>Charles: Interesting your mention of the concept of "secret police" . I
>was thinking recently about this standard concept from the Cold War era.
>Communist countries have secret police and capitalist countries don't , is
>the notion one gets from U.S. big brother. Here are two common sense
>criticisms of that mindset.
>
>Do people really think the plainclothes police in the socialist countries
>are unknown or SECRET to the people in those countries ? Couldn't the
>average person with common sense in a socialist country "spot" a cop ?
>(Wojtek ?) What exactly was perniciously _secret_ about the police forces
>in those countries ? It seems that a contrary caricature would be that the
>force of the police was open and intimidating, the opposite of secret.
Oh come now Charles. I'm not likely to get arrested for publishing LBO, and you're not likely to get arrested for anything you post to this list. We may get ignored, harassed, whatever, but we do have considerable freedom of speech. That was not true of the USSR. I know there are all kinds of constraints on our media, lots of subtle forms of censorship, but our formal guarantees of freedom of speech are still worth something.
Doug