i'd rather see a monument to the victims of capitalism.
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/victims-of-communism-monument-next-steps-1.3369261
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Julius No, Ph.D.
Can we build a "Victims of Capitalism" memorial right next to it for balance?
sutherlj
who would pay for it?
jessica murray
it would be best if we just built it together using voluntary labour, and held it in common ownership.
BromleyBromley
Like all of the people it has elevated out of poverty? there arent any victims of capitalism. Only corporatism.
jessica murray
poverty is only possible under the enforcement of private property. capitalism can never lift anybody out of poverty - that's an absurd twisting of words - it can only mire people within it.
Corvus2
Although capitalism has a lot of bugs in it it is still preferable to hardcore communism.
North Korea is an example that is worth reviewing on this subject.
jessica murray
i agree that north korea is an example worth reviewing. how many autonomously owned worker co-ops exist in north korea?
the reality is that poverty has no meaning when divorced from the enforcement of property rights; you can only have poverty if you have property rights.
when you hear capitalists talk about "lifting people out of poverty", what they really mean is "erecting a hierarchy where one group exploits another."
MalContent Disabled
Victims of Crimelords. Victims of Monarchies. Victims of Bloodthirsty Nutjobs, Victims of Kleptocrats etc, etc.
jessica murray
i'd like a victims of trolling monument that rickrolls whenever you cross through a censor.
contributor7
You find it appropriate to joke while my relatives were starved to death by Stalin and executed following months of torture? How Canadian of you!
jessica murray
stalin was an extreme right-wing despot, though. i mean, you don't even need to read history. you just need to read animal farm.
this is the funnest stalin fact: the guy actually turned himself into a GOD in the russian empire. i kid you not. like, the kind of thing that ancient roman emperors used to do.
khruschev and his minions did the best they could in destroying all evidence of this. but, if you look hard enough you can find russian orthodox icons (you know, those pictures of jesus with the orbs around his head) with stalin in place of jesus.
they actually had people kneeling down and praying to images of stalin, as replacement for jesus.
that's not communism. that's as right-wing as the spectrum gets.
there's a shot of one:
https://02varvara.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/01-stalin-icon.jpg?w=600
if that was a picture of jesus, it would be relatively normal for a member of the orthodox church to say their prayers in front of it, maybe take a few beads off the rosary, etc.
what actually happened - and this is actually true - is that they replaced all the pictures of jesus with stalin, then left the people to carry on their rituals.
again: that's a roman emperor's tactic. that's caesar. that's augustus. and it ain't communism.
"It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god." - khruschev, denouncing stalin
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more seriously, i would support a monument for the victims of the cold war, more broadly: korean war deaths, vietnamese villagers that got wiped out by agent orange, those purposefully starved in the holodomor genocide, cuban/angolan freedom fighters killed by the apartheid regime in south africa, those purposefully starved by mao as population control, palestinians who have become throw away in america's need for an ally in the middle east, etc.
there's no deficit of people killed in the cold war that deserve remembering. and, in fact many of these stories are not well known in the west.
the problem with this is that it takes a side.
our world war one monuments don't talk about how we beat the germans down, or about victims of the kaiser. they recognize that the conflict was senseless, and take responsibility for it. that's what this monument seemed to be missing.
