Is it just me or is this phrasing, with its emphasis on "their own people," only ever leveled against communist states? I never hear it used to refer to, say, the killing of black Americans via slavery or the massacre of German Jews.
Capitalist America killed a couple million of their own people with covid!
But that was in the before times. Yes I know it's the same government and same constitution but that was before they added one line of policy that shifts the burden of enslaving people a little bit so honestly it's like the genesis of a whole new America and we should really ignore everything before it you see
I brought this up to someone about slavery. They responded that black slaves weren't the southerner's "own people"
Which is half true, half obvious deflection, and half the most monstrous thing you could possibly say in that situation
on a pedantic note the southerners very much did claim ownership over black slaves
but those are owned people sweaty, big difference you see
also, since they were property, the southerns had a self-interest to keep them productive instead of just working them to death like in totalitarian states without private property rights :very-intelligent:
I'm fairly sure the Soviets were smarter than viewing kulaks and nazi collaborators as "their own people" because frankly, they aren't. They have actively chosen to be enemies of the people. This is something that fascists, in their pre-political bootlicker minds, always fail to understand: That people aren't born as your enemies, they choose to be that.
It makes more sense if you start with the assumption that liberals view "their own people" as a racial category
When somebody tells me that "at least the nazis didn't kill their own people", my first guess isn't that they're a liberal.
Yes absolutely and, when used specifically referring to the USSR, it is holocaust apologia.
you are correct. everyone who died in a gommunist country died from communism. anyone who died in a capitalist country was either unlucky, lazy or made bad choices and therefore had it comin'.
Imo it's also because Americans have internalised that it's fine for the USA to kill people from other countries as long as the treats keep flowing so they reconcile thinking murder is bad and being pro US by saying that it's only really bad if a country is killing its own people and simply assume that its just natural for countries to be consistently killing people in other countries (despite the fact that the vast majority of countries are generally not doing this).
or even that its fine for the US to kill their own citizens as they dont profess to be trying not to. on the other hand how dare any country not trying to kill their own citizens have anybody die from anything.
The whole pretense of this statement is suspicious as fuck since it seems to imply that killing your own people is somehow a higher crime than killing foreigners. It's just racist/nationalist chauvinism dressed up with false concern for loss of human life. And yes, it is of course used to demonize Socialist states. Socialist states are isolated economically by the immune system of Imperialist capitalism and then we are told that the deaths which result from sanctions and embargoes and sabotage other forms of scarcity imposed deliberately by imperialists are somehow "communists killing their own people." DPRK is "Killing it's own people." Kim Jong Un "needs to feed his people". You hear that a lot. It's a mockery of anyone paying attention and a lullaby for anyone who isn't.
On top of the fact that it accepts the Nazi position that German Jews weren’t “Real Germans,” I’d argue that as a general rule, a country invading another and killing people there is worse than killing its own citizens, not lighter
bourgeois critiques of communism target the idea that communism is a politics for the masses. capitalism is not itself vulnerable to this same rhetoric because it doesn't care about the masses.
I think that's because the people who make that point on one level do not consider black people to be Americans or Jews to be Germans
I've frequently heard this about the holocaust. Its a lib statement nonetheless as outlined elsewhere here
