2020 has been an amazing year of learning. The Ideology bias was very apparent this year where people's extreme ideologies prevented them from seeing the truth on many issues.
I personally think these ideologies turn people's brains into BOILED CABBAGE.
All one has to do is look at the history of collective ideologies and see the extreme damage that can result. Communism comes to mind.
While I agree with most of you just said. I think you picked the wrong example at the end with communism. While communism is certainly an ideology, there were very few communist ideologues during communism.
I am not sure of the percentage of people in favor of communism prior to countries becoming communists. But I suspect it was quite high as it was sold and seemed to offer
the masses something and that is why so many fought for it. I think it is a great example of the danger of an extreme ideology.
I think it was a disaster for a host of reasons resulting in millions of deaths, poverty, loss of freedom, etc.
I agree it was a bad system but you suspicion is incorrect.
Communism's spread in Europe for example was done through military conquest. The United States gave (gifted?) half of Europe to the USSR. At that point the countries had two choices: they could become communist or Russian tanks would roll into their countries and become communists. The second choice is actually a bit dramatic as at the point these countries became communist the USSR actually had armies stationed in these countries and the controlled the governments. They merely appointed the communist party as the ruling party.
It's pretty obvious that when you have to use a gun to get people to do something it is because they're not convinced by your ideas.
You are right that many countries in Europe became communist through military conquest. Good point.
But then there was Russia, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. Likely a bigger percent of the population believed Communism would be better in those countries.
Would have been better for the populations if the leaders just threw out the Communist ideology and picked the system that worked the best.
Ok, let dig deeper. Russia and Cuba were revolutions. In these cases you are probably right that communism was accepted by a large part of the population. Though I doubt it was really the ideology of communism that did it. These revolutions were brought upon by extreme inequality. Most of the population was living at or below subsistence level. So you have a large mass of population with nothing to loose. If it wasn't communism it would probably have been some other ideology that would have done it.
This brings me back to the theory overplayed on ideology issue. Communism as an ideology was not crafted for agrarian societies like Russia and Cuba. It was crafted for industrialized societies like Germany and Britain. But in Russia Lenin and the gang decided to toss that out take the kernel of ideology and overlay a new theory on it to make it work there. So it's not so much the ideology but the theories that go with it.
Now past that it all changes. One mistake that people in the west made about communism is that it was the ideology and communists were ideologues ready to die for communism. That couldn't be farther from the truth. Was Lenin an ideologue? Probably. But not in the ideology of communism but in his own theory of communism. Past that come the next generations. Was Stalin a communist ideologue? Not for a second. He was a power hungry tyrant. As a power hungry tyrant communist Russia had a pretty good system set up to achieve his goals. Why would he want to change it?
I have to admit that I don't know as much about Asian communism as the European one. In China I know the communists fought a civil war and they won so communism it is. If you fight a civil war you don't have that great of an acceptance of an idea. But clearly enough of one for people to fight and die for the idea. Korea, again pretty big war so not overwhelming acceptance there either. Vietnam is tricky because you have so many moving parts: French imperialism, Russian influence, American interests so I'm not even gonna try to venture a guess.
In the end it ironically looks like the only place where communism ideology succeeded and was really supported by a large part of the population ideologically was Cuba. But this wasn't really communist ideology that was supported. It was Castro's version of communism. His theory basically. I think there's a fair chance that the people that came up with the communist ideology did not even know that Cuba existed.
