Double standards

"How many died as a result of the great Enclosure movement? Nobody cares. But Stalin and the kulaks? Why, that "proves" the failure of socialist theory." – ‘bobbyp’ at MaxSpeak

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4 thoughts on “Double standards

  1. Actually I care! Well, perhaps ‘care’ is overstating it, but I am interested, so can anyone tell me how many died as a direct result of the enclosures in England? I can soon look up how many died as a result of Lenin’s "cruel experiment" as conducted by ‘Uncle Joe’, but I should warn you, if you are looking for a comparison, it runs into millions. And also, the results were very different. The former was a success leading to a huge expansion in food supplies, whilst the latter was a dead loss – pun intended!

  2. The ‘millions’ is something of a red herring, in that you’d need to compare Russia’s 1917 population to the UK’s 1650 population in order to get a sensible deaths-per-capita measure. I agree, it’s not an impossible task; indeed, I should do it at some point.

    It’s quite possible that Stalin’s toll is proportionately even higher than the enclosure movement’s, which wouldn’t be surprising given Uncle Joe’s extreme evilness. I strongly suspect, though, that they’re of the same order of magnitude.

  3. Once you start chucking the famines in India during the Raj, the relative bodycounts start favouring the Communist side …

  4. I always understood that the fact that proves the inherent problem of Communism is that something along the lines of Stalin’s mass executions has happened in every single instance of a Communist state, whereas non-Communist states can exist for centuries at a time without torturing thousands of their own people to death.

    I’d also point to this little thing we call "progress": mass death was, sadly, not uncommon in the 17th Century, but life in the 20th Century was supposed to have improved somewhat since then. The fact that a Lada could travel from Moscow to Paris in less time than a 17th-Century stagecoach doesn’t show that the Soviets were really good at making cars.

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