>My experience is that many Western leftists will
>believe almost anything they hear about the
>non-Western world, as long as it is negative (e.g.
>families of 20 in India live together in packing
>crates, 1/6 of Russians have tuberculosis, maybe in
>Thailand people live in abandoned gopher holes),
>unless the country in question is non-capitalist.
But you also get the opposite - that traditional societies are healthy and peaceful and un-alienated, and that "civilzation" carries with it nothing but trouble.
Doug