Did anything I say imply I didn't welcome the wall coming down? The same way I'd like the wall between the United States and Cuba - both ways.

What I was talking about was the way it rapidly became clear that the main objection that the people in power in Washington and London and elsewhere had to the Iron Curtain countries wasn't that they were repressive or dictatorial. It was that they weren't capitalist.

Instead of aid provided in such as way that it would help open up the lives of the people, and give them more freedom, everything was geared in a doctrinaire fashion to breaking up any kind of nationalised industries etc, in a gold rush style devil-take-the-hindmost frenzy, designed to allow the crooks and the apparatchiks to steal for their own personal use what belonged to everybody.

The very people who had cynically profitted out of the "communist" system were the same people who became millionaires. Them and the mafia. And the carpetbaggers.

And you'll note that anyone in Eastern Europe who opposed what was going on was described as a conservative...