>>>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 :).
>>
>>Well, it won't hurt to have you watch-dogging my increasing slide down the slope to right-wing senility <g>
>
>"Who in youth isn't a socialist, has no heart. Who in old age isn't conservative, has no brains." - Nikola Pašić (whom I never really liked, politically, but he had the brains and the guts)
>

Not sure who was plagiarizing whom but Clemenceau said, "If you're not a Communist at 18 something is wrong with your heart, but if you're still one at 30 something is wrong with your head."

>Ah, you said "DOWN the slope". There's hope ;).

>
>>But the common thread is authoritarian rule. I don't see dime's worth of difference between Stalin and Hitler and Mao ( all at least were intellectually honest enough to be cynical and contemptuous of humanity ) I guess I think of socialism as a type of idealism and therefore I see dictators as a betrayal of socialism. ( they are also a betrayal of capitalism, in my libertarian conception of capitalism ) Voluntary socialism is political maturity. State imposed 'socialism' as seen in most examples of the 20th century is an Emperor in New Clothes.
>
>Well, we could go down the list of examples one by one, as well as the list of socialist states taken down by force (of money or coup or whatever) - and some countries may be on both lists.

What of the socialist states which have failed because they degenerated into kakistocracies that completely lost legitimacy by failing to provide either social justice or prosperity for the people and for a fraction of a second relaxed the stranglehold on liberty they required to keep power ( USSR, East Germany ad continuum ... )


>
>State socialism the American way, as practiced today, isn't that bad either (you take risks for the benefit of all, your own first; if you profit from it you pay taxes so to share your good luck, if you fail you get aid from tax money) except that it works for one class of citizens only (corporations) while the others get to live in pure untamed capitalism (you, I). Another example of it is that there's a lot of redistribution of wealth going on - you can build a whole business empire on research paid for by tax money and still you own it, the people get "hollow nose up to the eyes" (another Serbian for "nothing"; the next on the list would be "a dickfull of cold water").

Of course this would be appalling if it weren't for the upwardly mobile nature of the society. You also may be a bit fuzzy about the meaning of 'corporation' - it is a publicly held entity. I grant you some portions of the public hold greater portions than other, but the game is open to anyone who wants to play.

How many millionaires in this country come from modest beginnings? I grant you there also many who never did anything more clever than pick the right parents or outlive far more clever ancestors, but this is not historically unique. What is unique is a society in which so much prosperity has been achieved by so many through their own efforts. I notice that when you left Yugoslavia you did not seek your fortune in Zimbabwe or Cuba. <s>

>
>>I completely agree. Of course this is the wisdom of hindsight. I think US policy in the Cold War was often devoid of understanding of local conditions and far too often we picked our allies not for who they were but for what they weren't.
>>
>>But a lot of the decisions were made in the late 40s and early 50s by people who had come of age in the 30s and 40s. It's a bit easier for us to get some perspective on it now.
>
>And in the 30s and 40s the country was still very isolationist, IIRC (ok, "remember" is not the exact expression here - I may look that old, but... never mind). If today's generations of politicians, who have all the world's data and expertise available, is any measure, these guys had no clue of what was going on abroad, and fell victim of their own propaganda (but so did Reagan, right?).
>

Data is not knowledge. <s>

>>>And the CIA did not take over the business later? ;)
>>
>>Someday we'll have a beer and I'll tell you some stuff about that you may not know. <s> We actually inherited the network rather than the business, primarily the Binh Xuyen river pirates of the Saigon delta area, the Laotian and Vietnamese military cadres and the Hmong. Throw in the Thai Tchiew gangster network between Bangkok and Saigon and ... well, it was a colorful place in a colorful time <s>
>
>I think I've read a few, ahem, colorful books situated in the area at the time,

Was one of them mine ? <bg>

>>and saw a few movies - Dennis Hopper comes to mind, not sure why, Le Care would be a better guess, so I got some imagery in my head. A (aka one) beer is underwhelming - make it a few ;).

Oh, you'll need a case. Don't know much about LeCarre's world but I do know something of blindmen trying to see the elephant.

>
>>But as you know from the Yugoslav experience ( and the example of Barcelona in 1937 ) the greatest danger to a nationalist communist in the Post-war period was not the CIA but the NKVD. When the KKE lost its nerve and chose Stalin over Tito the game was over.
>
>Dzhugashvili was a major player. He's sold them years before, and they still trusted him. Go figure.

I would have thought the ideological backflips necessary to swallow the Hitler-Stalin pact would have been enough to choke even the zealots in Comintern, but I guess by then all the 'tin-ears' had been purged.


>
>One positive note from the whole story is that with Macedonia being a country now, we don't really have to care why Greece disagrees with the existence of a country named the same as one of its provinces - they see it as an attempt to revamp the idea of Greater Macedonia, which was offered during the Greek civil war in exchange for even more Macedonians joining in.
>
>>I think a lot of the history of socialism was determined by idealistic communists not catching on in time as to what a cynical, mad, completely non-idealistic bunch of monsters Stalin and his cadre ( Beria, Molotov, Malenkov, Yagoda ) were.
>
>As Lenin said, "the one thing that will be the end of us will be the thugs within our ranks". Same holds for GOP ;).


>
>>>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?
>>
>>No, they would only have had to win one election - once.
>
>You mean, rely on Supreme Court thereafter?

Why yes, otherwise we would have had to have an election again in 2004 and again this year.

I don't think the experience of European nations - East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania - who voted in the Communists is a good argument that allowing the Communists to win is the best assurance of the continuation of democracy.

>
>Oooops... wrong thread.

No, just an inappropriate comparison <s>

>
>Not necessarily - as I said, it's 1950, the world is a bit different than a few years before, and if they were allowed to win elections and actually stay in power until the next elections (which was, and still is, extremely rare - I mean, being let to stay in power without a coup or military intervention), the whole need for a revolution is defenestrated. The idea that the revolution is a must is based on observed behavior of capitalism that democracy is all fine until people elect guys we don't like because they have wrong ideas about distribution of wealth we honestly redistributed into our direction. Once such a bunch of guys get elected, you get all sorts of stool hitting fans - police action, party banned (Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1930s); CIA engineers a coup (Chile, 9/11 1973,

>>Venezuela recently but it didn't work).

But keep a good thought ... it ain't over yet ...

>

>So if for once the capitalism would stay true to its promise of democracy and cedes power to a party on the other side of the spectrum when it wins the elections, there's no ideological reason for dictatorship of proletariat. They'd have to apply marxism properly and decide on the right course of action. They'd probably be in quite a vacuum ideologically, because they'd be in a unique situation - capitalism actually honoring the results of election when it loses.
>
>> Then they would have had the benefit of Soviet 'advisors'. I'd bet their Soviet allies would have even been happy to provide at to supress counter-revolutionary elements - they were happy to do it for the Hungarians in 56 and the Czechs in 68.
>
>They could have taken the independent line - this was already past 1948, and Yugoslavia was not invaded by either bloc, right?

You think the Czechs or Hungarians were not trying to take in independent line? That was exactly the problem. Stalin decided he didn't want to try to swallow a hedgehog in going after Tito. ( Stalin was evil but he wasn't completely crazy )

Budapest and Prague were easily accessible with armor. A Communist government in France elected in 1950 would have had similar access to bolstering from the east and that would have truly led to nuclear war. That was the reality of 1950. We did not have the armor or ground troops to stop a Soviet push West, but we were definitely prepared to stop them.

>
>This grip that Stalin had over ideology of communist parties abroad is still amazing me - what were these guys thinking? Or were they thinking at all? It sounds so like religion, as if they haven't learned anything from their own books.
>
>Easy for me to say, being a Yugo ;).
>
>>And conveniently, those liberating soviet armored divisions would have had to sweep through West Germany on the way.
>>
>>Mushroom cloud.
>
>A Stalinist party, yeah, bad. I was thinking more of the later eurocommunists, they would be interesting. Well, in Italy they held several big cities, Bologna for instance, and it's still there, right?

The Bandera Rosa has a long and proud tradition in Italy - but their real contribution to political theory is anarchy <g> I think politics in Italy peaked in the 15th century and has just been floundering around ever since.

>
>>There really was quite a bit at stake when the CIA cut a deal with the Union Corse to breakup the strikes on the Marsailles docks in 50.
>
>Nice. See what I said about the capitalism never actually delivering on its promise of democracy? So stalinist parties ban other parties (which is bad, IMO - but then parties are a bad way to do democracy anyway) and capitalist parties ban any parties they don't like, or pay the thugs to do covert stuff.

But again, the goal was to stave off a situation where the alternative was Soviet armor vs American tactical nukes. I'm a big believer that a few covert thugs do a lot less to upset the average citizen's life than a few megatons of explosive.


>
>>As to Italy - last place on earth I would like to see citizens have to depend on the government for much of anything. Just doesn't seem to work there- even with current low expectations in that direction.
>
>Imagine "communists against mafia", opening next week in your neighborhood? ;).

Put it on pay-per-view and we can fund health care ...

>>But in a perfect political system the political parties will be irrelevant because the government plays such a small role a citizen's life or prosperity <s>
>
>I was getting there. With the web being everywhere, can't we just eliminate the parties as those deciding in our name, and restore our right to make decisions? The parties' task would be to merely define the problem and make the case for several possible solutions - and then we'd vote. Takes about five minutes per and surely costs less than lobbyists, K Street etc.

And yet you disdain the culture that dotes on American Idol ?

Okay, but when Lindsey Lohan becomes President, I'm holding you responsible.