Posted: Oct 01, 2014 10:22 pm
carl wrote:<snip 'misinformed bollocks'>
Let's take it from the top, shall we
- Karl Marx: Had nothing to do with the death of anyone
- Friedrich Nietzsche: Had nothing to do with the death of anyone
- Vladimir Lenin: The first country to legalise homosexuality & abortion, was Lenin's Soviet Union. He also introduced free universal health care, no-fault divorce, free education, land reform, and a general modernisation, and the establishment of a free market economy. All that in the midst or just after world war, invasion, and civil war. No genocide.
- Leon Trotsky: An anti-war socialist, and a Jew, who had a religious wedding. He didn't oversee genocide. Yes, there was starvation in Russia, but funnily enough, it was during war time. It was not policy.
- Benito Mussolini: Catholic. Baptized in 1927. Had Catholic clerics in the Fascist Party, and Pope Pius XI called Mussolini "the Man of Providence"
- Joseph Stalin: All-round nasty bastard, who had been in training for the priesthood. And yes, he declared himself an atheist, though atheism wasn't the reason for his murderousness.
- Margaret Sanger: Not actually responsible for the death of any living persons.
- Mao Zedong: It's true that his regime caused the deaths of 40 to 70 million people by starvation, torture, and executions. The Chinese population also grew by some 350 million, with education, free universal healthcare, and so on. Nobody died because of his atheism.
- Jim Jones: Mad man, with a range of weird beliefs, including that he was Ghandi reincarnated, that he was a reincarnation of Jesus, and Lenin, was God ... and he killed lots of people.
- Pol Pot: Nasty bastard, guilty of genocide. I've no idea of his beliefs. He did suppress religious organisations, and anything else that offered any alternative point of view to his own.
And the one you missed was Hitler, who was a Catholic.