>Here the answer is complex. Capitalism has brought the greatest advances in
>human well being in human history, immense increases in longevity, wealth,
>productivity, etc. At the same time, it has also brought the most terrible
>wars in history, as nations now armed with the mighty wepons capitalism has
>enabled them to create struggle for resources and domination. It has
>intensified the effect of famines, indeed created them, by subjecting
>nations to dependence on cash crops that are subject to the vageries of
>weather and markets. It has polarized the wealth it has created, so that a
>few thousand people in the rich countries have more wealth than the poorest
>half of the Earth's six billion. And so forth.
Not to mention the millions of deaths resulting from Western imperialism and their client states' repression of socialists and other dissidents in the post-WWII era alone.
>Historical communism, on the other hand, involved great and terrible
>slaughters--the Soviet collectizativazation famine and the Chinese Great
>Leap Forward famine, neither intended, both perfectly foreseeable; as well
>as many millions of deaths due to repression.
>
>So it's not a one-off. Ask a Russian today if he was better of ten or
>fifteen years ago. But that doesn't make the old USSR a good model.
>Stalinism is unacceptable. But it's over. Capitalism _is_ unacceptable. The
>question is still, can we do better?
>
>--jks
I'm no apologist for the USSR but it should be noted that repression in the Soviet Union and its satellites during the second half of the 20th century (post-Stalin) was not remotely comparable to the scale and savagery of repression in the capitalist Third World during the same period.
Cheers, Joseph _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.