Your Favorite Communist?

What do you call 25,000 communist dissidents in a corn field?

A Boneyard.

Leftists often criticize our present intervention in Iraq by bringing up the point that the US supported Saddam back in the 80s against Iran in the ill-fated--and ultimately stalemated--war that cost many Iraqi and Iranian lives.

First of all, I wonder at the logic of the point being made--obviously, if we really did create and support the monster Saddam, then we certainly have a deep obligation to take him out, and even to sacrifice thousands to undo the damage, regrettable though that would be. What was the alternative? Say "Oops, sorry!" and let his regime fester, uncorrected, forever?

Of course not. If the critics were sincere about their argument, it would be used to justify our more recent intervention, not to blast it. But somehow, I've never seen it used that way--odd, isn't it? It does me make wonder whether their argument might just be sophistry.

George Walker Bush

or George Walter Bush as Borat would say.

Communism took hold in parts of the world where peaceful upward mobility was rare to nonexistent. In a nation with a large middle class such as the US or the UK, the job situation is not so desperate that many would consider that the only alternative left is to force the bourgeoisie to surrender its stuff at gunpoint. And even a century ago, long before the "safety nets" of FDR and LBJ, living conditions in the US were far preferable to those in, say, Russia and China. (They swarmed to Ellis Island for a reason.)

So true IIPapa.

Russia, with the exception of the elite ruling class was only just beginning to emerge from a feudal, almost midevil way of living the "farmers" were essentially serfs living in a feudal collective, surviving one might say at the whim of the local " land lord" or Baron.

Confronted with war from outside and coupled with growing civil unrest and modern influences and ideas from outside of Russia the place was ripe for revolution.

For the average Russian in 1916 Communism made perfect sense and offered "at least on paper" a just and fair world that was not so radically different than way they were already living except Communism offered each Russian a bigger slice of the pie.