Comment 52830

By Shempatolla (registered) - website | Posted December 08, 2010 at 23:34:17

I wonder what kind of world we would have had people listened to Churchill? Low estimates are that Stalin murdered, starved, banished to Siberian Gulags to never be seen again, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 60 odd million or so of his own people. Evidence of which only began to surface in the west after the conclusion of the Second World War and with the establishment of the iron curtain.

You should speak to someone of Ukranian descent who is old enough to remember or old enough to have had a family member that lived through the Stalin initiated Ukranian genocide during the 1930s.

Poland, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria etc all got to experience in their own special way the wonderful world of the peoples paradise brought to them by the Soviet Union.,

The Hungarians in 1956, Czechs in 1968 got to know what it was like to piss off Moscow up close and personal.

The Soviet Union and communism beginning in Russia from 1920 onward and through out eastern Europe after WWII oppressed and enslaved hundreds of millions of people. They could not vote (other than for a communist as other political parties were illegal), they could not protest, they could not congregate for anything other than staged Communist Party events under heavy guard ( that would make the Toronto G20 security look like a boy scout jamboree), they could not travel, they could not access international media or news, they could not own property. The economic model they lived under barely provided them with the necessities of life. This regime and its puppets executed and imprisoned millions more. The final number may never be known.

This regime supported and exported weapons to regimes every bit as brutal if not more so than those you complain about the US supporting.

Now contrast what life has been like in Western Europe and North America since the end of WW II. Quite different. So much so that the former satellite states of Soviet Russia have thrown off those shackles of oppression and embraced market economies, democracy, individual liberties, free trade, property ownership, entrepreneurism.... etc etc.

The one Bulwark that has remained steady during this entire time, the one anchoring factor that has allowed these peoples and nations to pursue these goals has been the example of and the security provided by the United States. Period. This goes back to my original point. People have short selective memories. The Western world, specifically Western Europe owes the old allies but particularly the Untited States a debt that can never be repaid. Not just for WWII, but for the rebuilding of their society and the security that it provided them while they did it.

In stead what we typically get is what we have seen here. Pissing and moaning about support for unsavoury regimes around the world, the usual clamoring about corporate greed and manipulation for profit in client states..... and on and on add nauseum.

And you suggest we need to look in the mirror before we start trying to clean the rest of the world up?

On its worst day I will take anything the US has done in exchange for the security and prosperity we have been able to enjoy for the last 70 years.

We live in a very dangerous world that is ironically far less stable than the cold war. Keeping it relatively safe is sometimes dirty business. Thankfully someone is willing to do it.

Oh no communism wasn't a threat to our way of life at all........ please.

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