Weird. It was supposed to be another Google Books link.
Fixed now. Thanks!
There have been totalitarian governments which have subverted some of the symbols and superficial rhetoric of communism, but this doesnât make them communist. They could call themselves Mickey Mouse Club for all it matters. Why it became a huge part of US propaganda and ideology is that it was perceived to be in US interests to oppose both distinct things, and that their casual conflation made this extremely easy to do. They wanted to, on the one hand, limit the expansion of totalitarian empires who they were at conflict of interests with - more for reasons of trade prospects than anything else. And they also wanted to discourage real communism, which is anti-eltist with focus on workers shared ownership instead of them being exploited. Because the US and much of the west considered this a win/win situation does not make the conflation real.
Expecting a US conservative who likes to complain about communism to actually read Marx in the good faith of understanding it - and not being afraid to discuss it with others - was equivalent to shaking the faith of religious zealots. More likely what you could expect to find were âtasty bitsâ taken out of context to confirm their own biases. I donât mean to suggest that anybody needs to agree with or read Marx. Marx himself actually had little patience for Marxists! But for so many people to complain about what such a thing represented without even trying to understand it was foolish and ignorant. Likewise, people who express outrage over other controversial groups of people such as in radical Islam without actually making much effort to listen to their speeches or read their articles. Most people donât care what it is, merely what it represents. And this requires having pundits to offer the âcorrectâ interpretation of such movements to be consumed by their constituents. Typically not an ideologically not intellectually honest process.
Your examples are what I have always just called âtotalitarian countriesâ. Their rhetoric is transparent because they are run by âelitesâ of career politicians or military. By which I mean not to say that they are accomplished, but merely entrenched as a separate class of people, and a concentration of power. Some might call it semantic nitpicking, but since most formulations of communism prescribe classless living and equal distribution of power, the totalitarian countries were not, and never intended to be, truly communist. Not just missing the mark a bit, they are completely opposite.
For instance, consider what Wackipedia has to say about what âJucheâ means, and itâs position as the central tenet of North Korean ideology.
Is that really what is on offer to the people subjected to this dictatorship? Subjectivity? Agency? It is a subversion of the ideal to mean itâs opposite, complete subjugation. The only âself-relianceâ they get is being captive audience in a siege state. It is not any kind of âcommuneâ.
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Circular logic at its finest. 
Couldnât resist.
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These countries werenât supposed to become utopia overnight; there was always supposed to be a transition (I believe the phrase is âa brief period of socialist ruleâ). The problem is these countries never left that phase and devolved into totalitarian nightmare states.
And do you really think that neither Lenin nor Mao nor Pol Pot ever intended to create a communist country? They always planned to become murderous dictators?
I would and do! 
Lenin I think aspired to something truly communist. But the revolution of 1917 and the immediate years subsequent were far from bloodless. The nail in the coffin of his efforts was that despite his tireless work, he never implemented measures to prevent the abuses which followed with Stalin.
I would call neither Mao nor Pol Pot communist at all. Nor Stalin. Mao at least had his own philosophy, but under he and Stalin both China and USSR degenerated into fake state-socialist dictatorships, more like feudalism than real social projects. I like agrarian socialism, but I think Pol Pot was a nutcase. Dictators are not misunderstood humanists who were forced into despotism by circumstance. They are merely examples that those who strive to exercize control over others tend to be sociopaths.
If you think using terms to mean the complete opposite is a minor quibble, knock yourself out.
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I was being cheeky and a little flip, but in all seriousness, I think Iâve made it clear that I think one inevitably leads to the other.
Trying to enforce a system of fairness leads inevitably to tyranny? The cynicism behind this outlook is easy to understand. Exploitation and violence are more commonplace and easier to bring about than any sort of optimal system. Nearly all philosophies are subverted to first seduce, and then to subjugate the masses.
It sounds like you assume a causal link between communist doctrine (which you donât seem at all familiar with), and red terror, and other such atrocities. But this can be interpreted from a more ideologically neutral perspective by simply considering them as typical acts of bloody civil war. There is no reason to assume that these would have been more humane if they rallied under the banner of a different belief system.
Even the US had far more fatalities and wounded in its own civil war than it did any other conflict. Nearly equivalent to that of every other US war combined. For all of the ideological suspicion the US throws around, this indicates that it is its own worst enemy. No communism required.
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I concede youâre better read than I am on the subject of doctrine (mine extends to The Communist Manifesto and Eighteenth Brumiere, but thatâs it â Iâll match you book for book on the history, though ) but even if the theory doesnât condone it (doesnât it?), in practice, terror and communism seem inextricably linked.
Yes, yes, yes there is. The Tsar was not a saint by any stretch, but even at his worst, say in the âBloody Sundayâ incident, about 1,000-4,000 people were killed, depending on the source. At their worst, the Bolsheviks killed hundreds of thousands, mostly civilians. As I said earlier, itâs a question of scale.
No, I do not consider myself to be particularly well-read about communism. Thatâs just an easy way to frame a position for me on one side of a debate. As for what theories of communist revolution condone, they seem to acknowledge the revolutions and civil wars nearly always involve a lot of violence. I think this is acknowledged in a pragmatic, matter-of-fact way. No, the theory does not seem to condone genocide. You canât help the masses by slaughtering them!
The act of linking revolutionary bloodshed with the ideas of communism is something you can do, and I understand why you would. But no, the link does not seem to be âinextricableâ. Any nuanced critique of such big historical events is always more about the particulars of what people did and why, than what their professed ideologies might have been. This goes for any movement, any war. The Bolsheviks were a particular people, in unique circumstances, so an honest evaluation of their actions will focus upon their particulars. Starting with an ideological bias - for or against - and working backwards to interpret it from there would be poor history.
Discussion of how just the Tsar may or not have been is missing the point of how the revolution unfolded. What I was saying that the social upheaval could have still been severe if they decided to replace the system with any number of others. Much of the immediate bloodshed was a direct result of a refusal to implement democratic procedures after the initial revolution. There is not anything about communism itself which prevents or prohibits having democratic elections. Many would argue that the USSRs refusal of meaningful democracy is what prevented them from ever becoming a communist country. But this becomes meaningless for you if you simply choose to call the resulting mess âcommunismâ for your own reasons. Then we are arguing the point using effectively different terminology.
I agree we probably talked past the point of usefulness (and wandered away from the original topic long, long ago), so Iâll leave you with this: even taking into consideration the technical differences in their respective approaches, all the groups I mentioned earlier were striving toward a similar political ideal.
That ideal either has something inherently wrong with it, or itâs the worldâs unluckiest ideology, because it keeps barfing up monsters. For all its problems, the capitalist West never produced a Mao or Pol Pot.
Are you sure about that? Just because you canât identify a single person to blame, this does not imply that the imperialism of the west has not had a similar body count. How capitalism works is that it abstracts personal and governmental responsibility into constant financial and economic warfare. This deliberately allows for a âhands offâ way of subjugating and killing populations without direct accountability. Nobody told your family to âdo this or dieâ! It was just âmarket forcesâ! That they died as a consequence of an economic system is merely an unfortunate coincidence.
You dismissed the genocides of colonizing the Americas as being âa drop in the bucketâ, but many studies suggest that they could have been a median range of 45 million or so between 1492 and 1900, which is certainly more than the Bolshevik Red Terror and Khmer Rough massacres combined. Even adding Stalin and Mao - there was a lot of killing, but they didnât depopulate whole continents. Granted, the figures are always suspect. Those who commit genocide typically donât keep exact figures, and piecing it together after the fact is not an exact science. Also factoring in the uncertainty of direct murder against death by infection, siege, imprisonment, and other tactics.
And of course, the effects of western colonialism of the Americas did not end in 1900.
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No, just genocide in Africa, Australia and the Americas. Not to mention slavery.
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And war after war after war.
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Funny how you both had to reach back at least 200 years to a completely different economic and political context to find a rough equivalence. Pol Potâs genocide wasnât even 40 years ago.
So you just go by date and body count alone?
You do realise that these effects are still being felt surely?
How about some examples of covert regime change?
Some of Capitalismâs more recent ugliness?
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I said from 1492 to 1900. Not 200 years ago. I think in some ways its worse because it demonstrates that the deaths are not due to a single deranged despot, but to an entire economic system operating with different people over hundreds of years. And no, I never said I âneededâ to provide this particular example. You dismissed it before as being negligible in significance and scale, and I disagreed. The genocide of the Americas is an easy and cogent example to make. But, like I said, this process did not stop in 1900. Itâs just that one has to dig through a lot more obfuscated data as we get to modern times, because some sociopaths actually hide their murder instead of publicizing it.
I donât think so. The extent to which elections are meaningful and how they can be subverted I think is relevant to any discussion of democratic process. My dad was a big red scare casualty as well. I asked him âWhy do you say the Soviets are not a democracy? They have elections there!â. To which my dad replied to the effect: âYes, but they are only for show, meaningless elections which front for the same totalitarian interests!â. Because they were a society which prevented free travel, spied on their own citizens, and controlled the machinery of the state for purposes of shadowy warmongering whilst fiercely defending their own elitist, comfortable positions.
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That sounds familiar.
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