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Originally Posted by WI wide body
I agree with you Rick. Communism/socialism is not the great evil as we have been taught. I also had about 5 or 6 trips to Budapest (actually the factory was in Oroshaza) and some of the guys at the plant became at ease with me and I even had a few dinners at their homes. It was an eye opening experience to listen to them They were very aware of what was going on in the USA and they seemed to love to make fun of the inadequacies of their system.
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WWB, that's the kind of thinking we in the hinterlands always suspected came out of Madison and Milwaukee
Seriously, Communism was one of the greatest evils ever foisted upon mankind. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a usefull idiot (to use a Soviet term) or horribly naive and uneducated. It's not a subject that is open to debate. Count the bodies.
Rick and I have had this discussion before, but when you meet any mainland Chinese 40 years old or older, he or she survived the Cultural Revolution. Except they don't call it that there. They call it The Ten Years of Upheaval, or, more commonly, they just refer to the date. Nothing more needs to be said. You know how many millions of people died of starvation during the Cultural Revolution? Neither does anyone else. You know how many millions of people died of starvation under Stalin - in the 20s and 30s? Nope, that number is lost to history too. Too many to count accurately. And then the Terror came in the 50s and the blood really ran. 10 million? 12? 20?
Say what you want about Nixon and Reagan, but one quarter of the world's population lives an infinitely better life today because Nixon went to China. Talk to anyone who was there during the time and they will tell you things started to get better
the day Nixon arrived. And
the day Mao died things got even better.
And because Reagan had the balls to tell Gorby to tear down the wall, another quarter of the world's population lives better. I just heard a lecture by Allan Greenspan. He credited the success of the 1990s to the fall of the wall, not the tech boom. He said the utter failure of the planned economy lead to the fall. We in the west had assumed that the East lived at about 80 the standard of living as Western Europe. It turned out to be more like 30-40%. That's right, because of Communism all of Eastern Europe lived a standard of living that was one third the level of what it should have been. And that's just the standard of living, to say nothing of the lack of freedom.
That's why your hosts had such a wicked sarcastic sense of humor. They had to laugh at the absurdities of life or die. By the way, of Eastern Europe, Hungary was the most free, independent and western. You'd have loved East Berlin or Beijing.