"Do you honestly think that the incredible death rate of those who politically opposed those in power in a myriad of work/ "
Don't know if you have any particular back-door to the truth, but having had an interest in politics for half-a century, I
have a little difficulty in separating it from the Cold-War rhetorical claims of how many died
By the time Stalin got his toe in, anything resembling socialism had long disappeared and the left were as likely to be victims as were the right - nothing to do with the system that was being aimed for.
Hitler was a product of German industrial capitalism - would you use that fact to denigrate the capitalist system?
Democracy is a very moveable feast in the West
My father panicked when he say the rise of Hitler, went off to fight in Spain and was wounded and imprisoned there.
When he returned, he was awarded an MI5 record as a "premature anti-fascist", excommunicated from his church, and blacklisted from his work - my mother and sister hardly saw him until I was aged 9 because he was forced to become a navvy
Now I am ten years older than he was when he died, there isn't a day passes when I don't think of him with pride - I still share his dream.
I doubt it.
The aims of The Soviet Union were being distorted by outside interference, such as the 14 countries which sent troops to support the Civil War brought about by an attempt top return to the old system and another world war in which the USSR lost 26,600,000 people, 13.7% of the population
The state was leveled to the ground and, rather than being allowed to rebuild peacefully, along came The Cold War.
Despite that fact, what had been a backward semi feudalist gathering of backward states, it developed into an industrial world leader
Stalin was a political thug working in a situation that encouraged such extremism - up to the end of the war he was "Good old Uncle Joe", the man who helped beat the Nazis (still have a photograph somewhere of me standing with my mothers arms at a street party in Liverpool, with posters of Stalin plastered all over the street.
"slave states" is one of those convenient terms - we fill our shops with goods created by virtual slave labour, and we sell arms to the dictators that create the conditions, because they are regarded as "a safe pair of hands"
When mass-murderer Pinochet was under house-arrest in Britain our Prime Minister worked her socks off to see he didn't come to trial for the many thousand young people he had slaughtered
She described those who wanted him tried as "running a police state" and, at a rally in Westminster on a platform draped witr crossed British and Chilean flags, she described him as "a hero of democracy"
Don't get me wrote - I despise Stalin for what he did to 'the dream", but he was a product of extreme circumstances which allowed him to do his worst.
Britain was quite happy to let "Herr Hitler" do his worst until they had no alternative,
Never been to China, but the Communist countries I did visit had no such restrictions on literature and those I talked to knew far more about my country's history than I did at the time - and most of them spoke several languages, English being the most common.
Lenin - so what
Don't we have statues to Nelson and Wellington - aren't our public buildings draped with flags, don't we still celebrate centuries old battles (mostly those which enabled us to enslave an entire Empire)
Lenin was a national hero who assisted Russia to walk away from the bloodbath that was WW1 and save many millions of Russian lives
I'd buy him a drink if he walked into our local.
I suggest you come back and tell me about Stalin when we don't live under a system that doesn't sanction the pouring of burning jellied petrol on third world farmers, or sanction wars with third world nations in order to run our cars on cheap petrol - or fill our shops with goods manufactured in factories that regularly crush workers who are paid less than enough to feed themselves and their families
Jim Carroll