>I like the tin ear joke. Rather like "The potatoes are piled as high as God"
>
>I don't think I use red strawmen. My problem is not with equitable distribution of resources, but with authoritarian social orders, which i think are far more threatening to the human spirit than knowing someone else got a better hand dealt than you did.

Well I lauded you for not doing it this time, but you did before and elsewhere. I may yet catch you next time if I'm not having a petite-bourgeois siesta :).

> I don't see Castro as a socialist, I see him as a fascist. ( would you claim
>Ceauşescu as a 'socialist' ? )

Even perverts of the worst kind still fall into "sex" category. IOW, even the worst offenders are still male or female - which doesn't say much about either gender. So while Batista, Somosa, Pinochet et al are dictators of the capitalist type, Stalin, Ceauşescu, Rákosy, Pol Pot et al are dictators of the socialist type. There are differences in the method, not just the color (personality cult, need to reeducate the opponents 1984-style and a few more).

>>>And yes, fifties were the proper time to decide to go with mainstream real-socialism a la Stalin,
>
>I have to believe that is a typo as I would never think you would use Stalin as the standard bearer for any kind of socialism.

Ooooops... I went into the rest of the list before finishing the first part of the sentence... should have had "or to go one's own way, into various models of socialism" just after that comma where you cut it.

> Aren't we agreed that Stalin was a genocidal thug who was responible for the deaths of more Russians than the Germans were ?

I'm bad with numbers, but thug he was. On a side note, he was a big Russian Georgian-born guy. He made himself a Russian, though he wasn't one - he even avoided speaking too much in public, because Russian language wasn't among his better skills.

>An early mentor of mine was with Stillwell in China in WWII and spent some time in a cave with Ho ( who claimed - to the Americans at least - that he'd been reading George Washington's diary ) He was impressed with him ( and probably hated the French as much as Ho did ) and in the 50s had a rather nasty falling out with Allen Dulles over our policy when we decided in 54 to ignore the Geneva accords and not back Ho who we were quite sure would win a free election. He had no illusions about Ho being a democrat, but he was convinced he was a nationalist, no fan of the Chinese, and someone we could deal with as long as we weren't determined to perpetuate French mistakes. Which, of course, we were. ( He was even more impressed with Giap )

At least he made a good enemy later ;). This is the sort of blindness in American politics that seems to repeat over and over. It doesn't matter who really is a friend or who is a foe, it has its entrenched prejudice - this good, that bad, no matter the year. Specially in the case of socialist countries, among which a lot could have been achieved with carrots, but no, it had to be state-sponsored terrorism, laws be damned.

>It was a bit tricky after war as the French communist party could lay claim to having been the most prominent resistance and keeping them from taking power after the war was seen as a very very top priority. To the few Americans who knew anything about Indochina this meant we turned a blind eye to many things - including Colonel Trinquier's financing the colony through the heroin trade. ( I later got into the tail end of the legacy of this in Laos )

And the CIA did not take over the business later? ;)

And, BTW, there was a similar tradeoff with the Greek, or against them. Markos's partisans had to be sold (by Stalin) and disbanded, and the country was made into a kingdom again, and had to endure a couple of decades of dictatorship, just because the West had made a previous deal with Stalin. All that just because the communists would have won in any elections at the time?

>And remember by 1950 the French communist party had been purged of non-Stalinists and its success would hardly have meant a Free France.

But it would have been very interesting. First, they'd have to operate within the system - they'd have to win the elections etc. It's 1950, nobody's willing to wage another war in Europe. It would also be interesting to see whether the other cradle of democracy (after Greece) would have the guts to accept communists winning an election. Or should we mention Italy 1974 again?

>I only denigrated the 'free' health care of Cuba in so much as Castro has used it like bread and circuses. Swapping freedom for free health care still doesn't seem like a good deal, though I believe in both.

Freedom from what and freedom of what? I somehow don't see much difference between these or other employees of the big money (in case I wasn't clear, I meant the political parties such as exist today) - they aren't serving people anymore. So free from the dictate of the state vs free from the corporate dicatate - the freedom is the same. Just like someone on the NPR today, in a dancing-in-the-street euphory, not at all unlike some Arabs celebrating 9/11, said "when people have economic liberties, they will then want political liberties as well" - which is actually a thorough Marxist analysis ;). I wonder, if people here became economically free from the big corporations, would they again choose to consume mindlessly and get deep into debt? ;)