None of these countries were every truly Communist. It was always about semantics. Since Communism is impossible anyway, it's only ever going to be an excuse to transfer power, property and privilege from one group of greedy, corrupt, self-serving elites to another group of greedy, corrupt, self-serving elites by a different name and espousing a different flavor of BS. They mostly use Communism as an excuse for oppressive autocracy; but many of these countries that abandoned "Communism" are still corrupt and autocratic.
True. I'd add that many of these states were led by groups with at least some affinity to communism (defined in numerous ways that were not about autocracy) at early points - often extinguished even before reaching power.
More technicalities: Technically the Soviet Union was never communist. It was "socialist", which was originally envisioned as a stepping stone on the way to true communism. Marxists had a whole theory of history in which humans progressed from feudalism -> bourgeois liberal capitalism -> socialism -> communism. Virtually all of their predictions proved to be complete garbage.
^ which is itself a complete betrayal of Marxist theories and predictions that foresaw a proletariat revolution after the condition of the workers grows so dire and the size of the working class so huge that revolution is inevitable. There are no half-way stepping stones in that process... if you believed in Marxism that would only be holding back the revolution not doing anything to get us closer to it.
Well, that was the type of Marxism discredited in/by the Second International (i.e. more than a hundred years ago). Marxism is a pretty rich and varied school of history/economics/politics. The teleological weaknesses of that strain more or less died with the failed revolution in Germany in 1919.
I'm aware. But it's still the foundation of all of Marx's ideas. A man who died in 1883. So if some other people are still following his discredited ideas in 1919, knowing that they are not true, and trying to come up with some way to ignore that and still call themselves Marxists, that doesn't say a lot about them.
I think it would be reasonable for North Vietnam to not automatically fill in after typing "Vietnam".
By the way, just an idea for anybody who fancies making a new quiz: the same thing, but using modern day borders would be pretty cool, so you'd have to type all of the countries that made up the USSR instead of just USSR.
It would be interesting to add a column listing the number of their own citizens that these worker's paradises had to kill to keep the ruling elite in power over the years.
After a while, an observer can see a pattern of revolution -> societal failure -> oppression (usually mass murder) -> collapse or serious reform to keep elite in power.
The only truly communist county would have only one person left after the dictator had to murder everyone else to keep them in line.
No, a true communist country would be run for the benefit of the people. But unfortunately there are always power-hungry people willing to exploit others for their own gain.
Has there ever been a communist country that was really beneficial to its people? Cuba? The economy stinks. USSR? It's economy tanked and the rich live grandly while the poor suffer. China? Maybe a better example but much of the gains have been as a result of capitalist reforms. Vietnam? Socialism has had more success but democracy is still the least worst.
Most countries have communist and socialist elements. Most countries have capitalistic elements too. Democracy has nothing to do with economics, it's just the way decisions are made (and a true democracy would be very tedious if not impossible).
Really makes me wonder why people like Bernie Sanders want to install communism in USA. It makes me wonder if they honestly don't recognize that communism has never worked in the past, or if they simply have a more dark motive and want to destroy the West.
And democratic socialism, which is the only thing that Bernie Sanders has ever championed and then not very strongly, isn't even the same as socialism, which isn't the same as communism, which isn't the same as the Stalinism/Maosim etc that these countries were actually practicing. But don't try to explain that to someone who thinks that Bernie is a Communist.
Because he is, I think, the only US Senator who calls himself a socialist without reservation and the Americans that believe this word is a pejorative, they have no clue what the difference is.
Socialism is more like more benefits for lower-income people like social programs and lower taxes while Communism is that everyone shall be paid equally/fairly, no private businesses.
Lol, he's a center-left social democrat at most, it's just that since the USA has no real leftist party, you think anything left of Reagan is communism.
It might be better to explain why eskimo shouldn't be used and what the preferred term is. Many people probably don't know that. To quote Wikipedia, 'Some people consider Eskimo derogatory because it is popularly perceived to mean "eaters of raw meat" in Algonquian languages common to people along the Atlantic coast.' and 'In Canada and Greenland, "Inuit" is preferred. Inuit is the Eastern Canadian Inuit (Inuktitut) and West Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) word for "the people".'
I grew up with the name 'Eskimo' being the widely-used term for those people. When I read Sherlock Holmes it's spelt as 'Esquimau' (plural 'Esquimaux').
@camus It's a common misconception that Eskimo means 'one who eats raw flesh'; the correct etymology is from Montagnais ayas̆kimew ‘person who laces a snowshoe’.
You've been basically everywhere! I see so many of your comments in quizzes about you've been to a bunch of different countries, I would love to be able to do that!
I saved a lot of money working in Saudi Arabia. I was sort of a professor there. Taught English at a technical university in Dammam. Made a good salary.
But... I bought my Viper back when I was a full-time college student moonlighting in a hospital ER. It's just about priorities, setting goals for yourself, learning how to budget really... I rarely spend money on anything unless it's really something I want or need.
And, further, while I was still traveling all over Earth I met many people who were doing the same for much less than I was. I met a guy at a hostel in Tel Aviv who started with $1000 in the bank and traveled on that for six years. I hosted a young couple from Colombia in my apartment in Rome who had nothing. There are ways. Especially if you are American or Canadian your passport affords you a lot of privilege. Google "shoestring travel," "CouchSurfing," "rideshare," "food saving," "work away," "hostelworld," to get started...
It also helps that I never got married, had kids, or bought a big house I couldn't really afford. That's what siphons away the majority of most Americans' money.
I think there was a comment here asking how I afforded a Dodge Viper and traveling the world for years without spending a ton of money. ... I was responding to them but the comment has since gone missing. Will leave up the response in case anyone else was wondering. I wish QM would stop wiping comments from users that had been purged due to inactivity and simply make their accounts inactive.
After 8 years of commenting here and several rounds of user purges there are one-sided conversations up all over the site that make it look like I'm talking to myself...
There will never be a truly Communist nation as the ideas of Karl Marx have been proven wrong and the proletariat revolution he envisioned will never happen.
yeah I guess they go back and forth between being an oppressive Communist hellscape to a glorious capitalist utopia and beacon of freedom every 4-12 years or so. Strange how that works. And it always seems to change immediately around the 3rd week of January for some reason.
North Korea is actually Juche which rules by divine mandate and against the principles of communism, it is not true communism and therefore should be removed. It is more similar to Imperial Japan as the Kim dynasty are depicted as gods and has a cult following, pretty sure religion is not promoted in such a society and is hypocritical to many aspects of real communism, where Atheism and Non-religious institutions are favoured instead of.
@Thanasi, Russia isn't a Communist country, The Soviet Union (which took up a large part of Russia) was.(yes I know my Soviet history.Hunt for Red October 4 life)
Slovakia didn't belong to us :D we were two countries united into a federation. The "o" in between connects two words; for instance "black and white"/"black white" is "blackowhite" (černobílá) in Czech
I agree, we learned about Venezuela being a communist (socialist) country. However, I don't know how much Marxist propaganda they use (if any) and if it's of any importance to this quiz
Khiva, which was never part of imperial Russia, had its own revolution and became the Khorezm People's Soviet Republic in 1920. It was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1924. Therefore I think it should be included as a communist country that existed 1920-1924.
Looks like Khwarazm was a Russian protectorate by 1920 and it was very strongly encouraged to have a communist revolution. It probably wouldn't meet the criteria for an independent country.
I see an awful lot of countries that used the word 'Communist' as an excuse to crush their opposition but when it can time they weren't really communist...just totalitarian Govts that took from many and gave to a few. The so called 'communists' of countries like North Korea, China, Russia, Cuba all managed to live in palaces whilst other starves.
I don't think any country ever achieved true communism and am not sure it could ever be done as power will inevitably end up in the hands of a few who will inevitably exploit that.
^ It was not. It was Socialist. What led to Maurice Bishop's assassination in 1983 was that his deputy, Bernard Coard, wanted to embrace hard-core communism, ala Cuba, and Bishop did not.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which was presaged by the many Soviet-friendly regimes in Eastern Europe and around the world falling out of favor and losing power starting in the late 80s.
Many of those regimes were supported by the USSR. When the USSR began to fail, that support got cut off, and eventually the motivation for them to identify as Communist went away, even when they stayed in place enforcing roughly the same policies. In other cases, the Communist regimes in these places were murderous and oppressive and after a few years or few decades of this locals rose up against them.
To various degrees... Ethiopia, Romania, Poland, etc. Ethiopia maybe being the most clear example as the Derg were eventually ousted by the Ethiopian Civil War. Some of these regimes were not quite as bad and some of the uprisings against them took the form of social protest or peaceful political movements in opposition.
I came here expecting to find just such a comment from you, after noting you calling for the disbanding of NATO and calling every US president a war criminal, and you didn't let me down. Are you on the Kremlin payroll or what? Maybe working part time out of a pro-Putin Russian troll farm in Romania?
Anyway yeah you're right.. Pol Pot's Cambodia and Ethiopia's Derg were super cool. Real hep cats. And of course nobody knows how to party like the North Koreans.
Is there a reason Cambodia wasn't a communist country from 1975 to 1979 under Pol Pot? The Wikipedia description says "Kampuchea... was the Cambodian state under a one-party Marxist-Leninist totalitarian dictatorship that existed between 1975 and 1979." That sounds like it fits the quiz description to me.
north korea aint communist, it seems like it, but they are technically an unfair democracy. They have votes, but kim just always wins, and some are rigged. Also in that country sharing and equality is extinct there.
no. none of these countries are/were actually communist, hell even in the title it clarifies that these are "single-party marxist states". Mongolia is not a one-party state so I don't know why it's not listed as ending in 1990.
Ha, this is a trick question. None of these countries have ever been communist. In strict sense, there has never been a communist state, ever and likely never will be.
Mongolia ceased to be communist country in 1990. Might want to fix that on the quiz. Ethiopia was also ruled by a communist military regime (the Derg) from 1974 until 1987, so the correct dates for Ethiopia would technically be 1974-1991.
I think Seychelles should count because of the 79 constitution which declared it a single party socialist state under Rene. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seychelles
By the way, just an idea for anybody who fancies making a new quiz: the same thing, but using modern day borders would be pretty cool, so you'd have to type all of the countries that made up the USSR instead of just USSR.
After a while, an observer can see a pattern of revolution -> societal failure -> oppression (usually mass murder) -> collapse or serious reform to keep elite in power.
The only truly communist county would have only one person left after the dictator had to murder everyone else to keep them in line.
But... I bought my Viper back when I was a full-time college student moonlighting in a hospital ER. It's just about priorities, setting goals for yourself, learning how to budget really... I rarely spend money on anything unless it's really something I want or need.
And, further, while I was still traveling all over Earth I met many people who were doing the same for much less than I was. I met a guy at a hostel in Tel Aviv who started with $1000 in the bank and traveled on that for six years. I hosted a young couple from Colombia in my apartment in Rome who had nothing. There are ways. Especially if you are American or Canadian your passport affords you a lot of privilege. Google "shoestring travel," "CouchSurfing," "rideshare," "food saving," "work away," "hostelworld," to get started...
( btw these internet codes can mean what i wnt ? yea )
I don't have to guess... both because I already know and I have this thing called the Internet.
Nicaragua?
Republican Spain?
Tannu Tuva?
Nicaragua is not considered communist (yet)
Republican Spain was democratic
might be fun adding Bavaria, as it a communist style government was introduced between 1918-1919
I mean...
I'm pretty sure it's not....
Anyway, it asks for a single marxist party
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_Madagascar
I don't think any country ever achieved true communism and am not sure it could ever be done as power will inevitably end up in the hands of a few who will inevitably exploit that.
San marino was a communist country