[AnimalMuppet]

Most bloody? That's objectively true, in terms of total body count, and especially total body count of their own citizens. (Most bloody in terms of deaths per person per year that they had the opportunity to kill is probably the Nazis - although Cambodian Communism, if considered separately from all of communism, probably tops even the Nazis.)

Most horrible? It doesn't seem unreasonable to use body count of a country's own citizens as a proxy for "horror".

[KozmoNau7]

You're lumping a lot of different ideologies together under one umbrella term, even though 1) they were wildly different in practice and implementation, and 2) most of them only paid the tiniest bit of lip service to what Marx envisioned, and 3) were actually just good old tyrannical dictatorships, falsely using the promise of communistic ideals to pacify the populace.

Did you read the article?

I've found it a very common tendency to lump everything free market capitalists don't like as "communism bad!" and "socialism bad!", which I guess stems from decades and decades of cultural indoctrination, fueled by the military industrial complex.

For instance, an anarcho-communist is very far from whatever haphazard centrally planned mess was in place in the USSR at any given time.

[golergka]

> most of them only paid the tiniest bit of lip service to what Marx envisioned

Oh, the old "no real scotsman" argument. See, the whole communist ideology is like convincing people to jump of a cliff so they can fly: when they inevitably fall to their death, you just tell that since they didn't fly, it wasn't what you envisioned.

Dictatorship and blood is the inevitable outcome of Marx's ideas executed on scale of millions. As inevitable as gravity.

[KozmoNau7]

Yet another examples of a completely rigid worldview, no doubt caused by decades of anti-socialism propaganda and indoctrination. There is absolutely no call for the frothing-at-the-mouth reaction so commonly seen from free market/capitalism proponents.

Did you read the article?

https://aeon.co/essays/the-merits-of-taking-an-anti-anti-com...

Marxism and what happened in countries like USSR, China and Cambodia only have an extremely tenuous connection, most of it related to the propaganda fed to the populace to force the tyrannical regime on them, without too much opposition.

[golergka]

> no doubt caused by decades of anti-socialism propaganda and indoctrination

Dude, I live and Moscow. My whole family survived 70 years of communism. I seen first hand how capitalism and free markets raised us from hunger and poverty to first world country living standards.

Please, don't make assumptions about people on the internet, you may end up completely wrong.

[KozmoNau7]

In that case you should also have noticed the crushing poverty "enjoyed" by many Russians, while the über-capitalist oligarchs live in outrageous luxury.

If you think the majority of people in Russia enjoy a first world standard of living, you're sorely mistaken. Moscow is very much an outlier.

[golergka]

> In that case you should also have noticed the crushing poverty "enjoyed" by many Russians

Compared to Soviet Union, modern Russia is light years ahead. Of course, all this progress is built on the foundation laid down in the 90s, and is slowly deteriorating away for the last 10 years.