On 11/19/2015 12:12 PM, John wrote:
On 11/17/2015 4:18 PM, Daniel J. Matyola wrote:
On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Collin B <coll...@brendemuehl.net>
wrote:
It spread from China to N. Korea. It spread through VietNam.
It is maintained in Cuba
While Soviet style authoritarianism and elitism spread to those
countries, I'm not sure that communism in the Leninist fashion lasted
very long. China today defies any easy characterization, and North
Korea is sui generis -- a country ruled by madness and personal whim.
Unique in today's world, but not unprecedented. There have been mad
dictators before, as well as mad kings.
Not so unique really, the Khmer Rouge exhibited the same general strain
of madness, in a virulent form. The madness stems from absolute power.
Stalin ruled by whim as well, so did Mao, so did Hitler, (there I said
it). Those are pretty modern examples. Any time you have a system with
no checks on the leadership, a "mad" leader can pretty much wreck
everything, and "mad" leaders arise with depressing regularity. Those
are all pretty modern examples. Madness is in the eye of the beholder,
and is like a communicable disease. I'm pretty sure that most of the
camp guards in Hitler's Germany, Soviet Russia, Mao's China and Pol
Pot's Cambodia, thought their actions were justifiable at the time.
--
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve
immortality through not dying.
-- Woody Allen
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