Influence your thoughts and feelings

[gekko]

To your 2nd paragraph: There are many issues about which I do not know squat. There are other issues about which I know enough, but not more than most and less than some. There are a couple of issues about which I know more than most, and definately more than people here. 2 reasons for that. 1) I was born there and have many relatives with whom I can talk about these things, who actually lived through them as adults... and 2) Since the age of about 15-16, my fascination with my former (thank god) homeland has led me to read more literature on the topic of the history of the USSR and world comminism in general than people who were not born there would care to do. Oh and works by Marx and Engels and Lenin were required reading in college, and my parents actually took some of their literature with them.

The combination of those 2 factors allows me to have such strong views on this topic. See, you guys think you know and understand. I, OTOH actually do know and understand. Oh, I suppose there are 1 or 2 people here who were born there also, but that does not mean that they care about this topic as much as I do and therefore do not know as much.

As far as your 1st paragraph.....I choose not to touch it, as this might get ugly, and I am in a very relaxed mood right now....
-A
[right][snapback]86580[/snapback][/right]

That may have been enough if this discussion was limited to specific historic facts or timetables. However, the opinion you put forward was not limited to the rule of communism in the USSR. The opinion you put forward was that communism is and must always be evil. That's a pretty bold statement, particularly considering you never bothered to state what aspects of communism you believe are so evil, or even exactly you mean by communism. Off-hand, I can't think of a single definition I would apply to communism, since I'm aware of several very differing beliefs that fall under that broad name.

If you want to say that certain aspects of communism made things worse in the USSR than they would have been had communism not existed, then I would say your personal experiences would make you very qualified to express that argument. However, you didn't do that. You made a broad generalization that communism is evil, without putting any limits or definitions in place. That's like my saying that vegeratians are evil, without mentioning that I'm talking about vegetarians who murder anyone they find eating meat.

My comments regarding capitalism, by the way, were not meant to spark anything ugly. They were simply designed to point out that any system has flaws, and that it is not fair to label something evil by asserting that those flaws are inherent and cannot possibly be fixed or changed.

gekko