Comments by "ScorpioBornIn69" (@ScorpioBornIn69) on "PragerU"
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Conclusion
While the concept of "community sharing" sounds like a great idea, socialism and communism are not merely about sharing -- they are about control. Humans tend to want to control and regulate other humans. This ranges from the simple "control freak" who is intent upon running other people’s lives, to the megalomaniac who seeks to control the world. Socialism seeks to control and regulate the fruits of man’s labor. By controlling the fruits of one’s labor, one controls the laborer. According to the Bible, God grants each human the possession and control of the fruits of his own labor. As free-agents, we can use this wealth in a way that redounds to the glory of God (Matthew 19:21; 2 Corinthians 9:13), or we can use it for our own godless self-pleasure (Luke 12:16-21; 15:13; 16:19-24). Though God allows us to make the choice, He holds us accountable for the decisions we make (2 Corinthians 5:10).
Obviously, socialism would not be so appealing if all one knew of it was that it enabled some people to obtain total control over others. There is another, more deceptive dimension to it: Socialism appeals to man’s desire to be cared for and provided for by someone else. It frightens man to think that he is responsible for his own life and livelihood. Socialism offers him security (though at great costs in personal liberty). The state promises to feed him when he is hungry, clothe and shelter him when he is cold, and cure him when he is sick.
The term "nanny-state" has been appropriately applied to this arrangement. As the child takes comfort in the arms of his mother, so the citizen (better, denizen) takes comfort in the arms of the state. Herein lies the great and dangerous deception -- unlike a child’s mother, the monolithic mechanism of the state lacks the capacity to provide personal care for its "child." The collective’s real purpose is not to defend and preserve the rights of individuals, but to strengthen and promote itself. Christians must oppose socialism and communism, for these systems of economy and governance are contrary to God’s design of both man, government and economy.
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@illuminate4622 Red Terror
Main articles: Decossackization, Execution of the Romanov family, Lenin's Hanging Order, Red Terror, and Tambov Rebellion
The Red Terror was a period of political repression and executions carried out by Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. During this period, the political police (the Cheka) conducted summary executions of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people."[78][79][80][81][82] Many victims were "bourgeois hostages" rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation.[83] Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion of Baltic Fleet sailors and the Tambov Rebellion of Russian peasants. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions."[84] A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.[85][86]
According to Nicolas Werth, the policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory."[87] In the early months of 1919, perhaps 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed[88][89] and many more deported after their villages were razed to the ground.[90] According to historian Michael Kort: "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000."[91]
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@illuminate4622 Joseph Stalin
See also: Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin
Estimates of the number of deaths which were brought about by Stalin's rule are hotly debated by scholars in the fields of Soviet and Communist studies.[92][93] Prior to the collapse of the USSR and the archival revelations which followed it, some historians estimated that the number of people who were killed by Stalin's regime was 20 million or higher.[75][94][95] Michael Parenti writes that estimates on the Stalinist death toll vary widely in part because such estimates are based on "anecdotes" in absence of reliable evidence and "speculations by writers who never reveal how they arrive at such figures".[96]
After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives became available, containing official records of the execution of approximately 800,000 prisoners under Stalin for either political or criminal offenses, around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulags and some 390,000 deaths which occurred during kulak forced resettlement—for a total of about 3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[bh] However, official Soviet documentation of Gulag deaths is widely considered inadequate. Golfo Alexopoulos, Anne Applebaum, Oleg Khlevniuk and Michael Ellman write that the government frequently released prisoners on the edge of death in order to avoid officially counting them.[97][98] A 1993 study of archival data by J. Arch Getty et al. showed that a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.[99] Subsequently, Steven Rosefielde asserted that this number has to be augmented by 19.4 percent in light of more complete archival evidence to 1,258,537, with the best estimate of Gulag deaths being 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953 when excess mortality is taken into account.[100] Alexopolous estimates a much higher total of at least 6 million dying in the Gulag or shortly after release.[101] Jeffrey Hardy has criticized Alexopoulos for basing her assertions primarily on indirect and misinterpreted evidence[102] and Dan Healey has called her work a "challenge to the emergent scholarly consensus".[bi]
According to historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Stalin's regime can be charged with causing the "purposive deaths" of about a million people.[103] Wheatcroft excludes all famine deaths as "purposive deaths" and claims those that do qualify fit more closely the category of "execution" rather than "murder".[103] Others posit that some of the actions of Stalin's regime, not only those during the Holodomor, but also dekulakization and targeted campaigns against particular ethnic groups, can be considered as genocide[104][105] at least in its loose definition.[106] Modern data for the whole of Stalin's rule was summarized by Timothy Snyder, who concluded that Stalinism caused six million direct deaths and nine million in total, including the deaths from deportation, hunger and Gulag deaths.[bj] Michael Ellman attributes roughly 3 million deaths to the Stalinist regime, excluding excess mortality from famine, disease and war.[107] Several present scholars, among them Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore, Soviet/Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, and the director of Yale's "Annals of Communism" series Jonathan Brent, still put the death toll from Stalin at about 20 million.[bk][bl][bm][bn][bo]
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@illuminate4622 Great Purge
Main article: Great Purge
See also: Mass graves from Soviet mass executions, Mass operations of the NKVD, and Stalinist repressions in Mongolia
Mass graves dating from 1937–1938 opened up and hundreds of bodies exhumed for identification by family members[135]
Stalin's attempts to solidify his position as leader of the Soviet Union led to an escalation of detentions and executions, climaxing in 1937–1938 (a period sometimes referred to as the Yezhovshchina, or Yezhov era) and continuing until Stalin's death in 1953. Around 700,000 of these were executed by a gunshot to the back of the head.[136] Others perished from beatings and torture while in "investigative custody"[137] and in the Gulag due to starvation, disease, exposure and overwork.[br]
Arrests were typically made citing counter-revolutionary laws, which included failure to report treasonous actions and in an amendment added in 1937 failing to fulfill one's appointed duties. In the cases investigated by the State Security Department of the NKVD from October 1936 to November 1938, at least 1,710,000 people were arrested and 724,000 people executed.[138] Modern historical studies estimate a total number of repression deaths during 1937–1938 as 950,000–1,200,000. These figures take into account the incompleteness of official archival data and include both execution deaths and Gulag deaths during that period.[br] Former "kulaks" and their families made up the majority of victims, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed.[139]
The NKVD conducted a series of "national operations" which targeted some ethnic groups.[140] A total of 350,000 were arrested and 247,157 were executed.[141] Of these, the Polish operation which targeted the members of Polska Organizacja Wojskowa appears to have been the largest, with 140,000 arrests and 111,000 executions.[140] Although these operations might well constitute genocide as defined by the UN convention,[140] or "a mini-genocide" according to Simon Sebag Montefiore,[141] there is as yet no authoritative ruling on the legal characterization of these events.[106]
Citing church documents, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev has estimated that over 100,000 priests, monks and nuns were executed during this time.[142][143] Regarding the persecution of clergy, Michael Ellman has stated that "the 1937–38 terror against the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church and of other religions (Binner & Junge 2004) might also qualify as genocide."[144]
In the summer and autumn of 1937, Stalin sent NKVD agents to the Mongolian People's Republic and engineered a Mongolian Great Terror[145] in which some 22,000[146] or 35,000[147] people were executed. Around 18,000 victims were Buddhist lamas.[146]
In Belarus, mass graves for several thousand civilians killed by the NKVD between 1937 and 1941 were discovered in 1988 at Kurapaty.[148]
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@illuminate4622 Tibet
Main article: History of Tibet (1950–present)
According to Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism, the Chinese communists carried out a cultural genocide against the Tibetans. Margolin states that the killings were proportionally larger in Tibet than they were in China proper and "one can legitimately speak of genocidal massacres because of the numbers that were involved."[173] According to the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration, "Tibetans were not only shot, but they were also beaten to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded."[173] Adam Jones, a scholar who specializes in genocide, notes that after the 1959 Tibetan uprising the Chinese authorized struggle sessions against reactionaries, during which "communist cadres denounced, tortured, and frequently executed enemies of the people." These sessions resulted in 92,000 deaths out of a total population of about 6 million. These deaths, Jones stressed, may not only be seen as a genocide, but they may also be seen as an "eliticide", meaning "targeting the better educated and leadership oriented elements among the Tibetan population."[174] Patrick French, the former director of the Free Tibet Campaign in London, writes that the Free Tibet Campaign and other groups have claimed that a total of 1.2 million Tibetans were killed by the Chinese since 1950 but after examining archives in Dharamsala, he found "no evidence to support that figure."[175] French states that a reliable alternative number is unlikely to be known, but he estimates that as many as half a million Tibetans died "as a 'direct result' of the policies of the People's Republic of China" by using historian Warren Smith's estimate of 200,000 people who are missing from population statistics in the Tibet Autonomous Region and extending that rate to the borderland regions.[176]
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Tibet
Main article: History of Tibet (1950–present)
According to Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism, the Chinese communists carried out a cultural genocide against the Tibetans. Margolin states that the killings were proportionally larger in Tibet than they were in China proper and "one can legitimately speak of genocidal massacres because of the numbers that were involved."[173] According to the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration, "Tibetans were not only shot, but they were also beaten to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded."[173] Adam Jones, a scholar who specializes in genocide, notes that after the 1959 Tibetan uprising the Chinese authorized struggle sessions against reactionaries, during which "communist cadres denounced, tortured, and frequently executed enemies of the people." These sessions resulted in 92,000 deaths out of a total population of about 6 million. These deaths, Jones stressed, may not only be seen as a genocide, but they may also be seen as an "eliticide", meaning "targeting the better educated and leadership oriented elements among the Tibetan population."[174] Patrick French, the former director of the Free Tibet Campaign in London, writes that the Free Tibet Campaign and other groups have claimed that a total of 1.2 million Tibetans were killed by the Chinese since 1950 but after examining archives in Dharamsala, he found "no evidence to support that figure."[175] French states that a reliable alternative number is unlikely to be known, but he estimates that as many as half a million Tibetans died "as a 'direct result' of the policies of the People's Republic of China" by using historian Warren Smith's estimate of 200,000 people who are missing from population statistics in the Tibet Autonomous Region and extending that rate to the borderland regions.[176]
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