[quote=@Vilageidiotx]
We should be very careful with the "Communism killed X amount of people" thing, since more often than not it is propaganda with questionable methodology. 

This is the problem; with Nazis, we can pull up a number easily because Hitler literally corralled those people into camps and killed them methodically, and because this was an explicit goal of Nazism. With the deaths by communism thing however, it gets weird.

Do we count famines? Collectivization certain exacerbated them; force collectivization of the peasants is one of the most glaring failures of the Soviet system. But they weren't malicious deaths (in the sense that death was not the intended goal of the regime). Mao didn't want to cause a famine. Who knows with Stalin, I'm not well read enough on the subject to get into it. If we are counting non-Malicious deaths though, doesn't the same thing [url=https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/how-many-us-deaths-are-caused-poverty-lack-education-and-other-social-factors]apply to capitalism then? [/url] 

Do we count extra-philosophical additions by specific regimes? Democracy has the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror]Reign of Terror[/url] and the post-1776 Native American genocide on their hands, and capitalism has the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State#Estimates]Congo Free State[/url], but none of these things were explicitly demanded by democracy or capitalism. Like I said, with Nazism we can safely put their murders on Nazism itself because racial purity was explicitly part of their philosophy. But Communism doesn't say "We need to kill people who live in cities." So does Pol Pot count? 

History is super complicated shit. When we say "Communism killed X amount of people" the implication is that Marxist philosophy ordered those deaths, which isn't necessarily the case most of the time.  
[/quote]

1. I don't think we should be careful about something that has caused ten of millions of death. It's not propaganda...it's recorded deaths. It's kind of dismaying to deny those regimes happened. It's a high amount, no matter where you get the facts...

2. I didn't want to bring up fascism and Nazi's because their slightly different, and I didn't want there to be a compassion made...but even then communism dwarfs the fascist kill count. [b](*Not implying Nazi's were good in anyway.*)[/b]

3. They didn't have any food because they had bread lines and massive shortages. (like all of them have throughout history.) Because of the system they inherited, vs the overabundance that capitalist countries have. I wouldn't even try to compare "LACK OF EDUCATION" to REGIMES that put guns to people's head. 

[b]"The investigators found that approximately 245,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 were attributable to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual-level poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty. "[/b]

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/07/pove-j13.html <- Basically same study and it's arguing that poverty (being poor) is the link to death. And if that's true, does making everyone poorer somehow help that?

Also bet anyone a bizillion monopoly dollars almost all of these stats are linked to gang related crimes...which this neglects to mention. And even if you try to say capitalism killed them somehow, which isn't even what this link implies. 245,000 to millions isn't the most convincing comparison.

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/FedCrimes/story?id=6773423 80% According to this.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/05/06/fbi-gangs-responsible-for-nearly-half-of-all-violent-crime/ Half from FBI and 90% according to others. 

And no gang's aren't capitalism's fault...

4. Okay? We aren't a [b]democracy[/b], we're a [b]constitutional republic[/b] so have no idea what you're even attempting to compare there...

"The Congo Free State was privately controlled by Leopold II, King of the Belgians through a non-governmental organization, the Association internationale africaine. Leopold was the sole shareholder and chairman, who increasingly used it for rubber, copper and other minerals in the upper Lualaba River basin (though it had been set up on the understanding that its purpose was to uplift the local people and develop the area). The state included the entire area of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo and existed from 1885 to 1908. The Congo Free State eventually earned infamy due to the increasingly brutal mistreatment of the local peoples and plunder of natural resources, leading to its abolition and annexation by the government of Belgium in 1908."

Yeah the whole "CONTROLLED BY A KING" part kind of makes me think this has absolutely nothing to do with a free market capitalist system.

Also, I feel like the video addressed this but it is a valid point. "Ignore the bad ones, name [b]one[/b] good one that's been tried..."

5. Again, if we're trying to argue that poor people in a capitalist country (somehow means death it's responsible for.) Which I hate to use this argument because it sounds quite pessimistic, but our poor are still the best off compared to other places. So if being poor is linked to death which is the argument for a bad system...we'd have the best case against that...

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/09/how-americans-compare-with-the-global-middle-class/

https://mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-europe

Because in many cases, if you don't want to blame famine and starvation on deaths, alot of them were ignored and caused from direct actions, and not because of some by product or coincidence. A ton of people were still killed by actions personally directed by the leaders and governments of those regimes.

[hider=From article below.]

"Some apologists for Communism acknowledge that Communism has killed in the past, but they blame this on incidental factors such as the traditions of cruelty and violence which existed in the countries conquered by the Communists, and they do not believe that killing is an essential ingredient of communism itself. They believe that the triumph of Communism in the United States, England, or Western Europe would not lead to mass slaughter. Are they right or are they suffering from a dangerous delusion? To answer this question, it is necessary to know why Communism kills."

[/hider]

https://www.schwarzreport.org/resources/essays/why-communism-kills

A simple, direct answer to the question, "Why does communism kill?" is-because the founder of Communism, Karl Marx, told them it was necessary to kill a large segment of the population in order to attain the basic objective of Communism.

Marx states in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible. 

Apologists for Marxism contend that Marx did not intend that this statement should be taken literally. They affirm that he was referring to the gradual elimination of property owners by the transformation of the economic system which Communism would bring to pass. They cannot deny, however, that many followers of Karl Marx, including Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot have taken this affirmation literally and have proceeded to kill the "middle-class owners of property" once they have acquired power.

A part of the article in question...