Communism?

What about the Soviet Union? It is hard but it's not impossible.

 

You are poinitng out the most succesfull and advanced capitalist nations.

For the record:
France - 10 percent unemployment
Germany - Huge economic problems
China - Peasants are worse off than they were thirty years ago
Israel - What a lovely country.

How about Sudan, Indonesia, Brazil?

Cuba has been a colony for some 500 years, until the revolution that started in the 1950's.


The 1953 census divided the population of Cuba into 57 percent urban, 43 percent rural.

Before the revolution:

* 90 percent of the rural population were malnurished
* 50 percent of the rural population were illiterate
* 25 percent unemployment in total

* Houses having lights (in the form of electricity):
All Cuba: 58.2 %
Urban: 87.0 %
Rural: 9.1 %

Baths:
Tub or shower:
All Cuba: 44.4 %
Urban: 64.9 %
Rural: 90.5 %

54.1 percent of the rural population did not have any toilets at all, not even a privy.

In rural areas, particularly, a large number of children got infected with parasitic worms, suffer miserably, and die a painful death.

Ray Brennan, Chicago newspaperman, gave a vivid account of this horror:

Parasites grow and mulitply within the bodies of little children.
Some of those worms, the size of an ordinary lead pencil, gather in clusters or balls, clog the intestinal system, block elimination, and cause anguished deaths. Such parasites often get into the body through the soles of the feet of children walking without shoes on infected ground. After a child dies the parasites may come slithering from the mouth and nasal passages, searching for a living organism on which to feed. What has been done about it over the years? Nothing.
​

This is history, however, thanks to the revolution.

Unemployment is down at 1.9 percent.

Child mortality is as low as 5.8, lower than that of all of the Americas, including the United States (7.0), with the exception of Canada, which is at 5.0. Highest is Haiti (76).

Illiteracy is gone. Everyone could read and write a few years after the revolution.

Before the revolution, Cuba had soem 6,000 doctors. Today, the island has 70,000 doctors, and even providing medical services to over 85 million people around the world. (no joke)

The country is now able to operate and provide services in all branches of ophthalmology to hundreds of thousands of patients. One hundred thousand Venezuelan brothers and sisters will receive theses services this year, in which, until yesterday, July 25, 25,024 patients from said country and a similar number of Cubans had been operated on.

No less than 15 thousand citizens of the Caribbean community will receive this form of medical care between the second half of June 2005 and June 2006. Venezuela and Cuba have offered to provide another 100 thousand Latin Americans with this service within the same period.

I wish I had more facts and statistics at hand right now, but like Arnold says, I'll be back.

Decent for those who "have a say" in the market; Horrible for those who don't. South Africa is one of the worst, if not the worst country in Africa. AIDS, rape, crime, extreme poverty, racial discrimination (remember the apartheid, which the the United States and Western Europe so proudly supported?), etc. "Biggest economy" doesn't matter when thsoe who profit from the economy is a wealthy elite consisting of a few hundred people, in a nation of 45,3 million.

"South Africa faces major problems" [...] - BBC country profiles.


"The country has the highest number of HIV/Aids patients in the world. Around six million South Africans are infected with HIV." - ibid

 

I understand but the HIV/AIDs increase is beacuse it hasn't been stoped. And over time the popultaion grows and the number of people with AIDs/ HIV will grow with it. And what internet site did you take that off of?

 

The problem with this discussion is the wealth variable. In Cuba, for example, although the monetary statistics are lacking in many areas, it seems more than one census has concluded the people are happy with their living conditions. One article I read (sorry, from a magazine no longer available to me to get a name or volume #) offered the local prostitutes wouldn't trade what they were doing for anything they'd heard about in America. Seems they are perfectly content with the social order and accomodations they currently possess. And although China is making astounding strides in capitol gains, a good percentage of the population is concerned that their new-found wealth is based solely on their uncanny ability to copy the technology offered them, not from original thinking of their elders, peers, or youth.
You can measure capitol gain and one country will be the leader, measure quality of life and another will be victorious. Gauge a society by health standards and still another will dominate. It's really hard to call a race when there's no one can agree on the prize and there's a hundred finish lines.

 

HIV/AIDS is just half the story. South Africa is a really sad story. Miserable.

Are you refering to the statistics of Cuba?

If that's so... CUBA: Anatomy of a Revolution, by Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, Cuban statistics, UNICEF, facts acquired through time, etc.

Regarding unemployment in France.. Several sources (BBC, CNN, etc).

 

I hate commies, and I always will. We could see in the past, that it doesn't work, so I really don't understand those people, who can say "I'm commie". If I would ever say this, my grandpa, who died 8 yrs ago, would come down from the sky to tell me I am stupid. He was an "enemy of regime", so my family knows very well, who commies were.

 

So, you know that there have been lots of oppressive reigiemes marching in the name of capitalism right? And yet i dont see me going, all capitalists are vile murderers, they are all like pinochet!

And your a big john lenon fan, do you hate him?

 

all communist are not evil, i think many modern communists are amazing people who honestly do have good in their heart and want all to be as so. i do admire them, but in the same way i admire real christians who want everyone to live in peace. i don't agree with the ideology because i do not believe it possible at present. but i do admire real modern communists
peacex

 

you don't understand it...

I am from an ex-commie country, this makes my opinions very different...!!! I can't imagine a "good commie"... coz I know only murderers... simply: idiots! and don't try to get over me with those shits "john lennon.." btw, Lennon has "triple N"...

 

I kill a communist for fun, but for a green card I'll carve 'em up real good.

PHALANGE

 

does that make me a murderer?

 

I have to agree with Jana, but I'll elaborate. There are murderer communists and there are the moron communists who are too stupid to realise what they are supporting. To me, I see no difference between neo-nazis and communists, they are both extremists promoting systems which have brought vast suffering to the world.

And typically here they are young people from wealthy countries who explain that Cubans are happy in poverty without even the most fundamental of political freedoms.

 

it makes you a "supporter of murderers". That's enough.

 

Jana

“I am from an ex-commie country”

Do you mean you are from an ex soviet block country or another corrupt regime?

The thing is that many places called themselves communist just as places that had little or no democracy called themselves Democratic.

You can find murderous regimes that supported a number of ideologies both religious and secular.

I’m no believer in communism for the very fact that I feel it too ridged but it has some interesting ideas. But don’t fall under the illusion that only ‘commies’ can form states that abuse their citizens.

 

Yes, I am from Czech republic, that used to be CZECHOSLOVAKIA. Since 1968 we weren't the exact part of USSR, as Russia, Ukraine, or so.. but we were a part of East block.

 

So Jana's family and her generation "failed to accomplish" communism and it is their fault?

Bizarre. Well, like I said, Communists, Nazis, its all the same.

 

Not an entire failure?

The Czech Republic was one of the wealthiest nations in Europe in 1945 when the Communists took over. It was unharmed by WWII. Half a century later it was among the poorest.

History shows that communism does more harm to an economy than having the entire country bombed to smouldering rubble. Yet you don't get it.

 

“The Czech Republic was one of the wealthiest nations in Europe in 1945”

Here are some extracts on the history of the Nazis dominated Czechs up to the end of the war -

“The population of the protectorate was mobilized for labor that would aid the German war effort, and special offices were organized to supervise the management of industries important to that effort. Czechs were drafted to work in coal mines, the iron and steel industry, and armaments production; some were sent to Germany. Consumer goods production, much diminished, was largely directed toward supplying the German armed forces. The protectorate's population was subjected to strict rationing.

In 1943 the German war effort was accelerated. Under the authority of Karl Hermann Frank, German minister of state for Bohemia and Moravia, some 30,000 Czech laborers were dispatched to the Reich. Within the protectorate, all non-war-related industry was prohibited. The Czech population obeyed quiescently up until the final months preceding the liberation.

Czech losses resulting from political persecution and deaths in concentration camps totaled between 36,000 and 55,000, relatively minor losses compared with those of other nations. But the Jewish population of Bohemia and Moravia (118,000 according to the 1930 census) was virtually annihilated. Many Jews emigrated after 1939; more than 70,000 were killed; 8,000 survived at Terezin. Several thousand Jews managed to live in freedom or in hiding throughout the occupation.”
Source: U.S. Library of Congress
http://countrystudies.us/czech-republic/30.htm

 

Do you have a point, or are you just trying to distract from the obvious fact that communism causes poverty?

 

Oh my dear Point, do I have a point well I do I have you.

But seriously, I was just highlighting what seemed to me was a bit of a historical error.

As to ‘obvious facts’ I admit the Czechs came under Russian domination after 1945 but Russia was by then under the sway of a paranoid sociopath and the country’s political and social system didn’t resemble the letter let alone the spirit of Marx’s philosophy if it in fact ever did or even could.