Re: a dumb query? pls humor me

[Mitja Podreka]

Freddy Freeloader wrote:
You truly have confused totalitarianism with socialism. 
No.  You don't recognize socialism put into practice as different than 
socialism by theory.  Even communism, in theory, is a peaceable, 
benign, good for its citizens, decentralized form of government.  It's 
proven itself to be just the  opposite everytime it's been put into 
practice.  Socialism, put into practice, is a high taxes, government 
runs everything, highly centralized form of government. 
Many "western" European countries had or still have strong socialist 
parties in their parliaments and/or socialist governments. Some of them, 
Italy for example, also have quite strong and successful communist parties.
The terms socialism and communism were vandalised by the authoritarian 
governments and individuals, in order to legitimate their authorities. 
In fact this governments had no more in common with socialism and 
communism than GNU/Linux has with Microsoft.
Following the widely accepted "democratic" rationale of socialism and 
communism we could, for example, say that Debian GNU/Linux is a bad 
thing. The most common OS (socialism/communism) is Windows 
(authoritarian state/government). Knowing that Windows is not of very 
good moral and technical standards we can then "democratically" conclude 
that OS is a bad thing. Because Debian GNU/Linux is an OS it must then 
also be a bad thing.
And to finish the discourse properly. We should also recognise democracy 
put into practice as different than democracy by theory.


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