Interesting. I just read a long expose on Mao's party and the tens of millions of Chinese people they are responsible for killing. Can you recount a similar story of the West? Just trying to understand how it compares.
There's a huge amount of documented history of mass killings, destruction of institutions, and economic exploitation by the West and USA in particular. By American authors, too.
Frankly, I'm astonished that you aren't aware of this.
I never said I wasn't aware of the faults of the West. I'm not naive enough to think Western culture is anything close to being innocent of crimes (many which are, as you pointed out, documented).
However, I'm simply pointing out that the collectivist culture of these countries in the 20th century was responsible for killing vast swathes of their own populations. My question was, of the documented horrors influenced by Western culture, which do you see as being comparative to this unfathomable death toll?
Genocide of Native American peoples, enslavement of Africans, political subjugation of LatAm, largest modern gulag system (#1 prisoners per capita, prison slavery still practiced).
Unquestionably some of these were unacceptable acts. But the numbers don't stack up. There's also a huge qualitative difference.
According to [0] there was a population decline adding up to 4 million native deaths (from all causes, including hunger and disease) over the past half a millennium.
Russia and China killed 5-10 million of their own people just in the past century. They had cannibal banquets where they quite literally ate the rich in public ceremonies. China, right now, has more than a million Muslims in prison camps, churning out gadgets for the communist economic machine.
If the issue is that you hate the United States, you'll always find something to criticize, and I think we'll never find common ground.
I grew up surrounded by many anti-American ideas. But when I tried to examine that place from a neutral point of view, in the proper context, after traveling to and living in many places, I found it impossible not to become a raving fan.
I had a really hard time stomaching the cannibalism. I had no idea this all happened until I started digging into it more recently. The stories of people being disemboweled while still alive and having their intestines feasted on just seems incomprehensible.
> If the issue is that you hate the United States, you'll always find something to criticize, and I think we'll never find common ground.
That's the issue, I'm not viewing this through a moral lens. I know you believe a priori the West is essentially Good and communism is essentially Bad, because that is what we are taught in school. Then it becomes easy to find evidence that fits your conclusion, there is literally a government-backed industry manufacturing such "evidence" (USG has earmarked something like $3B purely for funding anti-China propaganda). There's no point trying to reason someone out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into.
I think both systems have pros/cons, and the proof is in the pudding. China evolved out of a difficult colonial period and civil war to become world leader in many technologies.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
> I know you believe a priori the West is essentially Good and communism is essentially Bad, because that is what we are taught in school.
I think you're attacking a strawman here, what OP is pointing out for the faults of the West, it is still a preferable choice in comparison to the brutality the Communists performed on on their own people. It's ironic really because the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward very much is a difficult thing to ignore, if at all neccessary given that Asian Tigers that China modeled itself from, in Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan did not have to resort to such policies to achieve their wealth.
I grew up in the third world in an anti-US intellectual environment. I lived in and visited countries from across the spectrum.
Now, I've concluded that the West is Good and communism is Bad. Nothing a priori about it. My only prior is that I want people to be nice, rich, happy, and free.
> They had cannibal banquets where they quite literally ate the rich in public ceremonies.
Out of curiosity, what are the sources for this claim? I'm not disputing at all that communist regimes have committed large-scale evil (often beyond my wildest imagination), but nonetheless I'd like to verify this.
Google the Guangxi Massacre, the official investigation itself agrees that people very much killed and eaten in a frenzy of class struggle during the cultural revolution.
