Jim Carroll- re your link to:

"What "documented evidence?"
THIS DOCUMENTED EVIDENCE
Jim Carroll"

How that brought me back to the 'good' ol' days of The Cold War. Indeed, we are in the territory of "The God That Failed", and "Darkness at Noon" and of course, the still valid "1984".

The Gowan piece, to which you link, is a screed justifying the "Dictatorship OVER the Proletariat" that was Communist Eastern Europe. It seeks to humanize and justify the Eastern German nation-state that existed from Post-War to 1989.

The elephant in the room unseen was, of course, terror. The Stalinist imposition of imposed thought patterns under threat of death of oneself, one's loved ones, or both. From Stalin's point of view, it was simply survival. This is the case of ultimate equivalency: Stalin's survival as important as Roosevelt's for instance. It is understandable- from Stalin's point of view. It led to the killing of millions of people across the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, and the sending of other millions to the Gulags and various institutions, including of course, in a less lethal environment, in the 70s, mental institutions because if you were loco enough to oppose the state, certainly you must be mentally challenged.

Unfortunately for those who accept Gowan's article as anything other than a self-justifying screed, I remember Communism and Communists. They were not unlike the racists of the Nazis in that they set up a self-justifying philosophy that supplanted reality by using their own version of Orwellian Newspeak. I'll never forget one professor at my university explaining to me that the failures of the U.S.S.R. were not due to Communism being imperfect, but that the Russians trying to implement it were.

Jim Carroll you have been right about one thing, this is become a cold war back-and-forth. Whatever language you choose to indulge in, you have swallowed the principle of equivalency which I reject. There is no need for name calling. This is our point of difference. I think this applies to our difference in the Middle East as well. We are using a different set of basic standards and, like the impossibility of squaring the circle using nothing but a straight-edge and a compass, we will not be able to agree.

Thank you for populating your threads with enough clarity and references to make this clear to me.