>>A dictatorship that disappears political dissidents is a terrible thing. But a state-as-prison-camp that uses family hostages, barbed wire and guard towers to imprison *everyone* , on top of having a police mechanism at least as oppressive is stepping it up a notch. It was a lot easier to get out of Chile or Iran than East Germany, Romania or the USSR.
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>I've met people who fled from Chile, and have been to Romania under Ceauşescu many times. Neither was nice. I'm often getting the feeling that whenever one of the behind-the-rusty-curtain regimes is mention, there's a willful blanket ignorance of other kinds of regimes.
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>Besides, we generally may have very little knowledge of what's going on under friendly thugs. Their dissidents mostly seek refuge in the neighboring countries (there's a culture of that all over South America - neighbor's politicians always find sanctuary, because the host never knows when he may need the favor returned). Imagine a leftist from any generic South American country seeking refuge in the US. Equally ridiculous as the definition of political analphabeth went in 1981: a Polish activist seeking political asylum in Afghanistan.

Just had to jump over myself here. Heard McSame's guy on NPR say "we will not have USA dependent on guys like Putin or Chavez, because they don't share our values".

Which makes this whole way of thinking as dangerous as it is:

- warming up the cold war without actual need for it - Russia was ready and willing to be an ally, it was just unwilling to do that under Third World rules; it paid its debts and pwned its oil back from Yeltsin's oligarchs

- I don't think I'd like to have another guy who has no clue about foreign policy for president. If his guy can come on the radio and not know who's the president of Russia, that's a statement, which says "I'll have my guys experts in whatever it takes internally; foreign policy is on the back burner"

- Amazingly, though, Chavez and Putin get honorable mentions; The House of Saud does not. So, being dependent on them is OK, because they share the values (religiously-fundamentalist? < g,d,&rvvf >)? Or is this another century of "we like our thugs better than their thugs".