> Now, I'm not saying that Doug, who has been on the receiving
>end, as I have to a much lesser extent, of Stalinoid, paranoid
>rantings from certain quarters has ANY sympathies with bankrupt
>Leninist polities or economic systems. But, why is it that one
>cannot have, simultaneously, a critique of Capitalist Imperialism,
>in all it's UGLYNESS and Brutality, AND, a forthright confrontation
>with the anti-socialist, anti-democratic paractice and ideological/cultural
>vulgarities present in the fSU (except for the twenties) or Cuba,
>or North Korea today?
Well most people on this list do have a critique of both. So I'm not clear on whom you're arguing with. My own posish is that after the death of Stalin, the USSR was nowhere near as evil as your usual anti-Communist paints it, but not much of a model for a socialist future either. No one except the WWP likes N Korea very much. Cuba's more problematic - there are very substantial achievements of the Cuban revolution, and it's a lot closer to utopia than Haiti. I'm not fond of jailing poets and dissidents, but please tell me how you would have dealt with 40 years of implacable hostility coming from the U.S. One of the beauties of anti-Communism is that it gets the West off the hook for having helped to create the repression it then denounces.
Doug