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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, March 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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Good point about the Weimar Republic as an example of failure mode of democracy. I'm not sure whether it's germaine that part of the failure was it ceasing to be a democracy. Any other examples?
For what it's worth, I think of the failure mode of Communism as being partly the mass murder, and even in countries where there wasn't mass murder, the impoverishment and oppression of citizens.
A sidetrack: Are there any sound generalizations about differences between communist countries which had genocide, and those which didn't?
Here you go:
My comment on it.
What is a failure mode? Are you seeking examples of bad outcomes and bad behavior in democracies, or something more specific?
What are some examples of communist countries that have not engaged in mass murder? In Cuba and Nepal the death tolls haven't been so dramatic by Cambodian standards. Are there other tame examples?
Is the Cultural Revolution in China an example of mass murder? I learned that there was lots of oppression, suffering, and starvation. But deaths were not an intended result, only a byproduct that the ruling elite didn't care to prevent. By contrast, Stalin's starving of the Kulaks was intended to cause death.
Regardless, the Cultural Revolution doesn't reflect well on communism.
This question is so startling to me I'm not sure I understand it.
There are things as morally wrong as mass murder that don't qualify as mass murder.
I think you should read the article you linked to all the way through; starvation is not the only kind of violence that occurred. If someone dies during or as a consequence of your torturing them, it is standard to say you've committed murder even if your intentions were non-lethal, right? (I think it is too generous to grant such good intentions in this case, but irrelevant). If you torture ten thousand people and one hundred of them die, you have committed mass murder. This kind of mass murder was common throughout 20th century communist china, routine during the cultural revolution. There were some events during the CR on an even more enormous scale, in tibet and inner mongolia.
See also Tthe Great Leap Forward.
I'd say they count-- if a system doesn't allow for quickly changing (or better, preventing) policies which cause death on a grand scale, there's something wrong with the system.
Something very wrong - yes.
Mass murder - ??
Edit to add: On reflection, the Great Leap Forward is a lot more like Stalin and the Kulaks than the unedited version of this comment might suggest.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the-institutional-causes-of-chinas-great-famine-1959-61.html pointed to an interesting paper on that topic. I read it, but I don't know enough about China to really evaluate it.
But nevertheless, I have a hard time reconciling the observations with non-incompetence explanations:
Most of Eastern Europe, I think.
OK communist Yugoslavia is a more important example than communist Nepal. But you're not counting the soviet union as eastern europe? Non-soviet eastern europe is not unrepresented on wikipedia's digest of communist mass killings.
I'm not listing the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe.
The Wikipedia page lists mass murder in East Germany and Bulgaria as disputed, but it seems that things were generally worse than I thought.