Communism is the best solution to most of the world's problems

Thank you for your opening argument, Pro. Karl Marx was a brilliant and persuasive thinker, but did not get to see his ideas empirically tested. If he had, then in order to maintain intellectual honesty he would have had to admit that he was mistaken about many things. I begin by noting that my burden is not to prove that Communists cannot solve any problems, that everything they did was wrong, that it is inferior to every other system, or that all of its supporters are inherently evil. Indeed, these are not at all my positions. Communist Russia was an American ally in WW2, Communist Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space, and the USSR was at one time powerful enough to rival America militarily and perhaps in some ways even economically and ideologically. This provides ample evidence that Communism cannot simply be dismissed out of hand as being incapable of getting results. But it is not my aim to do so, and this is not at issue in this debate. My burden is simply to demonstrate that Communism is not the best answer to the world’s problems - nothing more, and nothing less. With that in mind, please note that none of the points Pro made in round 1 provide any support to the resolution that Communism is the best answer to problems, only that it provides one possible answer – and in at least some of these cases, a very bad answer. Denazification programs were also carried out in Western Europe. One of the main differences was that in the West, the Allies recognized the project as essentially a failure and a “witch hunt” and eventually in 1951 “the provisional West German government granted amnesties to lesser offenders and ended the program” [1]. Meanwhile, in Soviet controlled East Germany, 43,000 East Germans died in the camps that were set up by the Communists to imprison Nazis, but many were arbitrarily arrested and did not receive fair trials, or in some cases, any trials at all [1]. Rather than end the madness, they doubled down. The Soviets were embarrassed by the millions of East Germans that were fleeing to the better prospects in the West. They used fear mongering and demonization of West Germany, accusing it of being nothing but an extension of the old Nazi regime, to erect an “Antifascistischer Schutzwall”, or “antifascist bulwark” - the Berlin Wall. The true purpose of the Berlin Wall was to stem emigration out of hellish East Germany - to keep the population from escaping. If Communist controlled East Germany were such a paradise compared to the West, then why did people still risk their lives trying to get out of it? 5000 succeeded between 1961-1989… 600 of which were guards [2]. I can’t help but wonder - why do you think they were so desperate to leave such a great place, Pro? I agree that the Communist regimes did focus tremendous effort on building literacy and providing healthcare to the people, and to their credit, they were successful in improving literacy in countries such as Cuba. Again, my contention is not that Communist policy is incapable of improving the lives of people in any way at all. My criticism however, is that this is an incomplete solution, because high literacy, education, and healthcare never translated into good jobs and economic prosperity for these people. In the capitalist West as well as our capitalist allies like Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, there was both high literacy and economic prosperity. One need only look at the Korean peninsula at night to see the stark contrast between an enlightened prosperous mixed economy (both capitalist and socialist elements) like South Korea or even modern China, compared with the purity of Communist ideology that cripples North Korea. Indeed, while Mao may be rightly credited with being a patriot who was instrumental in freeing China from the grip of foreign domination, he was also was gravely mistaken about how best to transform his country into a prosperous and successful superpower. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were disastrous attempts to move China towards Communism and away from Capitalism, and the lowered agricultural production caused by these policies led directly to the deaths of millions of Chinese and the tragedy of a “lost generation” [3][4]. It was only when Deng Xiaoping gained enough influence to successfully maneuver his nation towards reform that China was able to enter a phase of unprecedented growth and prosperity – through mixed Capitalist-Socialist market economics, and not Communism [5]. During the past several decades, China has maintained high education levels, and generally speaking, political order and stability (with the exception of Tibet, which is a whole other issue). This indicates that mixed-market economics (Post Deng China, Singapore, much of Europe, etc...) is a vastly superior system than futile attempts to achieve pure Communism (Maoist China, Cuba, and present day North Korea). 1) http://en.wikipedia.org... 2) http://www.history.com... 3) http://www.independent.co.uk... 4) http://www.cnn.com... 5) http://www.time.com...