The CCP would like to disagree.

Per Marxism-Leninism the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat is a necessary step on the way to Communism, not the actual Communism.

So whilst Communism cannot exist in a dictatorship, to get there one must go through a dictatorship and invariably nations that do so get stuck at the dictatorship stage and never reach Communism whilst calling themselves “Communist” as part of the propaganda that tries and maintain public support and misportray criticism of the regime as being “criticism of Communism” and “criticism of the Proletariat” (kinda like the Zionists, an even more evil regime, misportray criticism of their regime as criticism of those they claim to represent - the Jewish People) to keep the dictatorial structures going supposedly until Communism is reached, but as it’s never reached, in practice for as long as possible.

In all this propaganda swamp around it, most people not knowing about those theories from anywhere but some political propaganda or other, think Communism is what China has or the Soviet Union had even though that very ideology says those countries are not and never were at the Communism stage and at best are on the path to Communism.

No. A communist society is stateless and classless. If there is a dictatorship, even a dictatorship of the proletariat, it is by definition not communist, and no educated Marxist would argue otherwise. However, we do have another term for the transition state between capitalism and communism where it is possible to have dictatorships - Socialism. (And Leninists would argue that a dictatorship of the proletariat is indeed the preferable state of affairs for any socialist state trying to survive in a global capitalist hegemony).

Edit: I initially misread the comment I was replying to.

And yet, here this person is, not incorrectly using Stalin to say communism is bad. He is criticizing Stalin on his merits, or lack thereof, and not using one person to disparage communism.

You are one tying Stalin’s crimes to communism.

You’re describing Direct Democracy vs Representative Democracy. Direct Democracy is what we also saw in places like Athens or ancient Greece, where all of the individuals came together and voted collectively on making decisions.

Representative Democracy is what we have in the US today with elected officials.

Direct Democracy is a lot more difficult to implement unless countries become smaller imo, although in the digital age it could be made more possible. Plus there’s the matter of maintaining a militia, although maybe we just expand the current version of the UN’s military budget in that case.

I feel that under Direct Democracy you would still have the issue of bigots outnumbering you in certain areas but not so in others.

The issue with the US’ representative system is that we artificially capped the amount of seats for the House of Representatives and even the Senate so that land has more power than people. If the House was uncapped Federally, and the even the Senate, then people living in Blue/densely populated states would have more fair representation.

It sounds like you would reject a system where one unelected, unaccountable person or class of people ruling through force could decide on a whim to take away the rights of LGBT+ people, or any other minority, and instead prefer a system where all people have an equal voice and a method for that voice to be heard and counted.

I enjoy supporting the developers of the platform and their federation policies. That’s really all it comes down to.

So being generous we’ll go high and say 10 million

Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin’s regime were 20 million or higher.

or maybe you can “be generous” and go with the figure you quoted.

An estimated 30 local NKVD agents, guards and drivers were pressed into service to escort prisoners to the basement, confirm identification, then remove the bodies and hose down the blood after each execution. Although some of the executions were carried out by Senior Lieutenant of State Security Andrei Rubanov, Blokhin was the primary executioner and, true to his reputation, liked to work continuously and rapidly without interruption.[14] In keeping with NKVD policy and the overall “wet” nature of the operation, the executions were conducted at night, starting at dark and continuing until just prior to dawn. The bodies were continuously loaded onto covered flat-bed trucks through a back door in the execution chamber and trucked, twice a night, to the nearby village of Mednoye. Blokhin had arranged for a bulldozer and two NKVD drivers to dispose of bodies at an unfenced site. Each night, 24–25 trenches were dug, measuring 8 to 10 metres (26 to 33 ft) in length, to hold that night’s corpses, and each trench was covered over before dawn.[17]

Blokhin and his team worked without pause for 10 hours each night, with Blokhin himself executing an average of one prisoner every three minutes.[2] At the end of the night, he provided vodka to all his men.[18] On 27 April 1940, Blokhin secretly received the Order of the Red Banner and a modest monthly pay premium as a reward from Stalin for his “skill and organization in the effective carrying out of special tasks”.[19][20] His tally of 7,000 shot in 28 days remains the most organised and protracted mass murder by a single individual on record, and caused him being named the Guinness World Record holder for “Most Prolific Executioner” in 2010.[2][3]

Ya, totally equivalent.

Sit the fuck down.

How many global soviel block deaths of malnourishments did you tally up for old boy Stalin? Do we calculate relative or absolute numbers? Do the deaths of malnutrishion of nominally socialists states today also count as being capitalisms fault?

Why do you first support my point, and then call me a moron?

Compared to genocide by Stalin, ICE is peanuts.
But no it’s not justified, that still doesn’t make it an equal atrocity to what Stalin did.
Also USA is not a democracy, it is a deeply dysfunctional democracy. And In USA it can go 2 ways now, they either go full dictator, or if they go the other, these things will be softened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin

official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[8][9][10][11][12] around 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag,[13][14][15] some 390,000[16] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s,[17] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.

So kindly piss off with your false equivalences.