Interesting, because I have another person on a HN thread scolding me for calling Soviet regime communism.

I would like people to either reconcile this between themselves or stop pretending like they can correct on well-defined term usage.

I suspect the person is an actual communist and not one fond of dictators? no? :) . I still stand by the idea that real communism as professed by Marx can't survive in groups bigger than the hunter-gatherer groups of old for much more than a generation before it will self-immolate. Most people are "greedy" and will only truly sacrifice for their loved ones like family and their "best of" friends. I will dive to push my child out of the way of an oncoming vehicle without regret or pause (or at least hope I would) and would stand back in a similar situation happening to a neighor and hope my neighbor "survives that" or ponder "that's gonna hurt"

Actual communism is different than the communism tried by Stalin, Mao, Pol pot, Castro or any of the self-professed communists......is a hard sell.

It is especially odd given that most of these men were both well-read and wrote a lot about their intellectual commitment to communism.

At that point, it's better to start referring to Marx's academic theories as 'proto communism' or 'communist utopianism' .... the word 'communism' already has a tarnished legacy and it is further solidified by the convergent outcomes from each of those aforementioned regimes.

Communist/Socialist are very attached to their theoretical world construction. With tons of obscure terms and redefinition of common terms. So that whenever anybody who isn't an expert says anything they can say 'you are wrong because such and such'.

The fact is whenever Communist took over a country, they created mostly the same structure. And its the only form of socialism/communist that existed in a realistic long term setting.

Everything else is just theoretical talking about what true socialism and true communism really are depending on the subculture.

The soviet worldview was "We're trying to build communism and some day we will succeed, but for now what we have is socialism". So while it's easy to attribute all the wrongdoings to the Communist Party, it's not that easy to trace them back to socialism or communism. Was something done in an attempt to build communism or socialism? Hard to tell.

> mostly because we've failed at teaching our children history and basic types of government

Or you know the whole part of the history book where 20th century communists called themselves socialists too, least of which the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)...

Lenin was in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. China calls itself "Socialism with Chinese characteristics." North Korea is an "independent socialist state." Ho Chi Minh's roots were in the Socialist Party of France before being a founder of the French Communist Party.