Amongst all those things I was supposed to note!

"note that the Mugabes, Nkrumahs, Kenyattas and so on used the tag 'socialism' as a way of getting support (economic and political) from the Soviet Union. Other dictators, like Banda and Bokassa, courted Britain and America. The result on the ground was often not a lot different."

Anybody ever got anything other than "political" support from the Soviet Union?? "Economic" support would of course have been really worth taking them up on considering how successful they were in their own right (The USSR I mean). Mind you they did litter the planet (one person in sixty of the worlds population could have one) with that seemingly indispensible little gadget in the developing world known as the AK-47. In all those "trouble" spots around the globe where you have people with absolutely sod all, hacking bits off each other and killing massive numbers of each other, there you see blasted across the TV screens of the World, the bounty of "Communist Aid" in the shape of the 12.7mm Heavy Machine Guns, the BMP Armoured Personnel Carriers, the T-54, T-56 and T-64 Tanks. You see their principle was, "Give a man a meal and he will return for another hand-out tomorrow. Give a man an AK-47 and he can go and rob and disposess some other poor bastard and thereby feed himself for life." (Example: Darfur).

Also odd how before the left insisted that post-WW2 that colonies were bad, there were no massed famines in Africa - Reasons for that of course was that there were fewer people, less transport, less mobility in general and that the colonial power had a duty of responsibility to care for the citizens that the IMF and the World Bank does not.

Also note that when those who previously turned to the USSR and the Communist Block for "Aid", when they started getting it from the big bad evil "West" things started to get better, not perfect I know but an improvement.