I kinda agree with some of the sentiment here, but if you hate the city, is it necessary to live there? I think it’s usually even more expensive than outside the city so you cannot explain it with money.
Pol Pot pretended to be a communist, until it no longer suited him and he had them killed.
He was the leader of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963-1981, at which point it was rebranded as the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, which he lead until 1985. Also that new party was communist. The Cambodian genocide was roughly 1975-1979.
Are you just defining people who are absolutely horrible not communists even though they call themselves communist, are allied with other governments who call themselves communist, and execute similar policies as them? I mean I get the impulse, I also get plenty of negative feelings when I think about pro-free market, pro-freedom politicians who commit atrocities or say stupid shit and would rather that those people don’t exist. Sadly, real world doesn’t always like us.
Sure, many of these happened in a time where communism was still more like a theory (or not even that yet) than anything tried in practice. People who called themselves communist did a lot of these in a single century, most of them after WW2.
Besides, Pol Pot wasn’t much of a communist
To be fair, I said people “who call themselves communist”.
This seemed like a high quality analysis by a respectable academic, then the veryfirstsource I checked out turned out to be an amazing exaggeration. The article states
Tens of thousands are injured, and over 45% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed.
So I check the source, which is a paywalled WSJ article. Already the title of the article is
At Least 45% of Housing Units Destroyed or Damaged in Gaza
Destroyed ordamaged. Should I check the other sources for similar “mistakes”? Perhaps I just got lucky and found the only bullshit reference from this article written by a Harvard Law School PhD graduate?
Or perhaps Harvard Law Review was onto something when they didn’t publish it and I would be wasting my time looking through all of them instead of just trusting them on this.
I’m very comfortable calling the campaign against Gaza in the last few weeks genocide
Perhaps all the people who would downvote me have already blocked me ;-)
But seriously, this is not whataboutism. It’s an appeal to recalibrate and come to senses, and most importantly, not dilute an important and serious concept like genocide. Even what happened/is happening in Ukraine is probably not a genocide even though I’m happily 100% against Russia.
I mean it’s not great what they’ve done in Gaza, but just to recalibrate your senses a bit, this is what happens when a nation actually commits genocide against a weaker people inside its borders: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
A significant metric to look at is population growth. Gaza strip is one of the densest population areas in the world, and it has been growing rapidly. This is, incidentally, the reason why most of their population is under-age. In Uyghur areas, in contrast, population has been diminishing in growing rates.
Of course, you shouldn’t also ignore the forced labor, political indoctrination, forced sterilization, forced contraception, forced abortion. I don’t think Israel has done any of these? Israel has destroyed some mosques in their attacks, whereas China has razed or damaged 16 thousand mosques in Uyghur areas. Granted, the area is much larger, so there are probably more mosques in there also. But you should note that China is not at war against Uyghurs, and hasn’t been attacked by them – they’re just destroying them.