Jim:

First things first, thanks for your dense response and for 'splaining your comment about who gets to correct what.

Next: Communists didn't have to burn books. In the case of the Soviet Union, they literally shot letters out of their alphabet! (Would that the Irish would now do the same!)

But seriously, the Communists controlled what could be published in the first place. I'll never forget a Western reporter in a Chinese bookstore in the era of Mao. There was only ONE BOOK for sale! I'll bet N. Korea is similar right this very minute.

Nazis and the Soviet Union were VERY COMPARABLE, top-down political control in the solid grip of a despot, practicing major Cult Of Personality. The Nazis based their society on the false science of race. The Communists on the false science of Marxism/ Dialectical materialism. Oh, and the personalities of Hitler and Stalin, respectively. Reality was made subservient to the needs of the state, so that Darwin's survival of the fittest was extended by the Nazis to enable them to select that the fittest must be people who looked like themselves. The Communists actually denied Darwinism because is indicated that humans were not able to perfect themselves, and Stalin advanced an ignoramus named Lysenko who put Soviet biology in the dustbin for years.

Both societies reeked of hubris.

Your comment about Israel is neither here nor there (plenty of Israelis say the same things). But the irony is major: Early Israeli settlements from the days before independence into the 1970s made use of socialist societies, openly proudly and successfully, while only intermittently successful elsewhere in the West. Perhaps because it was small scale, administered from the bottom up, and not disastrously from the top town as was administered by Chavez in Venezuela, which resulted in a kleptocracy and the current disaster.


A lot of your comments about where today's countries are going are similar to my doubts. But they are made worse by false ideology. Take for example Yugoslavia. Tito as strongman kept it together by force, not rule of law. When his grip ended, all the poison in the mud hatched out, to quote Robert Graves. That is not Nazism, not Coummunism, not Democracy. That is the human condition. I think Clinton was right to lead NATO in limiting Serbia's grip on the region, but it took violence. Something that Clinton chose not to do in Africa, and hundreds of thousands of Rwandans and Somalis and Sudanese have perished. (And we're back to the thread topic Movie References: Hotel Rwanda; Beasts of No Nation)