When trying to debate with me, it would help if you actually read my posts in their entirety and not simply read every second word and then make wild assumptions. Now read carefully, if you can. I know last time it was only two sentences and you couldn’t even read that properly but please try this time.
No, it was communalism. I never said it was communism.
The point I was making is that calling a government an oligarchy is pointless as MOST governments are indeed oligarchy, especially those with autocratic ideals. Now, I don’t remember calling communism an oligarchy but if you look at the history of Bolshevism I think you will see that Lenin clearly thought the USSR should be ruled as an oligarchy. All other communist and socialist governments around the world have used the Bolshevik example.
Gosh Snake, you're the sort of guy for whom the "no editing" rule was created. For the record, you never said they were communalist, and you never said they were communist either. You asked "Would you call the system of government the Iroquois, Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Tuscarora had was communism?" No one can make any sense of why you asked that (well actually I know why, but it's too silly to repeat), but that's what you did.
First: that's a terrible sentence, the final verb doesn't match any of the nouns. Typos are one thing (I make them all the time); having basic literacy is another (I have advanced literacy). Tone down the knee-jerk responses and try reading your own posts (I think you don't read your own posts).
Second: Don't go around accusing people of reading selectively and then responding blindly. You are taking this conversation wherever you want, most recently from the USSR to Spain to several Native American tribes to Cambodia. In the whole post I can find no point, only knee-jerk remarks intended to battle JM's points. If I can't find a coherent message to reply to and so choose to respond to this one bit of lunacy, you can ignore it or you can get into it with me. What you MAY NOT do is suggest that I don't understand you, or that I selectively responded to try to make you look stupid, or as you put it because I am too simple to understand your complicated (if incoherently communicated) mind.
Your post if you need me to comment on the whole thing went from: a claim that you had never accused the Muslims of being the only warmongerers, although you did earlier imply that pacifism in the West was a form of self-loathing; to a claim that North Americans entertain public executions (we don't); to a collapsing of decades of history of the Southern US to try to reduce JM's comments on the KKK (you failed); to a random question about Native Americans and whether they were communist; to an accusation that JM brought up communism in the first place, accompanied by the ludicrous suggestion that this is a "debate;" to the Spanish civil war (an effort to make a global comment on secular uprisings versus spirituality); to the Khmer and some other lateral argument you're having with JM. If you're surprised I didn't choose to reply to all of it, unsur-fucking-prise yourself. Those are several separate topics and your posts are starting to look like the early days of Usenet. I don't apologise for not responding in kind.
Back to what I did. I RESPONDED to your question, directly, which again is a far cry from "[reading] every second word and then [making] wild assumptions." If you want to keep up this nonsensical digression on "communalism" versus "communism," you need to acknowledge that neither describes the government systems of the tribes you mentioned. Living in longhouses like the Oneida doesn't define the group as "communal" any more than living in apartment buildings would do for us today. If it does, the all societies are "communialist" to some degree or another, and you can just fucking drop that word from your vocabulary altogether. Meanwhile, again to respond to your question, NO, they were not communist. Their governments were top-down; while suggestions and input would be welcomed from members of the tribe, the ruling group held sway. Typically this group would be made up of respected elders and the more successful warriors. And yes, in this limited sense their system of government was similar to our own. Every dissimilarity brings them closer to grass roots democracy, not to communism.
Then you said "Almost every government is an oligarchy to one degree or another." What makes theirs different from your dumbed-down idea of "oligarchy" (one that would include our own) is that there was NO ELECTION PROCESS. These guys were just appointed from within. The term "oligarchy," as you seem to suggest (if I bother to meet you more than halfway) is a very general and primitive term and can be used to describe government in general. Why we have more terms is that giovernment systems can be more specific. Like, a square is a rectangle, but you'd never call it that since the word "square" describes it more accurately. The government these guys had however was extremely primitive, and can only be called "oligarchy" because no more specific word, certainly not "communist" applies. Their government wasn't even a rectangle; maybe even "parallelogram" would be to give them too much credit. DOES THAT ANALOGY HELP?
Getting back to communism, you NOW say that you never said that communism was oligarchy ("almost all"), "but if you look at the history of Bolshevism I think you will see that Lenin clearly thought the USSR should be ruled as an oligarchy." Well ok. So you didn't say it then, but you're saying it now? Was it an oligarchy or not? Doesthis have anything to do with the point that you're making about there being only two types of people, Muslim warmongers and Westernised self-loathing Capitalists? Do oligarchies support or attack churches? Is communism at its heart a rule of atheism (try not to ignore JM's remarks about the political sway churches held in the turn of the century)?
Last: When you're done belabouring this point about what sort of government a series of unconnected Native tribes used, could you let us all know what general point you're trying to make? Because in case you didn't know what I was doing there with the Ford Taurus crack, I was making fun of your anything-goes style. It's not uncommon among trolls to just disagree with whatever the last post said, even if it's got nothing to do with their main argument, or in some cases if it's the very thing they themselves were arguing earlier (hence communism is oligarchy, no it's not, yes it is). If your goal is to be trollish until we ignore you, you're not going to succeed. As much as I love a spirited discourse on the merits of some Islam documentary, I much prefer punting a troll around. So, troll away.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
civilian_number_two 
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