I did not say that one side was as bad as the other. I said that the Japanese were worse than America or Britain. Much worse. Read my words. And the Nazis were even much worse yet! And so was Stalin, but he was an ally of convenience for the West at that particular juncture... But people know this in the West! What use is agreeing with everyone else and repeating for the 85,000th time that water is wet??? We all know that. It will not free us to say it again, for the 85,001st time.

The first job necessary in combating present evil and hypocrisy is to combat it on your own turf, which for me happens to be western society. If you can't resist it effectively at home, you will never be able to truly resist it anywhere else...and if resisting it elsewhere while ignoring it at home you will be either a fool or a hypocrite.

It is the job of a politically responsible person in North America or in any other place to first draw attention to the rot in his own front and backyard.

It is the job of a protestor in Russia or China to do the same...attend to his own front and backyard.

Understand?

I am not living in Russia or China. What point is there in me parroting what 10,000 lazy thinkers in North America who are too naive to ever look in their own front and backyard at all blather on about every day?

I will counter Orwell by paraphrasing him thus:

"There are a majority of armchair patriots in EVERY country in this world whose real, though unadmitted, motive appears to be hatred of everything that strikes them as foreign or different from their own chosen way of doing things. Their fondest hope is to persuade or force all other people on this planet to do things their way and only their way.

They are as common in dictatorships like the former Soviet Union or China as they are in western democracies like Britain or the USA. They make excellent capitalists, marvellous socialists, and superb communists. They universally detest pacifists and critics of the home regime, wherever that regime is located.

Their hate propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side (theirs) is the fountainhead of all that is good and true, while the other side (whoever) is evil incarnate, but if one looks closely at the writings of such fervent patriots in a country such as, for example, America, one finds that they are directed almost entirely against anyone at all except Britain, Israel and the USA.

They do not as a rule condemn violence unless it is used against themselves or a close ally of theirs. In fact, they idolize violence when it is committed by their own people, and they constantly seek new and even more effective ways of practicing it. Thus their firepower is unequalled anywhere outside their borders.

Their entertainment moguls, who are among their richest and most corrupt citizens, have discovered that violence sells even better at the box office or on the video game screen than sex (although the two together are the ultimate combination), and you can't fight profit, can you? The Soviets found that out! You can't fight mass media domination and total military supremacy either, and nothing beats the smell of napalm in the morning!"

I detest totalitarianism, whether it is achieved by either open military dictators (as in China or Iraq, for example) or an oligarchy of the rich hiding behind an elected figurehead (as in America or the UK). I love democracy, but I do NOT see it being practiced at the higher levels of government in either my own country (Canada) or the USA...I only see the procedural pretense of democracy. We still have real democracy at the local level, however...so far...because the "party" system has not yet entirely taken over the local level.

Orwell was a bit wide of the mark...he thought that faceless centralized Soviet-style socialism would take over the world, but he did not realize how much more powerful glitzy corporate mass marketing would prove to be, with the emergence of commercial television in the mid-50's as the public's daily pacifier, hypnotizer, and manipulator...or how effortlessly that corporate marketing system would cross national borders as it gobbled up and subverted the whole world by a combination of commercial seduction, credit spending, and financial monopolies, backed up by brute force...whenever that was required.

- LH