> What you have done is simply redefined communists to be communists who advocate violent overthrow and declaring that is the only type of communist there is.

But that's actually, legitimately the definition of Communism. That's how Marx defined it. Second sentence from Wikipedia: "Karl Marx, the father of communist thought, posited that communism would be the final stage in society, which would be achieved through a proletarian revolution"

Here's a map of everywhere that tried Communism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sino-Soviet_split_1980.svg

Violence in every single place. Lots of it. Horrible stuff.

> Your comment is a piece of trite propaganda.

The book that laid out Communism - the Communist Manifesto - directly calls for violence. Every significant attempt at Communism has included violence. At this point, Communism includes violence. If you're not in favor of rioting and violence and re-education, you're doing something other than Communism as was written by the founder of the movement and every real life implementation of it.

Pointing this out is not propaganda, and it's not trite. Trying to make Communism happen has literally created more misery and destruction than any other movement in history, and it's not even really close. People need to know about and remember the Khmer Rouge killing fields, they need to know about the Great Leap Forwards and Cultural Revolution, they need to know what Marx actually wrote in his books, they need to know where Communism leads and what it really is. It's a horrible thing. Putting it down is not trite - it's important that it's remembered for what it is, and never allowed to surface again, for the same reasons it's important that fascism doesn't surface again.

Just because the Communist Manifesto calls for violence does not mean that everyone who self-identifies as communist has to accept it. Modern communists can change, re-interpret, or cherry-pick parts of the doctrine. I know at least one person who explicitly identifies as both a communist (small c) and a pacifist. Marx defined the original meaning of the word, but he doesn't control its definition through the end of history, and the modern conception of communism is the resulting economic system, not the means to achieve it. Hell, in some contexts, communism is a tool of literary analysis.

Communism (big C), in practice, has lead to a lot of slaughter. I can't deny that. However, to say that it has created "more misery and destruction than any other movement in history," I will provide the counter-point that it is the only significant social-historical movement to occur in the industrial age. The Crusades (to pick a Goodwin-level example) or even the French revolutions did not have the means to cause misery and destruction on such a scale. Controlling for that accident of historical (technological) context, I would need additional evidence or argument to convince me that Communism is significantly more malicious from any other abstract idea (including democracy in both ancient and recent time as well as most religions) that people have used as an excuse for killing each other over the years.

Little C communists are just big C communists who haven't had the chance to implement their ideas. The idea that the capitalization of a letter means a significantly different ideology is silly. Libertarians don't go around calling themselves liberals because they know it means something different now and don't want to be associated with the new definition of liberal.

> the modern conception of communism is the resulting economic system, not the means to achieve it.

Every socialist I've ever talked to has always said their about the good ideas not the bad results. Where do you think the bad results come from? Do you think Mao thought the great leap forward would really kill 60 million people?

Roughly the same amount of people have died in India, from starvation, because of implementation of quite opposing ideas.