of of Donbass against the Kiev regime, read other Fightback! articles on Ukraine or visit the #Donbass Twitter page. Article also includes 2 embedded videos: Ukraine: Helping rebuild homes (7/1/15) (2:57) and Donbass under fire: Separatists (27/12/14) (58:12)
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After the U.S.-backed fascist coup in Kiev, Ukraine in February 2014, the people of Donbass rebelled for independence from Ukraine. A popular anti-fascist resistance quickly emerged. The breakaway state of Novorossiya, or New Russia, was formed and Kiev sent in troops and tanks to crush the people's resistance. Civil war gripped the country. Now, almost a year later, while the resistance soldiers on, a humanitarian disaster perpetuated by the Kiev government's war of aggression has struck the citizens of Donbass. International Students Aid to Donbass, based in Wroclaw, Poland, is one of many aid groups springing up across the world in solidarity with the ongoing resistance and the victimized people of Eastern Ukraine. |
Fight Back! interviewed one of the founders of International Students Aid to Donbass (ISAD), who wished to remain anonymous.
Fight Back!: Can you explain about the student organization generally?
ISAD student: Sure. The idea for creating a solidarity with Donbass group which could coordinate humanitarian assistance emerged in October when a handful of international students in Wroclaw some of whom had been activists back in their home countries, wanted to find a way to aid the people of Donbass, who are truly in a miserable situation. We felt like we could no longer sit back and watch as innocent people in Novorossiya starved and died of sickness. Some of us were especially passionate about the situation in Ukraine and we racked our brains until we decided that sending such necessities as food, medicine and clothing could be the best way we could help and draw in other students. The idea of a humanitarian aid organization seemed like a perfect way to express our solidarity with the war-struck people of Novorossiya with the limited resources and capacity we had. So, we sat down, discussed our ideas, and International Students Aid to Donbass was born in early November. We contacted Russian NGOs that handle humanitarian assistance and set up a collection point in cooperation with them. However, we're still our own independent group; we see working with them as one of the greatest opportunities available.
Fight Back!: Are you able to tell a bit about the make-up of International Students Aid to Donbass? Obviously, the name indicates that the membership is multinational.
ISAD student: Being a group primarily composed of international students, our group truly is diverse. We have people from the U.S., Poland, and various European countries. Our group can communicate in more than half a dozen languages. ISAD is also diverse in more ways than just our national make-up. We all come from a broad range of backgrounds and political persuasions. Our group includes communists, Eurasianists and students who simply hate war and the pain it brings anywhere, and want to help alleviate the pain of the men, women and children who are enduring it. Some of us are passionate supporters of Novorossiya and the resistance, while others simply sympathize with the ordinary people who are suffering. As a humanitarian organization, we have no strict political line. The thing that fundamentally unites all of us is the fact that we are saving people's lives by delivering desperately needed goods to the people that need them most. This simple yet important mission has grown our numbers in the short time that we've been active and continues to motivate our work.
Fight Back!: Are there any security issues, seeing as you're operating in a country which, on a state level, supports the fascist government in Kiev? How does the political situation in Poland affect the work of the organization?
ISAD student: Absolutely. Security is a serious problem that we have to carefully deal with. Our members have faced verbal and physical threats and hostilities from Ukrainian nationalists in Poland. A significant number of Ukrainians now have easy access to visas, even free ones, to come work and study here. Some Ukrainian nationalists come here on visas because they don't actually want to fight in the war, and find plenty of space here, without consequences or obligations, to howl about how patriotic they are and threaten those who disagree. Because of security issues stemming from such people and the fact that the Polish state supports the Kiev junta, we keep even our social media private and, unfortunately, can't publicly list our aid point. Speaking of the general political situation in Poland, politicians here love to fan the flames of Russophobia in order to distract people from the real issues they face domestically. Additionally, Poland acts as the war hawk within NATO, so tensions here are always virulently anti-Russia, anti-Donbass, and the propaganda in the media is ridiculously overbearing. Between state-sanctioned Russophobia and aggressive Ukrainian "activists," we have to consciously, always and everywhere, pay paramount attention to security.
Fight Back!: What exactly does your day-to-day work look like?
ISAD student: Our work is simple. We pool together our money, time and energy and go on weekly shopping trips for food, medicine and clothing which we can ship monthly to Donbass. The important thing to remember is that we are students. We're operating on student budgets with student schedules, but we do the best we can with our resources. We all sacrifice our own money and time, but we all feel gratified by the humanitarian work we're doing. We also try to spread awareness of the situation in Ukraine, but the political situation renders that secondary to practical work.
Fight Back!: Do you have any future plans for expanding your work?
ISAD student: In the next few months, our main plan is to find new people to work with. As far as I know, we are one of the only, if not then the only such organization of its kind actively working in Poland, and especially Wroclaw. Before we started, we looked around for other such groups, but found none. In addition to continuing our work with our existing contacts, we're going to contact other humanitarian organizations, particularly those that specifically deliver assistance to children in Donbass. Of course, our capacity is limited, but finding more students and people in Poland, and indeed the world, who are interested in participating will only increase our determination and ability to carry out our mission to save Donbass people.
Fight Back!: Is there anything you'd like to say to supporters and sympathizers in the West, particularly progressives in the U.S.?
ISAD student: I think the most important thing is that this model of organization is universally applicable. Any number of people anywhere can get together and open an aid point. A little work goes a long way. Even if you only have one or two people and can only get a few food items, some over-the-counter medicine and used clothing, such things mean the world to people in Donbass whose only lifeline is international humanitarian assistance. Especially in the West and in the U.S., where the propaganda is so strong and labels the ordinary people of Donbass "pro-Russian terrorists," humanitarian aid work is important to exposing the lies, and most people can find it agreeable despite their political convictions. At the end of the day, we're saving people from a war being senselessly waged against them by some of the most powerful countries of the world in an imperialist geopolitical bid to weaken Russia and snatch Ukraine for the Western camp. The people stuck between the fighting need our help. Support from progressives benefits both the people of Donbass and the struggle against war and propaganda in the heart of the West itself. We encourage anyone interested to get involved and, of course, we're happy to help with logistics and share our experience.
International Students Aid to Donbass can be contacted at polskidonbasu [ AT ] gmail.com
Comments
James Sinnamon
Tue, 2015-01-20 11:43
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Polish students defy war-complicit govt and reactionary emigres
The following was posted to the #comment-250989">Monday Message Board of johnquiggin.com.
The action by Polish students is particularly brave, given that:
1. The Polish Government is supporting the Kiev regime in its war against Russian speakers in the East with military 'advisors'.
2. There are large numbers of Ukrainian emigres within Poland, many of whom support the neo-Nazi anti-Semitic regime in Kiev.
Poland, in terms of the proportion of the pre-war population who died in the Second World War, suffered even more than the Soviet Union. That the Polish Government is supporting a government, which worships Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazi invaders, is one of the bizarre paradoxes of geopolitics in 2014. Another is that those Ukrainian collaborators, worshipped by the Ukrainian government of today, assisted the Nazi occupiers in their "ethnic cleansing" of Poles within Ukraine.
admin
Thu, 2015-01-22 02:59
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Evidence that Ukraine putschists worship Nazi collaborators
The following was #comment-251108">posted to a discussion on JohnQuiggin.com:
On January 21st, 2015 at 20:18 J-D #comment-251097">asked:
There is a vast amount of documentary evidence, including photographs and videos, which shows that those who came to power as a result of the CIA-instigates coup of 21 February 2014, openly endorsed the legacy of wartime Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazi German invaders.
One article, republished on my web-site, candobetter.net, and first published on Global Research, is Moment of Truth: "Fascism As It Is" in Ukraine (30 Jun 2014).
Another, also previously published on Global Research, is New York Times discovers Kiev's Neo-Nazis at war in Eastern Ukraine.
Articles about Ukranian Nazis, from the Russian news service RT, include Russia slams Ukraine's UN envoy for publicly justifying Nazi collaborators (4 Mar 2014) and Ukrainian neo-Nazism threatens to spread across Europe – Russian diplomat.
Dennis K
Thu, 2015-01-22 22:02
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Ukraine and Axis collaboration
admin
Sun, 2015-01-25 02:49
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Communism has killed more than fascism?
DennisK #comment-157014">wrote: "[Communism] killed even more people [than fascism]".
Could you show us what the figures are and where you got them from?
If you had read a little more history, you would know that a large number of people who labeled themselves "communists" in the early 20th century, including the Central Committee of the Russian Bolshevik Party, which led the revolution in 1917, did not consider Stalin, who was to commit nearly all of the crimes wrongly attributed to 'communism', a 'communist'.
By 1939, only Stalin, Trotsky and one other person, who was a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party was still alive and not imprisoned. Trotsky, then in exile, was to be murdered by one of Stalin's agents in 1940.
During the great purges of the late 1930s, 70% of the senior officer corps of the Red Army, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the commander in chief of the Red Army, were murdered after secret trials. Stalin murdered them because he feared they might have a residual loyalty to their old commander-in-chief, Leon Trotsky.
The decapitation of the Red Army prior to the Second World War is the principle reason the Red Army suffered such a terrible death toll during that conflict. Those losses were of the order of at least 10 million in addition to many millions of Soviet civilians who perished. Had it not been for Stalin, the war would have been over much more quickly at a cost of vastly fewer lives lost and much less material destruction in both the east and the west.
The myth that Stalinist tyranny is 'communism' has been used to justify the misrule and of those responsible for nearly all of the appalling bloodshed in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The following is a post which seems to have demolished a claim by forum contributors that communism was tyranny and a threat to humanity. Nobody responded to that post and the discussion is now closed.
Feel welcome to resume that discusion in this forum.
Another myth is that Stalinist tyranny, mislabeled 'communism', killed more than fascism, including German Nazism.
For all the terrible crimes of Stalin, his crimes were only a fraction as monstrous as those committed by Hitler against Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Russia, the Jews and Romanis and far less than what Hitler had planned should he have won the war.
#LostChanceToStopNazism" id="LostChanceToStopNazism">The Russian Revolution isolated: Humanity loses its best chance to stop Nazism and the Second World War
This is republished from a #comment-173372">post of 28/4/2012 to the forum discussion site JohnQuiggin.com.
Alan #comment-173327">wrote:
At least acknowledge that as as Lenin lay in bed mortally ill in 1923, he instructed Trotsky to remove Stalin from the post of Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This is substantiated in many works including "Lenin's Last Struggle" of 1968 by Moshe Lewin and "The Prophet Armed" of 1954 by Isaac Deutscher, the first of his three volume trilogy on the life of Leon Trotsky. Had Trotsky acted on Lenin's instructions instead of largely sitting on his hands until 1927 (also documented by Deutscher) history would have turned out very differently.
Much of the terrible destruction and bloodshed that occurred through the remainder of the 20th century and the early 21st century:
Purges of both left and right wing opponents of Stalin, the bloody defeat of Chinese Communism in 1927, Nazi triumph in Germany in 1933, the triumph of Franco in Spain, the Second World War in which possibly as many as 70 million may have died, The Korean War in which 3 million North Koreans died, The Vietnam War in which as many as 5 million may have died, the murder of half a million communists by Suharto in 1965, the invasion of East Timor, the invasion of Yugoslavia, the invasions of Iraq in 1991 which may have killed as many as 2 million, the invasion on Libya in 2011, ...
... may have been avoided.
As others pointed out, Lenin was faced with a savage civil war and an invasion by the troops over ten foreign nations, including Australia.
So is it fair to damn Lenin for having resorted to harsh measures to keep his government in power, especially given what his opponents, many professing to be for democracy, both outside the Soviet Union and within, have 'achieved' since his death?
Personally I think Marxism is a flawed philosophy (see Robert Heilbroner's "The Worldly Philosophers" of 1953), but in spite of that I think the Russian Revolution of 1917 presented humanity with its best opportunity to date to establish a workable and humane global society.
Sadly, that opportunity was lost.
Dennis K
Sun, 2015-01-25 20:33
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Good riddance to Communism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4230/so_how_many_did_communism_kill
There are Many resources available, which try and estimate the death toll. The thing is, people lost count.
When I attended Socialist Alternative meetings I heard this same argument. That it wasn't Communism, it was 'something else', and therefore each and every place where Communism was tried that turned into a basket case couldn't be used to judge the ideology. You see, its only Communism if it matches exactly what the perfect system is supposed to be, as they define it, of course.
No sane adult can hear that and take this line as anything other than a punchline of a bad joke.
If the Russians laughed at Marxism in the beginning, the tragedy could have been avoided.
I suppose one could then argue that the problems of Capitalism are NOT due to Capitalism, as no true Capitalism country which implements Capitalist ideals perfectly exists. It is technically true. This is what Libertarians argue, that the failures of laissez fair capitalism and self-regulation are not failtures of the ideology, because they ideology was not applied PERFECTLY. Any deviation from total implementation allows them to wash their hands. We see the same with Islam.
Likewise, Fascism and National Socialism could absolve themselves of any wrongdoing, using the same argument.
I've met many real Socialists (they call themselves Socialists, but in private refer to themselves as Communists. "Socialism" is just a ruse for the public). They are (in private) just as statist, and just as willing to subdue and do 'what is necessary' to implement the theoretical vision. They sucker Palestinians into rallies "supporting their cause", when in reality their goal is not Palestinian statehood, but to deconstruct Palestine nationality. This is Leninism, entryism.
http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/lh/article/viewFile/24904/23098
I recommend you read "The Gulag Archipelago" to see how this system really was. I've worked and met people who escaped (not emigrated, literally jailbreaked) these countries. A former neighbour had to evade a machine gun placement to cross the border. You see, Communist countries have to use violence to keep people IN. The border between Communist Eastern European nations and the West was guarded with machine guns, not to keep people out, but keep them in. The Berlin was was built to keep people IN.
Why would they build it otherwise? Why does a country which isn't that bad, need machineguns and walls to keep people IN? They were prison countries.
It's worked NOWHERE. Marxism is silly, not flawed, silly and evil.
The Communists had their reasons. Anyone against Communism was against the Peace and Brotherhood of Man, and obviously insane. Communism literally treated objections as a mental illness. I posed an article a few days ago, highlighting how this thinking is taking root here.
Communism, as defined by the "Socialist" advocates of today, involves the deconstruction of nations and of the family. "Socialists" today plan for a future where children are raised apart from their family, communally by the state so they won't even know who their family are. Everyone belongs to the state, works for the state. As the state argues that is is the democracy of the proletariat, it claims to have the right to dictate human affairs, at every detail, for everyones own good, of course.
In no way is Communism desirable, even if it COULD work. It is a system for ants, for sheeple, for a humanity degraded to mere cogs. It outdoes Capitalism ten fold in degrading people down to 'human capital'.
Good riddance to it. It wasn't just Stalin. Trotsky and Lenin were brutal and their ideas, which they forced were deadly. Mao Zedong killed people on a scale that is a multiple of Hitler. Pol Pot killed a large percentage of his country. Deaths directly attributed to a political ideology, applied by force and protected from questioning. Some of the causes of mass death seem downright absurd, darkly comical even.
The response to this post is #comment-157448">here. - Ed
admin
Sat, 2015-01-24 15:04
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To Kiev: "Don't take Donbass' kindness for weakness" - video
republished from #Donbass twitter page
Prime Minister and head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR/DPR) Alexander Zakharchenko stated Kiev had taken the DNR forces' "kindness for weakness" and warned Kiev that he had no fear of their forces because the army "cannot fight, and cannot defend themselves" at a press conference in Donetsk, Thursday.
James Sinnamon
Mon, 2015-01-26 02:16
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Wikipedia communist "mass killings" page flawed, inconsistent
#comment-157380">DennisK,
You have not responded to even one of the arguments I put in my previous post. Until you do so, I don't see why I should feel obligated to take you seriously.
Presumably, given that communism has killed "between 85 and 100 million", according to that Wikipedia article, surely you must think it would have been preferable for Hitler have won the Second World War and to have succeeded in ridding the world of communism?
Much of the death toll of up to 100 million, allegedly caused by communism, supposedly occurred in China, where the article claims that "at least 45 million" died#fnChina1" id="fnChina1txt"> 1 in the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" of 1958-1961 and "between 750,000 and 1.5 million people" were alleged to have died in the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.
Whilst I was aware of these claims, I have not been able to find out whether or not they were true. Nonetheless, these claims can only be properly evaluated within their proper historical context. The Wikipedia article fails to do this.
The Chinese Communist Party Came to power in 1949 after years of bloody war against both the invading Japanese and the brutal regime of Chiang Kai Shek. Chiang Kai Shek and his armies fled to Taiwan in 1949 and brutally crushed an uprising of native Taiwanese.
Almost immediately after the civil war ended, the Chinese were faced with a war of aggression by the United States and its allies against neighbouring 'North' Korea. In that war 3 million out of a total of 23 million Koreans died. Most of those who died were from North Korea or were their supporters in the South. Whilst the article claims "Mass killings have also occurred in ... North Korea," no mention is made of the war against Korea or the brutal repression of Koreans, from 1945 until 1950, by the South Korean regime of former Japanese collaborators.
Also Stalin failed to give the aid that China desperately needed both to rebuild its economy and to defend itself. This was formalised by Nikita Khruschev when he announced the Sino-Soviet split in 1956. From that year until Gough Whitlam and US President Nixon visited Beijing, China was extremely isolated and vulnerable.
Most probably, extreme measures were adopted by the Chinese government to deal with these circumstances. Whether or not it resorted to deliberate starvation and mass murder as you claim, I am not yet able to say.
The section on the Russian Red Terror states:
Note that the numbers claimed to have been killed here are quite small in comparison to the other vast slaughters that occurred in the same era.
Given that those whom the Bolsheviks were defending Russia against had just gotten Russia and the rest of Europe embroiled in the First World War that had needlessly caused the death of ten million combatants and eight million civilians, (and were to do the same, on an even more terrible scale, barely 20 years later) it would have been folly for the Bolsheviks not to have resorted to whatever measures they judged necessary to keep those forces from resuming power in Russia.
Footnote[s]
#fnChina1">1#fnChina1txt"> ↑ The link at http://web.mac.com/dikotter/Dikotter/Famine_2.html to the source for this this claim by the Wikipedia article is broken, by the way. - Ed, (26/1/15)
Dennis K
Mon, 2015-01-26 18:54
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Communism is idealism
Sheila Newman
Tue, 2015-01-27 16:53
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No communism without capitalism
Dennis K
Sat, 2015-01-31 09:46
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Communism is somewhat similar to Capitalism
James Sinnamon
Sun, 2015-02-01 02:52
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Attempt by "political and religious ideologists" to prevent WW1
I #comment-157448">wrote:
... then DennisK #comment-157549">wrote:
Our readers deserve better than this apparent attempt to trivialise such a gravely serious historical issue.
On 4 August 1914, the members of one "political and religious ideology", including its adherents who were running the Australian government at the time (see "Hell-Bent – Australia's leap into the Great War" (2014) by Douglas Newton), decided to start a bloody war that was to last over 4 years and cost the lives of 10 million combatants and 8 million civilians. Members of another "political and religious ideology," who had twice before – in 1911 and 1912 – prevented war, also tried to prevent that war breaking out, but, sadly, failed.
'Adherents' to the latter "political and religious ideology" included Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in Russia and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany. The latter two were murdered in January 1919 after they had participated a in failed revolt against those adherents to the other "political and religious ideology" which had led Germany into the First World War. They were killed by German FreiKorps mercenaries, many of whom were to form the core of Hitler's Nazi Party, which was to start another even more bloody and terrible war barely 20 years later.
Of the 21 members and 10 candidate members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party of Russia in 1917, only Stalin, Trotsky, and two others were still left alive or not imprisoned by 1939. The then exiled Trotsky was to be murdered on Stalin's orders in August 1940.
The people who led the first successful Communist Revolution in 1917 were not the same as those who committed the crimes which occurred under Stalin's rule. Had they lived and still been in control of the Soviet Union, there is every reason to expect that those crimes would not have occurred. They certainly don't deserve to be held culpable for Stalin's crimes.
Dennis K
Sun, 2015-02-01 13:13
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Factions during the Russian revolution
James Sinnamon
Sun, 2015-02-01 16:09
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Could ten invading armies have been defeated with harsh words?
DennisK #comment-158664">wrote:
I note that you have not cited sources to verify this claim about 'labour camps'. In any case, I already explained #LostChanceToStopNazism">above why I thought it was necessary for Lenin to resort to harsh measures, just possibly including 'labour camps', to defend his government in the middle of a savage civil war. In that post I cited #comment-250989">another post to another forum made nearly three years ago:
No-one has bothered to attempt to refute that argument, there or here.
I will address the remainder of DennisK's fallacies, omissions, inconsistencies and baseless assertions on another occasion.
Dennis K
Sun, 2015-02-01 22:03
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Show me where Communism worked
Sheila Newman
Mon, 2015-02-02 11:36
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Socialism, communism, dirigism and capitalist conspiracy
admin
Mon, 2015-02-02 12:20
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Cuba: another communist tyranny?
DennisK #comment-158728">wrote:
"Each time", Dennis?
How about Cuba?
The government of Cuba is formed by the Cuban Communist Party. The Cuban Communist Party is largely made up of what was formerly, the 26th of July Movement which came to power on 1 January 1959 in a country which was barely 150km south of the United States.
Almost immediately, the Cuban Communist Party government implemented reforms that was to transform Cuba from a capitalist society into a socialist society.
Contrary to your assertion, Cuba did not immediately become a ghastly police state which imprisoned or killed any Cuban who opposed the government. Not long after the triumph of the revolution, the United States sponsored an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles on 16 April 1961. That invasion was known as the "Bay of Pigs" invasion. Had Cuba been the tyranny that you implicitly claim that it must have been, then surely the Cuban population would have embraced the invaders and risen up against Castro or, at most, remained neutral. Instead they rallied to the support of their government and drove the invaders back into the sea.
Cuba may not be 'paradise on earth' – as if paradise could be possible in a world in which many countries have suffered the terrible consequences of military aggression by the United States and its allies in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Ukraine, Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, Korea, ... – and it's government many not be perfect, but surely, given the adversity it has faced, the Communist government of Cuba deserves credit?
Given the success of Cuba, why not acknowledge that the #LostChanceToStopNazism">extreme adversity faced by others who have tried to accomplish the same in the previous century, rather than any fundamental flaw in their plans, may have been one of the factors which caused the outcome?
Sheila Newman
Mon, 2015-02-02 13:07
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Cuba
Dennis K
Mon, 2015-02-02 20:50
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Cuba
James Sinnamon
Tue, 2015-02-03 00:41
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Cuba, Yugoslavia and Vietnam
DennisK #comment-158882">wrote
Can't you see that your own personal preferences are somewhat beside the point?
We were discussing statements such as the following:
I have shown, notwithstanding the clearly biased sites that you have linked to, that in the case of Cuba, the above statements are untrue. They were also not true in the case of Yugoslavia (which was destroyed as a result of war by NATO countries in 1999) and are untrue about Vietnam.
Dennis K
Wed, 2015-02-04 19:55
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Yugoslavia fell apart soon after Tito died
James Sinnamon
Sun, 2015-03-15 02:20
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1917 Bolshevik leaders complicit in their own murders by Stalin?
Dennis K #comment-157380">wrote on 25/1/15:
The First World in which over 15 million, including over 3 million Russians, died, and which drove Russia to revolution in 1917, is not a tragedy?
Dennis K wrote on 1/2/15:
The Soviet Union faced, as well as domestic counter-revolutionaries, an invasion of 13 foreign armies at the time. Had the Soviet government not resorted to harsh measures against its enemies a far more terrible bloodbath would have ensued.
Dennis K continued:
Perhaps, you should explain yourself more clearly.
Of the 16 members of the 25 members of the 1917 Central committee of the Bolshevik Party (later renamed the "Communist Party") still left alive in 1927 after the civil war and famine, 12 were to be subsequently murdered on Stalin's orders.
How is Stalin's murder of the same people you condemn for acting harshly against domestic counter-revolutionaries just an 'amplification' of those actions?
Dennis K
Mon, 2015-03-16 20:14
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Communism lead to millions of deaths and impoverishment
James Sinnamon
Mon, 2015-03-16 23:35
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Repetition and failure to respond
DennisK,
The #comment-165376">above post adds nothing to the discussion. Yet again, you have repeated what you have already posted and, yet again, you have failed to respond to my posts.
Note the contradiction between one sentence and the next:
The very next sentence is:
So which of the above do you hold to be true, DennisK? Does communism cause death and impoverishment everywhere it is applied, or does it merely "[result in] in low grade authoritarian police state[s]" presumably like Cuba and Yugoslavia of which you, unlike the Cubans or the Yugoslavs, also disapprove. The Yugoslav government stayed in power until 1999 when it was overthrown by a NATO war of aggression (with the help of Kosovar Islamist terrorists, some of whom are now fighting the Syrian people). The Cuban government has withstood attempts by its far more powerful northern neighbour to overthrow it since the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. How do you explain the survival for over 55 years of a government, which by your own logic must be hated by its people?
Until you address my arguments, this debate can't proceed.
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