Every day we celebrate.
6 Likes
“Hey, governor, how 'bout a day commemorating the defeat of Nazism at the end of World War II?”
“Whoa, hey, I don’t want to piss off my base!”
15 Likes
That was a bit over a week ago.
8 Likes
90% of the indigenous population woudl like a word with you Mr. DeSantis… but they are having trouble talking from the grave.
14 Likes
Indeed, one cannot ignore the facts unless one knows what they are!
And a +1 vote for every suggestion of a “victims of right-wing economic late-stage capitalist fuckwittery” holiday, or similar.
11 Likes
“…is the same thing as democratic socialism is the same thing as social democracy is the same thing as the Democrat Party.”
and, again, the GQP is the exact thing they tirelessly accuse liberals of being,
8 Likes
Full stop
10 Likes
Nah, I don’t think it’s a good idea for DiSantis to be executed in a CIA assisted effort by a foreign military. 
4 Likes
You know, I hear that “100,000,000 victims of Communism” thing quite a bit. Does anyone know where that figure comes from? Because I’d be interested in calculating the “victims of Capitalism” by the same metrics.
8 Likes
I dunno, how big was the Romanov family?
2 Likes
Or a couple months?
10 Likes
Desantis totally made this up, and it wasn’t a thing before today. And November 7 was deliberately chosen for being before the election, and it’s totally not related to being the date of the start of Bolshevik control of Russia and the Soviet Union.
5 Likes
Does that mean that they will learn that some of the first victims of the Soviet Union were the communists who disagreed with the Bolsheviks?
And when will it be “Victims of the White Terrors Day”?
13 Likes
But they can’t give people a day off to exercise their democratic franchise on voting day. 
10 Likes
Stalin and Mao probably account for most of that number. Estimates for the number that Mao killed, either through political purges or – more often – through wildly-foolish or callously-indifferent policies – run as high as 78 million. Estimates of Stalin’s body count (using similar mechanisms) go as high as 60 million. Pol Pot probably contributed another 3 million, the Kims between them could have killed about the same number. Then there are lesser players like Castro, Hoxha, the CP of Vietnam and assorted African nations etc. to round out the score.
The highest estimates come from people who, like DeSantis, consider anyone left of Reagan to be hardline Marxists, and may depend on pinning every single excess death on “communism”: twenty million Russians died fighting Hitler? Communism! Famine in a nominally-Communist developing nation? Communism! Etc.
Still, there’s no denying that Mao and Stalin killed a shit-ton of people. Even if you took a more ‘conservative’ (ahem) count of their contributions to excess mortality, it might not be too hard to reach that 100 million figure.
But you could also observe that what Mao and Stalin had in common wasn’t so much Communism as that they were both authoritarian dictators ruling over large, populous and underdeveloped countries. Stalin, in particular, seems to have been less dedicated to the ideals of Communism than the principle that whatever happened, he should be The Boss. While Communism seems to be particularly good at creating the necessary conditions for mass murder by dictators, there are other important variables to be taken into consideration.
I wouldn’t want to say “communism doesn’t kill; authoritarianism and dictatorial cults of personality kill.” But it might be true to say that “authoritarianism kills; authoritarians in a supposedly communist system kill even more.” That might be partly because of communism’s love of central planning and grand solutions. Even the most dedicated political murderers like Stalin can only have their goons kill so many people directly. But if you can manage to fuck up your economic or agricultural policy in a large poor nation where things are already a bit borderline, then the sky’s your limit. It’s worth noting that even Winston “Champion of Freedom” Churchill had to leverage this killer combo of natural forces and bad policy to rack up his own 3 million kills in Bengal in the 1940s.
At the end of the day, if you find yourself staring at ten million chalk outlines on the floor, it’s almost never just an “-ism” that’s responsible. There’s almost always some specific psychotic asshole who thought he had all the answers, and a bunch of lesser assholes who gave him free rein. Which, not at all ironically, is exactly the kind of situation that DeSantis would like to construct.
If DeSantis wanted to declare a Victims of Authoritarianism Day, and spend the day educating people to be suspicious of authoritarianism and cults of personality, I’d be behind him all the way. But that, I think, is not on his agenda. He’s absolutely onboard with authoritarian rule and maximum leaders; they just have to be the right (Right) ones.
13 Likes
Seems an appropriate moment to repost~
6 Likes
IRRC the figure originally comes from this book:
8 Likes
Second Life fist bump. Loved that place.
2 Likes
You’re right, it has deep pre-DeSantis roots going all the way back to *checks linked website*…Trump.
Since 2017, the President has issued a yearly proclamation declaring November 7 as National Day for the Victims of Communism.
Just because it’s toady copycat political opportunism doesn’t mean it’s not still political opportunism.
And just fun to note that while all of their mission language is around the evils of Marxism (when not deliberately conflating with socialism) their two leading blog entries are about events supporting Ukrainians against Putin…a decidedly not communist authoritarian.
4 Likes
