Enough already. You guys may be able to convince a lot of similarly unread people that you have a point, but to someone who is familiar with these subject matters, you are transparent frauds.
Let's review D1B's lowlights in this thread.
Tries to assert that atheism is not an essential component of communism. Gets pummeled by the fact that every communist theorist, starting with Marx, including Lenin, including Stalin, and right up to Andropov, insist that collective atheism is required in the communist state. D1B's claim is that they killed because they were communists, not because they were atheists, but he has no answer for the fact that communism is an economic system which draws its moral code from atheism, as per every writer mentioned above. He also has no explanation for what theory/philosophy infused their moral system, if not atheism.
D1B then tries to distinguish atheism, secular humanism, and communism, ignoring in the process that they all share a common flaw: the denial of objective truth as the source for moral values. It is pointed out to him that Dostoevsky, long before the Bolshevik Revolution, predicted with almost complete accuracy the future of Russia under a atheistic communist state, and was able to do so because he foresaw that, once you deny the existence of God and remove objective truth as the source of morality, there is nothing which compels the atheist state to embrace humanism. In fact, he said it was inevitable that the atheist communist state, despite employing the language of humanism, would devolve into an oppressive immoral tool capable of crimes of the highest order against morality.
So D1B says Stalin's failure wasn't a moral one, but an economic one which caused mass starvation -- as if the victims in the gulags were not targeted because of their refusal to assent to the atheist state. This is a monstrous claim which simply destroys any credibility that D1B tries to assert. Stalin is the worst mass murderer in history, with the blood of at least 20,000,000 million victims, and likely tens of millions more, on his hands.
Lifting from Hitchens, a fluff writer for
Vanity Fair with no legitimate academic credentials, D1B also blames the systematic annihilation of the religious opposition in Russia under Stalin to the fact that Russia had a history of being a religiously-inclined state, which caused the Russian people to be a servile population capable of being manipulated by a totalitarian leader like Stalin. Of course, this is nonsense, as any student of history knows. During World War II, these "servile" people took millions of losses defending the Russian front from persistent Nazi invasions, and inflicted stunning defeats on the Nazi war machine every bit as significant as the defeat they took at Normandy Beach. These remarkable people also dismantled history's most oppressive and ruthless governmental machine, without firing a single shot. And D1tchens has the temerity to call these remarkable people "servile." That's awfully pathetic (although the unread are very susceptible to being influenced by he rubbish that Hitchens publishes).
It gets even worse when one considers that Stalin's victims were the religious in Russia. Thus, D1tchens blames the victims for the atrocities committed against them. Remarkably insipid. This is liking blaming the Jews for the Holocaust.
Having never read Dostoevsky, D1B is incapable of responding to the point about how accurate his prediction was for a collective atheist state. So he throws out a one liner -- he probably loved the czar -- in an effort to dismiss the profound thought of one of history's most remarkable writers. Of course, if D1B had any familiarity with the subject matter and had read Dostoevsky, he would know what he thought about the czar.
Suffice to say this another embarrassment for D1B. Far from loving the czar, Dostoevsky was actually imprisoned and sentenced to death for his anti-czar writings, before his sentence was commuted to hard labor in a Siberia work camp for four years, and then compulsory military service. Dostoevsky's health was irreversibly damaged by his time in Siberian hard labor. So he had no love for czar. He just came to realize and predicted, with chilling accuracy, that the coming atheist state in Russia would be far worse than what it would replace, because it had no center for objective truth and thus there was no compelling reason for an atheist state to choose humanism.
Finally, he tries to claim that the United States is a purely "secular" state, ignoring that it is founded on enlightenment principles of natural law, i.e., that individuals possess inalienable imbued by their CREATOR. Our founding principles run 180 degrees counter from modern secularism embodied in secular humanism.
So, yes, you guys were thrashed and embarrassed in this thread. And do you know how we know that? Because, having trounced you guys in every respect in this thread, I'm finished. I see no need to prolong the debate, as the victory is so complete and so thorough.
You guys, on the other hand, will feel compelled to start another comparable thread, because you need to keep the debate going because you think (know) you haven't won -- yet
.
Don't you see what buffoons you've become? Stalin?
