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Controversial Historical Opinions You Have

ffs just start a theology thread so you can all pontificate about the finer points of Christianity and Judaism already.

and I stress those two because with the exception of one or two people you're all talking about Judeo-Christianity.
 
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Astrid Fornhoff said:
ffs just start a theology thread so you can all pontificate about the finer points of Christianity and Judaism already.

and I stress those two because with the exception of one or two people you're all talking about Judeo-Christianity.
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Theology (Christian)

Both the concept of the hereditary original sin and the argumentation for Sola Gratia/Sola Fide comes from Augustine of Hippo, an utter misanthrope of the 4th century. There is no real indication for the hereditary original sin in the Bible, and Augustine's theology was originally carried only...
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I forgot this existed, but it's there.
 
Susano said:
That's certainly a hot take, by which 99% of Christians aren't actually Christians ("I have not come to abolish the law..."), and Marxism-Leninism isn't a thing.

Mao was considered a Marxist by himself, by the global communist movement at the time, and by his enemies. Saying "Mao wasn't Marxist" thus comes pretty close to "the Nazis were leftwing, actually".
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Says Susano, true expert on marxism.

And by no one considering the actual historic Mao and his actions.
Arawn_Emrys said:
What I think the point that people are making is that the Abrahamic religions are unique in that their deity actually demands your belief rather than simply your obedience/worship. Zeus doesn't care what you think of him as long as you do what he/his priests tell you to do. Doubt isn't a sin from the Hellenistic point of view.
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Erm.... One of the primary charges Socrates was killed under was that he did not hold to the proper concepts of the gods.

People get way too abstract with hellenistic and other pagan faiths. Hellenism is a religion family, not a single religion, and most city states would have their own beliefs and, yes, even dogma. If you pull away from the specific regions to talk about hellenism as a whole, it does seem very loose, but that's because we are trying to examine the slightly different faiths of the eastern mediteranean (and the entire mediteranean if you are including Rome) at once as opposed to was specific people in, say, Athens, or thebes believed.

Hellenistic religions were much more flexible that christian ones for sure, but they weren't absent dogma.

I also think people get hung up on the public cult to the exclusion of the mystery and private cults.
 
Hakazin said:
To be fair, Susano is right here. Maoism may be heavily revisionist Marxism, but it's still Marxism.
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Is it really though? It has almost nothing in common other than "capitalism bad" and a few loan words that have had their meanings changed dramatically. Hell, in many ways it's "reverse Marxism".

Maoism's "ideal state" is that of the rural peasant farmer. Mao idealized traditionalism and pre-industrial values, believing that the cities must be conquered by the countryside and subordinated. Conversely Marx believed that the destruction of the power of rural areas was one of the "good things" done by capitalism, he wanted rural life to essentially not exist.

" The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life."
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
Is it really though? It has almost nothing in common other than "capitalism bad" and a few loan words that have had their meanings changed dramatically. Hell, in many ways it's "reverse Marxism".

Maoism's "ideal state" is that of the rural peasant farmer. Mao idealized traditionalism and pre-industrial values, believing that the cities must be conquered by the countryside and subordinated. Conversely Marx believed that the destruction of the power of rural areas was one of the "good things" done by capitalism, he wanted rural life to essentially not exist.

" The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life."
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"Traditionalism" is a stretch given Mao was basically a Chinese advocate for European colonization. He did his best to eradicate Chinese culture and history and replace it with his interpretation of Marxist dogma. He did his best to eradicate Confucianism (failed dismally) and ideas and philosophers were separated into "Materialistic" and 'Idealistic" with everything "idealistic" to be disparaged and discarded as reactionary or counter-revolutionary.

I kinda really hate Mao. Like, a lot.
 
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But like there's traditions of (or at least were at one time) Marxist christian socialists, Marxist anarchists, Marxist social democrats, Marxist environmentalists, etc..., etc...
Baptists may be very far from Catholicism, but both recognize themselves as within Christianity (though sometimes not the other)
 
bookwyrm said:
But like there's traditions of (or at least were at one time) Marxist christian socialists, Marxist anarchists, Marxist social democrats, Marxist environmentalists, etc..., etc...
Baptists may be very far from Catholicism, but both recognize themselves as within Christianity (though sometimes not the other)
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Yes, but the differences are rather more striking between Mao and Marx. Somethibg closer to Early Christian Gnostics vs Mormons in terms of how far apart they are.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
Is it really though? It has almost nothing in common other than "capitalism bad" and a few loan words that have had their meanings changed dramatically. Hell, in many ways it's "reverse Marxism".

Maoism's "ideal state" is that of the rural peasant farmer. Mao idealized traditionalism and pre-industrial values, believing that the cities must be conquered by the countryside and subordinated. Conversely Marx believed that the destruction of the power of rural areas was one of the "good things" done by capitalism, he wanted rural life to essentially not exist.

" The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life."
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I don't think the person who unleashed the Cultural Revolution could be billed as a traditionalist in any sense of the term.

Mao came from rural roots but actually it's probably better to say that he was more an aspiring intellectual in many respects. But throughout his life, he never really got to achieve this personal goal.

However, much of his leadership was defined by his frequent struggles with rivals who had better military or administrative credentials than him. So he actually veered into intense anti-intellectual attitudes and policies. Not to mention, the times he did try to promote intellectuals, it actually backfired on him, most notably with the Hundred Flowers Campaign where Mao encouraged people to voice their concerns and it actually resulted in a huge amount of dissent and open opposition to CCP policies and him in particular.
 
Look, I don't really have positive feelings for Mao, and I would argue he and Stalin (who for all intents and purposes were almost identical ideologically) were more developmentalists than communists but of all things I'd criticize him for, "destroying Chinese feudalism" would not be one of them.
 
HeyJune said:
Look, I don't really have positive feelings for Mao, and I would argue he and Stalin (who for all intents and purposes were almost identical ideologically) were more developmentalists than communists but of all things I'd criticize him for, "destroying Chinese feudalism" would not be one of them.
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I think the important thing to keep in mind when we discuss this sort of thing is that, on reflection, is this really something that another Chinese government or leader could not have also done?

Because we have to ask ourselves if any of these actions are things that only Mao could have/would have done. And while I would argue that the negatives of Mao's rule greatly outweigh its few positives, at the same time, I don't think even the positives are something that could not have been done by another.

I would argue that actually whoever won the Chinese Civil War would have presided over an enormous period of social, economic, and political transformation of Chinese society. China was devastated by war and even regional elites and landlords who had wielded power for centuries weren't in a terribly powerful position. The necessities of postwar reconstruction and, in the CCP's example: enacting communist ideology, would have assured a massive change to society that would probably reject the traditional order of Chinese society in significant ways.

TL;DR: some of Mao's actions vis-a-vis modernisation are something that any Chinese government would have done in some way.
 
Heavy W. Guy said:
I think the important thing to keep in mind when we discuss this sort of thing is that, on reflection, is this really something that another Chinese government or leader could not have also done?

Because we have to ask ourselves if any of these actions are things that only Mao could have/would have done. And while I would argue that the negatives of Mao's rule greatly outweigh its few positives, at the same time, I don't think even the positives are something that could not have been done by another.

I would argue that actually whoever won the Chinese Civil War would have presided over an enormous period of social, economic, and political transformation of Chinese society. China was devastated by war and even regional elites and landlords who had wielded power for centuries weren't in a terribly powerful position. The necessities of postwar reconstruction and, in the CCP's example: enacting communist ideology, would have assured a massive change to society that would probably reject the traditional order of Chinese society in significant ways.

TL;DR: some of Mao's actions vis-a-vis modernisation are something that any Chinese government would have done in some way.
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My problem with this logic is that you could easily say the exact same thing about the evil things he did. Could another Chinese leader have millions of his people die under his watch? Well, the answer is obviously yes.

Few good things are unique, but that's just as true about most evil things.

I don't think that "another leader we're imagining in our head could do good things too without the bad" is a very useful point to make. I'm not saying this as someone who likes Mao, the deeply harmful ineptitude and anti-intellectualism are pretty unappealing to me, but I don't think this works as an argument.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
My problem with this logic is that you could easily say the exact same thing about the evil things he did. Could another Chinese leader have millions of his people die under his watch? Well, the answer is obviously yes.

Few good things are unique, but that's just as true about most evil things.

I don't think that "another leader we're imagining in our head could do good things too without the bad" is a very useful point to make. I'm not saying this as someone who likes Mao, the deeply harmful ineptitude and anti-intellectualism are pretty unappealing to me, but I don't think this works as an argument.
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How many leaders would decide that peasents melting down their tools will increase steel production or killing off predators that keep down vermin which prey on crops whilst encouraging a baby boom so as to ensure the China would outbreed the rest of the world even if all it's cities were nuked were good ideas?


Like Mao was not just incompetent and anti intellectual. He was quite willing to assume he was the smartest man on the planet who had figured out how to turn a third world agricultural nation into an industrial powerhouse by wishing very hard and cannabalising everything that made the country function according to whim.

Generic dictators or hypothetical technocrat proto democrats might well fuck things up but it is highly likely that they would fail in less spectacular ways. Because he was a very unique guy with blizzard theories and total power. We can look at those who came before and after or were removed for opposing him to get a feel for what a non Mao might be like
 
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Fourthspartan56 said:
My problem with this logic is that you could easily say the exact same thing about the evil things he did. Could another Chinese leader have millions of his people die under his watch? Well, the answer is obviously yes.

Few good things are unique, but that's just as true about most evil things.

I don't think that "another leader we're imagining in our head could do good things too without the bad" is a very useful point to make. I'm not saying this as someone who likes Mao, the deeply harmful ineptitude and anti-intellectualism are pretty unappealing to me, but I don't think this works as an argument.
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The point I'm making is that developing China probably would have happened under nearly any government that took power.

The extreme cruelty, incompetence, and borderline insanity of Mao's rule IMHO is unlikely to be replicated under someone else's authority, mostly because so much of Mao's worst excesses: namely the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, were so intrinsically tied up in Mao's flaws, his inability to admit failure, and his desire to remain in power, that it's very hard to imagine something happening to the same extent under Liu Shaoqi or Zhou Enlai, for instance.

It isn't to say that Mao was alone in his acts, or that he didn't rely upon countless others under him to implement his policies, but when you actually delve into what caused the Great Leap Forward in particular, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Mao's actions were quite responsible for it. And that he repeatedly ignored warning signs of a growing disaster that could have at least been mitigated if not entirely stopped.

Would the PRC have still been an authoritarian state that employed repression as a means of control had Mao not been its leader? Without doubt. China had a longstanding authoritarian tradition and given the general governing styles of either the GMD or the CCP. Whoever won the Chinese Civil War did not intend for China to become a democracy. Whether it would have eventually become one had things gone differently is another question, but neither the CCP nor the GMD were particularly democratic movements.

Would it have caused a famine so bad that tens of millions died? Or the Cultural Revolution? I'm skeptical.
 
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Arawn_Emrys said:
I didn't say communist, I said Marxist. You can be the 1st without the 2nd. But you can't be a Marxist and reject everything Marx said. Sort of like you can't rightly call yourself a Christian if you think Jesus was wrong about everything, or a Platonist while rejecting the ideas of Plato.
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Well, yes, but really no. Marx never called himself a Marxist. Marx called himself a communist. Most Marxists called themselves communist. Most communists called themselves Marxists. The very much evil people killing other people in the Soviet gulags, Cambodian killing fields and the Chinese Great Leap Forward very much so considered themselves Marxists. Why would anyone want to associate themselves with that?

Among historians such as Klas-Göran Karlsson, R. J. Rummel, Stéphane Courtois, Benjamin Valentino, Steven Rosefielde, Matthew White or Stephen Kotkin, the main disagreement isn't whether Marxism is Communism or vice versa, but about whether we are talking about 60.000.000 people killed or 160.000.000 under the ideal of creating a better utopia under the red banner.

Nyvis said:
The difference is that the neo nazis are lying.
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Yes, of course. If we were to assume that we can read the mind of neo nazis and neo commies, we can clearly see that one party and of course not the other is clearly and obviously lying. As I have stated before, then in general, many observations say more about the observer than the observed.

The Laurent said:
Nazis don't actually have an ideological foundation that's not just an excuse for mass-murder. Various communisms and anarchisms, on the other hand, have a rich set of works on politics, the economy, etc, etc. It's impossible to look at the world from a Nazi framework without in your heart of hearts wanting to commit genocide, but Marxist historical analysis, for instance, is a reasonably widely used framework used even by people who don't want to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat or whatnot. :V

It's like one is a long-running (set of) ideological project(s) lasting centuries and creating dozens and dozens of spin-off ideologies, and another is the wet fart of antisemitic militarist death-cultists in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
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Again, well yes, but actually really no: a number of eminent historians argue that Marxism in its original 1850-form deliberately advocates genocide.

Take for instance Andrzej Walicki who said this about an article by Engels in Marx's journal that "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide" - and please let me cite the exact words of said article: "The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward."

Of course, I totally get the idea that if you define Nazism as genocide and Communism as salvation, then obviously the two have no connection.

But, for a statement like "It's impossible to look at the world from a Nazi framework without in your heart of hearts wanting to commit genocide, but Marxist historical analysis, for instance, is a reasonably widely used framework used even by people who don't want to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat or whatnot" to be true, then you would have to define Nazism as "wanting to commit genocide", and "Marxism" as "a reasonably widely used framework used even by people who don't want to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat". Sorry to say, but there is not much historical evidence to support either statement.

You want to call yourself a Marxist, a Communist, a Nazi or a Fascist or whatever? Then please accept that you will be associated with other people who called themselves that. If you don't want to associate yourself with mass murder, then maybe consider a different label #justsaying
 
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Pedersen said:
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Well, yes, but really no. Marx never called himself a Marxist. Marx called himself a communist. Most Marxists called themselves communist. Most communists called themselves Marxists. The very much evil people killing other people in the Soviet gulags, Cambodian killing fields and the Chinese Great Leap Forward very much so considered themselves Marxists. Why would anyone want to associate themselves with that?

Among historians such as Klas-Göran Karlsson, R. J. Rummel, Stéphane Courtois, Benjamin Valentino, Steven Rosefielde, Matthew White or Stephen Kotkin, the main disagreement isn't whether Marxism is Communism or vice versa, but about whether we are talking about 60.000.000 people killed or 160.000.000 under the ideal of creating a better utopia under the red banner.


Yes, of course. If we were to assume that we can read the mind of neo nazis and neo commies, we can clearly see that one party and of course not the other is clearly and obviously lying. As I have stated before, then in general, many observations say more about the observer than the observed.


Again, well yes, but actually really no: a number of eminent historians argue that Marxism in its original 1850-form deliberately advocates genocide.

Take for instance Andrzej Walicki who said this about an article by Engels in Marx's journal that "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide" - and please let me cite the exact words of said article: "The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward."

Of course, I totally get the idea that if you define Nazism as genocide and Communism as salvation, then obviously the two have no connection.

But, for a statement like "It's impossible to look at the world from a Nazi framework without in your heart of hearts wanting to commit genocide, but Marxist historical analysis, for instance, is a reasonably widely used framework used even by people who don't want to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat or whatnot" to be true, then you would have to define Nazism as "wanting to commit genocide", and "Marxism" as "a reasonably widely used framework used even by people who don't want to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat". Sorry to say, but there is much historical evidence to support either statement.

You want to call yourself a Marxist, a Communist, a Nazi or a Fascist or whatever? Then please accept that you will be associated with other people who called themselves that. If you don't want to associate yourself with mass murder, then maybe consider a different label #justsaying
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When I said "Marxist historical analysis, for instance, is a reasonably widely used framework used even by people who don't want to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat" I wasn't giving an opinion, I was stating a historiographic fact. Like, a fact about the history of history.

So thanks for playing?
 
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The Laurent said:
When I said "Marxist historical analysis, for instance, is a reaosnably widely used framework used even by people who don't want to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat" I wasn't giving an opinion, I was stating a historiographic fact. :V Like, a fact about the history of history.

So thanks for playing?
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Oh, please do elaborate on how your posting is a "historiographic fact" that isn't disputed by anyone.
 
Pedersen said:
Oh, please do elaborate on how your posting is a "historiographic fact" that isn't disputed by anyone.
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My point, my incredibly simple point, was that Marxist historical analysis, as in the framework behind it, is actually commonly used by a lot of historians, including ones that aren't even actually communists, lol. This is basic shit.

You get taught about Marxist historical analysis in basically every Master's level historiographic class as one of the frameworks for how a lot (though obviously not all) of historians look at events, and despite what Turning Point USA might tell you, it's not cause they're all Marxists who want to overthrow the government.

It's because it's actually, if not uncontroversial, actually a very substantial and useful framework for looking at certain events.

E: None of what I'm outlining is controversial, lol, except among people so lacking in knowledge that they think the Black Book of Communism might have been understating things, and don't really want to engage with historiography, that is to say the study of the study of history.
 
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Note, the claim is not that all historians accept that Communism is right, which really would be an absurd one, but that Marxist historical analysis is actually a relatively commonly used and respected tool, and not actually just by communists, in contrast to the absolute lack of any real academic merit to Nazism, which in no way contributed to the study of economics or history. :V
 
The Laurent said:
My point, my incredibly simple point, was that Marxist historical analysis, as in the framework behind it, is actually commonly used by a lot of historians, including ones that aren't even actually communists, lol. This is basic shit.

You get taught about Marxist historical analysis in basically every Master's level historiographic class as one of the frameworks for how a lot (though obviously not all) of historians look at events, and despite what Turning Point USA might tell you, it's not cause they're all Marxists who want to overthrow the government.

It's because it's actually, if not uncontroversial, actually a very substantial and useful framework for looking at certain events.

E: None of what I'm outlining is controversial, lol, except among people so lacking in knowledge that they think the Black Book of Communism might have been understating things, and don't really want to engage with historiography, that is to say the study of the study of history.
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When you say "Marxist historical analysis", do you mean what many people call "Historical Materialism"?

Again, I would like to point everyone's attention to the fact, that the term settled on by historians for viewing history as "material reality creates human consciousness" as opposed to the other way round doesn't include any reference to a murderous ideology associated with genocide. I wonder why that is.

Now o/c the neo-nazi in my area, which I have referenced before, also like to associate Hitler with the building of motorways. I think that idea is very silly. Motorways have as little an association with Hitler as Historical Materialism has with Marx.
 
Roman religio should not be included in the same family as the Hellenic religions of Classical Greece. I will do my best to ignore the 35th Marxism discussion. You will have to pry every single word of Marxist discussion from my cold dead hands.
 
Pedersen said:
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lol, you're literally pulling from Black Book authors. The same people that blame the people killed by the Nazis on Communism, along with the people who "should have existed" had the dastardly communists not had things like abortion.

And then going "Oh this guy totally says that the Communists call for genocide as a fundamental part of the ideology. No I'm not showing you this. But this one dude did say this once, so it's true. Trust me."
 
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