AH.com Votes: Greek parliamentary election, 2012

[The Red]

Originally Posted by Abhakhazia

Typical Pro-Communist backlash.

Humanity is too greedy, too conformed to the greatness and ideals of the past to ever truly accept Communism.

Typical capitalist response, human's are naturally greedy, thus they'll happily put up with being exploited so the can watch others grow rich.

[Don_Giorgio]

According to new infos Democratic Alliance (DISY) will be dissolved and merge with ND so all votes so far (and future) in this poll cast for DISY will be transfered to ND...

[Don_Giorgio]

Also DRASI has announced that they will form a coalition of parties with DX for the upcoming elections so votes in this poll for these two parties will be combined...

[God-Eater of the Marshes]

Drasi looks totally rad. Nice, clam centrists who seem like they've got some kind of sensical thought processes.

Honestly, anything with "radical left" in it frightens me. Though admittedly not as much as a party that bluntly states their hate of capitalism.

[stefanbl]

Originally Posted by MKN

It's worth noting that North Korea is actually fascist. It just has a red coat of paint.

I think NK is it's own special kind of fuck up.

Also Unions are great.

[stefanbl]

Originally Posted by Hrvatskiwi

Typical anti-Communist arguments that have no foundation in reality. If a state calls itself Communist, but doesn't act Communist in practice, its not Communist. North Korea is a prime example of this. It's effectively a monarchy. Period. There's nothing Communist about it. It encourages worship of the Kims (not cult of personality, full-on WORSHIP. They get taught in school that Kim Jong-Il could throw pinecones and they'd turn into grenades). The leadership is hereditary, also not Communist.

China too is not Communist. Being state-Capitalist, having relative economic freedom and political repression mirrors Fascism more than Communism. Also, you can throw a hint of heavy nationalism in there, with all of China's claims on territory from the Ming dynasty etc. And with the Hans colonising everywhere, which effectively weakens Uighurs, Mongols, Tibetans etc.etc. Also, how does keeping your currency down make you evil? Just because you have smarter economic policy than America, which I suppose is the only nation that deserves to be a superpower?

As for the Stalin thing, he WAS a horrible despot, no denying it. But we shouldn't take his actions as the definition of Communism. Leninist Russia is far better to look at for that. Also, before you bring up famines etc. in Russia and purges etc. during and after the Russian Civil War, you should remember that a) Communism was an experimental ideology, and they needed to tweak with it, just like the West historically tweaked with constitutional monarchy, democracy and capitalism. Also, purges in Russia were necessary to stop further instability, which would be bad for everyone. Same thing happened OTL-post-WWII Yugoslavia.

The only place the purges were necessary in was Stalin's head.

[stefanbl]

Originally Posted by Don_Giorgio

According to new infos Democratic Alliance (DISY) will be dissolved and merge with ND so all votes so far (and future) in this poll cast for DISY will be transfered to ND...

Then I'd vote for Recreate Greece or DRASI

[Don_Giorgio]

Greens struck a deal with Democratic Left for cooperation but they will present separate ballotpapers in the upcoming elections so votes for them in this poll will be calculated separately...

[XNM]

Originally Posted by Don_Giorgio

Greens struck a deal with Democratic Left for cooperation but they will present separate ballotpapers in the upcoming elections so votes for them in this poll will be calculated separately...

I suppose it'd be fair to merge the votes of the parties you mentioned (DISY/ND). We can assume that the results on election day are the election day results in this scenario -- like, we can pretend like we haven't stretched the votes over the last month.

Thanks, Don.

[Don_Giorgio]

Originally Posted by MKN

I suppose it'd be fair to merge the votes of the parties you mentioned (DISY/ND). We can assume that the results on election day are the election day results in this scenario -- like, we can pretend like we haven't stretched the votes over the last month.

Thanks, Don.

Plus we must merge the votes for DRASI and DX...

[stefanbl]

Originally Posted by Don_Giorgio

Plus we must merge the votes for DRASI and DX...

What the 2 and the 0?

[Dan1988]

For anyone considering ND: note that they too are also responsible for the mess that Greece is in.

[XNM]

We're almost to 100 voters.

Hopefully ANTARSYA stays above...wait...is the threshold three or five percent?

[blindgoose]

Originally Posted by MKN

We're almost to 100 voters.

Hopefully ANTARSYA stays above...wait...is the threshold three or five percent?

Three percent.

[Romanos]

Originally Posted by Dan1988

For anyone considering ND: note that they too are also responsible for the mess that Greece is in.

This should be VERY much stressed.

[Don_Giorgio]

When we are over 100 votes it will be safe to extract a first estimation of seats based in this poll...

[XNM]

To whoever voted "other": which party did you have in mind?

I should have specified that anyone who votes other should say which party they're voting for.

[Hercule Poirot]

Originally Posted by Hrvatskiwi

Heres something from a pro-democracy source on NK: "In medieval times the system of ownership assumed that the land, its produce, and the people themselves were essentially property of a king. To present precious goods to the king was the natural duty of each citizen. Following the collapse of social classes and the beginning the democracy, taxes were substituted for presents to the king and were used by citizens to manage their communities.

In North Korea, however, presents to the king are still required, though the regime declares that social classes no longer exist. People dedicate their meat, produce, and fur to the Dear Leader while their children go hungry and under clothed."

Yes, people have to raise rabbits for the "Dear Leader". Also, the Kim's public relations encourage a very similar phenomenon to Emperor worship.

You aren't just describing North Korea, but all Communistic states that did not dilute itself with capitalism (such as China now)

As for the "Communism has never worked", I think you have to take realpolitik considerations into this. Lets look at a few of these states under the looking glass. The USSR: from the outset essentially the whole world was against it. They survived the Leninist experimental period (with a few failings), but were starting to get relatively stable.

Largely due to employing New Economic Policy (ie allowing certain forms of capitalism), and not openly invading the rest of the world as Trotsky and others wanted.

Going into the Stalinist period, they had an unbridled autocrat, and to top it all off were the target of the biggest land invasion in history. More than 20 million CIVILIANS died at the hands of the Fascists. After the war, their historically most prosperous European lands had to be rebuilt, essentially from scratch. Their consumer base was impoverished from the war. By contrast the USA was the richest it had ever been. It took Western Europe with relative ease, since the back of the German army was already broken by the Soviets, who bore the brunt of the fighting. Half the world was in debt to the USA. This wasn't because the USA was capitalist. I assure you, if the USA had been Communist, and the USSR capitalist, the USSR would still have been worse off. After this, we had the Cold War, where the USA took full advantage of its head start. Plus, the USSR gave states like China significant aid, who proceeded to screw them over.

Nonsense by now, plenty of communist countries which were far ahead in 1945 have fallen behind. For example South Korea was the rural, agarian half of Korea yet their living standards are several times superior to that of North Korea or even for that matter the former USSR (mind you Korea also suffered a devestating war and had no industrial base from which to even rebuild).

In Afghanistan, the Marxist regime was opposed by the Taliban, who had AMERICAN support.

Mujahadeen are not synonymous with the Taliban.

In Vietnam, the Americans pretty much destroyed the country. Again they had to work from scratch. In Albania, Bulgaria and Romania, they didn't have anything anyway. They aren't exactly rich now either, despite being 'democratic'. Yugoslavia did relatively well, having the fourth biggest army in Europe and a suprisingly successful space program, as well as being a role model for the non-aligned movement.

You forgot East Germany and Czechoslovakia both of which were reasonably developed before World War II and are quite backward now compared to undeveloped areas at the time such as Spain or southern Italy.

In China, we had Mao, a ridiculously murderous despot who somehow convinced people that keeping them socially and economically behind would propel them forward. We're talking about a guy who thought that North Korea should be like Kampuchea. The gist of it is, that these circumstances have come up which prevent these nations from being successful, not their ideology. Some of these circumstance are bad luck, like Mao being in power. Others are geographical or pretty much historically inevitable (USSR's position). And democracy and the free-market hasn't worked in most of those cases as well. If China liberalised politically, it'd be chaos.

Why would it be chaos? Are the Chinese people naturally stupid for example? Other East Asiatic countries are democratic and all of them are orderly and prosperous.

Originally Posted by MKN

The (modern) communists in Greece haven't either.

And, for one thing, a synagogue was vandalized with a few Golden Dawn emblems, among other crimes linked to the far-right.

And businesses are being burnt and looted. Both are equally crimes IMO.

Just because something hasn't worked doesn't mean it will not. Most attempts at creating a communist society have failed not because of a flaw in the ideology, but for other reasons.

Well...

Maybe if it fails only once, but after dozens of attempts I don't have much faith personally.

The chief problem with communism is that it has to be both a social and political ideology. If you try to take modern America and turn it communist, it'll fail, because of the very much un-communistic culture. So you have to transform both the political system and the culture.

That's why communism has so often failed. Not because capitalism is morally superior and more true to "human nature" (which doesn't exist).

Exactly, Anglo-American culture prefer evolutionary politics as opposed to the extremes of reaction and revolution and has a stronger free-market tradition (in the Viking, Anglo-Saxon heritage) as opposed to the stronger feudalistic/statist traditions-Spengler called this the divide between the Viking and the Teuctonic Knight.

And there have been some close successes in history. See: the Paris Commune, Anarchist Catalonia, and the Free Territory of Ukraine. Note that they all failed not from within, but from without (the Paris Commune fell to the republican French forces, Catalonia was conquered during the Spanish Civil War, and the Free Territory was overrun by the Bolsheviks).

Is this the same Paris Commune that took the archbishop of Paris hostage and had him martyred later on? If the definition of communist success are Jacobin thugs... Catalonia if I remember correctly allowed privately owned farms as long as they didn't hire people to work for them.

It's not communist either.

If you look at North Korea, it's obviously fascist. For one thing, their military fetishism that dwarfs that of the US by about a million times.

Communism and militarism are not contradictory. Plus a fascist society would have a economy based on syndicates as seen in Italy.

Originally Posted by The Red

Typical capitalist response, human's are naturally greedy, thus they'll happily put up with being exploited so the can watch others grow rich.

So they'd prefer a society where there's absolutely no chance of gaining wealth?

[Hercule Poirot]

Two things to chew on:

1. Many of you have argued that no communist state in history has truly implemented Marxism and that countries like the USSR or the PRC are simply corruptions of communism. Yet the KKE (which is how the argument began anyways), is not "the Soviets did it wrong" type of Marxist party but rather "If you liked Brezhnev, you'll love us" type of unrepentent, oldguard commie party.

2. Communism's ideology as argued by Marx is naturally totalitarian: http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Marxism.html (Note that this was written not by a conservative or a libertarian but by a "progressive").

[XNM]

One more vote left and Don can calculate preliminary seat results!