I will never understand how people casually throw around communist talking points like these were not the talking points of some of the worst, most oppressive regimes ever. And the same people then are very vocally outraged when they hear fascist slogens (rightly so, but why is communist shit cool?).

I forget what the fallacy is called, but basically just because thing X is associated with Y and Y is bad doesn’t make X bad. If a communist leader killed people, it doesn’t necessarily mean communism is the reason he killed them.

In the same vain saying fascism is bad “because Hitler was a fascist” would also be a logical fallacy. Hitler also drank water but that doesn’t mean water is bad.

That’s not a very good example, because good and bad people drink water, pretty much everyone does. Here is a list of communist states:

en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_socialist_states_(comm…

I’d say that all of these sucked to live in. There are definitely states that treat their citizens better than these. If something always leads to death and suffering, maybe we can conclude that it’s a bad idea. Communists are not “associated with“ communism, they are communism.

As I said elsewhere:

Every socialist state that has ever existed has been, contextually, far better than what came before it, and in instances where socialism dissolved, better than what replaced it, for the working classes.

This is true for all of these. What’s also important is analyzing context, life expectancy doubled in both Russia and China thanks to the lives saved by socialism. Cuba has, in many years, a higher life expectancy than the US Empire. On the whole, there may be states where quality of life is higher for the working classes, but these are exclusively imperialist states that subsidize their safety nets with the spoils of plundering the global south, and is why these same countries are surging to the far-right as imperialism is decaying.

I’d say that all of these sucked to live in

And you’d be wrong to say so. Polls in most post-communist states (except some exceptionally right wing nationalist regimes such as the Baltics or Poland) clearly tell us that most people preferred living under socialism.

When talking about the effects of socialism, we need to compare with what came before or after. And what came after was horrifying:

Ahem. I wonder if non-communist states are any different, or it’s just that birth rates dipped before/during a World War, and they were all climbing back up until ~the '80s?

Would be an interesting thing to say. My graphs are Wikipedia screenshots from the “Demographics of X” for each country mentioned. Would you post some from, say, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, US…?

Sorry, the last time I was commenting from the toilet. I’ve done some looking up: France: Spain: Germany: Italy:

I mean, I know that 5 countries isn’t considered reliable statistics, I guess, but most of them are also on the rise in the given time period.

Thanks a lot for the extra info! My point was not particularly the population growth isolated, rather the total destruction of the demographics of most eastern block countries after the point in time in 1990 when the block is dissolved and the countries transition to capitalism. This is not apparent in the western capitalist countries because the dynamic of western Europe is that of imperial core whereas eastern Europe has become imperial periphery, to be exploited and denied equal footing than that of the west!