Hey Peter: A somewhat better post than your previous one, so I'll try to be nice:

Blaming all communists for Stalinism is like blaming all Christians for the Inquisition. It is tarring with one brush, yet there is a lot of blame to go round.

Dragging in the fact that Russia did yeoman's work to defeat the Germans in WWII has little if anything to do with Communism. If you know much about the war you'll know that the Germans were first welcomed as liberators by Ukrainians and Russians until they learned there could actually be something worse than Communism.

I'm not so worried that every Communist is as you have determined Stalin to be "paranoid psychopath - probably certifiable". Maybe that's true, but the guy ran the largest country in the world for about 30 years, had nuclear weapons, and managed to die in bed. The Communists with him as their leader had one-party rule by terror for the whole of that time and a generation after. So I'm worried about the millions of people who FOLLOWED the "paranoid psychopath - probably certifiable" and were so blind as to write praises to him and his ilk.

You managed to spend more words than my original post saying a lot less. I also put forth that Communism was much more than a political party, it sought to supplant religion, philosophy, and to a point, science (unless it could be shown to serve the state, one guess as to who made that determination).

As for books, you advise me to read some but you didn't bother to point out a one. Some folks local to me gave me a book by Marcuse which I found unreadable. So may I commend to you Orwell's "Animal Farm", "1984", and Koestler's "Darkness At Noon".

Is the fact that there are eurocommunists now any different from the fact that there are euronazis now?

As far as does knowing that a reporter is or has Communist sympathies informative of bias, I think it profoundly IS. And while waiting for more facts of this affair to come out, I think we have already seen Ms. Sgrena having problems with facts and no fear of asserting opinions as facts.