anti communism

I don't think Castro is a good counterexample here. The Europeans don't favor left-wing dictators over right-wing dictators, they favor dictators that serve their interests. Since Cuba and Chile are far from their real spheres of influence, I don't think it should be surprising that they take a rather more rhetorical tack with respect to them. Since it is politically profitable to give the US a tweak, Castro is coddled. I think nonetheless it is fair to say that Castro is a relatively benign dictator. Certainly Pinochet was a brutal despot, but he hardly falls into the ranks of one of the great mass murderers of the Twentieth Century. (That a Spanish judge should choose to prosecute him makes sense given that the Western Hemisphere is mostly Spanish culturally.)

On the other hand, the Europeans--which is obviously to ignore the great differences between the various they--are more likely to shore up dictators that directly effect their perceived interests. The French, for example, have been quite good at that in Africa and the Middle East. The United States also supports dictatorships in the Middle East. I would argue that is because following the Cold War it is probably the only spot where our interests are clear. However, following the end of the Cold War, American support for dictatorships in other parts of the world has been completely withdrawn, for the most part, I do not think that the same reorientation has occured for the Western European governments/polities.

Socialism has perhaps produced some of the most destruction in the 20th century, be it national socialism or international socialism. But then again political systems in general have produced the most destruction in the 20th century claiming the lives of some 170 million people, and about more than half goes to Communist efficiency.

I think on this count we should go back to who was trying to persecute Pinochet - Judge Garzon. Not some European conspiracy, but the one judge, who's been on a bit of a crusade, one thats inconvencienced the Spanish government quite a bit too (Aznar was reputedly not too glad with the Pinochet affair). A brave crusade it is, and I for one applaud him - he is obviously a man who believes judges have an important role to play in persecuting perpetrators of political crimes (see BBC profile). First he went after the ETA, then Pinochet and Videla, he's compiled a dossier on Osama bin Laden and now he's opening the Franco dossier. But that is the framework of what was happening. And the only reason Garzon could persecute Pinochet was because Spanish citizens fell victim to his dictatorship - and it was only their fate that he could go after Pinochet for. Could he have done the same with Castro? I dunno, were there Spanish citizens murdered/made to disappear by Castro's regime?


Any particular example of a dictatorship thats being shored up by European governments these post-Cold War days? How?

In regard to the numbers who were killed in WW2.
It is generaly accepted that WW2 caused the deaths of some 55 million people. About 25 million of these were people of the Soviet Union. [This figure does not include Stalin's insane [pre-WW2] purges So, in WW2, Germany inflicted 25 million Soviet deaths. Plus another 10 million in the Holocaust.

The impact of the war on the Russians was enormous.

***In his book Mein Kampf (My struggle), Hitler condemned not only Jews, but the Slavic people as well. He said they were too stupid to be educated and should be trained to understand traffic lights so they would not be killed while working as beasts of burden. This resulted in the German army destroying entire Russian(Slavs) villages and towns and their entire populations. The carnage was so bad, a German general told Hitler if they kept doing this, Russia would fight to the last person. The

*** Virtually all Russian families had deaths do to the war.
Alexander P. de Seversky wrote about the will of the Russian army, facing German Panzer tanks, and stopping them with dead men and dead horses.

***It didn't take suppresion to get the Russian people to come out of WW2 despising and fearing Germany.
Russians call WW2 the "Great Patriotic War."

***Some observers of Russia, believe that from a perspective of a people just coming out of serfdom under the Czars and the devastation of WW2, the Soviet Union showed remarkable progress.

***The statements above are not intended to ignore the evils of Stalin, the KGB, etc. but, rather, to put Russia in a context outside the "evil empire" status.

I'll be back to give my take on the USA and fascism.

POLITICS OF ASSASSINATION:
The Bloody Legacy of the US Army School of the Americas
By W. E. Gutman


Getting rid of someone is easy. Destroying popular aspirations takes more effort but you can always count on a volunteer or two to do the dirty work. For money; favors; influence; power--mostly power. When conventional methods-- elections, plebiscites, national referenda--fail, or when the results threaten the oligarchy, the US Army's School of the Americas, a shadowy but formidable war factory billeted at Fort Benning, Georgia, can help. There are not petty bureaucrats here, taking up space and stealing time until retirement. The SOA is a model institution. Its instructors and students are recruited from the cream of Latin America's military establishment. The curriculum includes: counterinsurgency, military intelligence, interrogation techniques, sniper fire, infantry and commando tactics, "irregular" and psychological warfare, jungle operations, among the most bellicose specialties. But Latin American soldiers at the SOA are not always trained to defend their borders from foreign invasion. They are taught--at US taxpayers' expense--to make war against their own people, to subvert the truth, silence poets, domesticate unruly visionaries, muzzle activist clergy, hinder trade unionism, hush the voices of dissidence and discontent, neutralize the poor, the hungry, the dispossessed, extinguish common dreams, irrigate fields of plenty with the tears of a captive society, and transform paladins and protesters into submissive vassals. Even if it kills them.

For the past two years, a group of US legislators, led by Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-MA), have vowed to shut down the facility/ "SOA graduates include dictators and soldiers implicated in gross human rights violations in Latin America," says Kennedy. "[Continued operation of] this facility suggests that the US has blessed such excesses. The SOA costs [the US] millions of dollars a year and identifies us with tyranny and oppression." In 1993 Kennedy sponsored an amendment to the House Defense Appropriations Bill calling for an end to the training provided at the SOA. The measure was defeated. Reintroduced in 1994, the amendment was again rejected. This time the defeat was sustained by a sixfold increase in the number of abstentions from the preceding year.

Founded in Panama in 1946--and relocated in 1984 to Fort Benning when Panamanian President Jorge Illueca evicted it-- calling it "the biggest base for destabilization in Latin America"--the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American and Caribbean basin soldiers. It has also produced some of the region's most despicable tyrants. The SOA is expected to graduate about 750 students in 1995.

IN A

First of all, the writer who said that communism necessitates that people be naturally good was not speaking about actual communism but about theoretical communism and, ultimately, why communism failed.

Secondly, can we keep from making statements -- all of which are based on limited experience and colored by prejudice -- on the intellectual honesty of various professors and just stick to the topic?

When I was in high school, I was taught that socialism and communism were essentially economic and not political systems and that, in the former, the means of production were owned privately but controlled by the government while, in the latter, both the means of production and the control of said means resided in the hands of the government.

These terms have been misused for the past decade or more. MA pointed out that it was ironic that the first Communist revolution occurred in Russia which did not have an industrialized society. Any means of keeping industry from harming workers, neighbors and the environment by the government is viewed as fascism (sometimes as communism) by today's neo-conservatives. Consider, however, how negative untrammeled capitalism is. If a form of democratic government were married to a communist political system (which is, actually, the only way communism could work), then despots would be voted out of office. Under capitalism run amok -- as it is here in the US -- industrialists can and do ruin the environment and destroy the economy, but, because they are in the private sector, we can't vote them out of office and they fund the worst of the politiciams and then "sell" them to the public.

Finally, because there effectively is no blue-collar class today and because home ownership (and the best of schools) is out of reach of the lowest paid workers, the American worker is the worst off since the time of indentured servants.

I fully agree with you; I lived in Chile at the time of Allende and at the time of Pinochet; the latter was a good president and a patriot.
Regards.
Xavier