silverscreenselect wrote:Sir_Galahad wrote: He said that Americans were being fed one small bite of communism at a time, and that over the course of several years, Americans will have accepted so many communistic ideals, including a massive and uncontrollable federal government, that one day we would wake up to discover that we are a democracy only in name - that our policies and methods of government will be communist in nature. Kruschev concluded that it will be the slow injection of socialist/communist principles into America - not nuclear missiles - that would destroy our nation."
Communism... a system under which people suspected of being dangerous to the State are shipped off to a remote location where they are held and tortured without being charged of crimes, afforded due process, or being subject to press and public scrutiny.
A system under which the Government has wide powers of surveillance and intelligence gathering over other people suspected of being dangerous to the State, all without judicial oversight.
I'm sure that a good Republican like George W. Bush would never allow anything like that to happen in this country....
Actually, none of that has anything to do with Communism, it has to do with general totalitarianism, which exists anyplace where you have a regime that has difficulties or perceives that it has difficulties imposing its will on its subject population. In pure communism, the state would not have any power, because there would be no state-- when true 'communism' is achieved, the state withers away and we will all live in a perfect state of nature, each of us sharing what we have with everyone else. 'Totalitarianism' becomes involved only because 'communism' is a fantasy that cannot possibly exist on its own (except for very short times, in very small communities-- even in voluntary 'communistic' groups, like the hippie-ish communes that began to appear in the 1960's, and the places like Brook Farm in the 1800's, the commune members who actually do produce eventually become fed up with the parasites who do not, and the commune withers away as the more productive members leave), and a totalitarian state is necessary in order to force communism down people's throats.
And as for a good Republican like George W. Bush never allowing anything like this to happen in this country, well, how many people do you know who were rounded up and shipped off to distant locations to be tortured? and the rest? You can argue that none of that was necessary or proper, but at the same time, to suggest that those kinds of things that went on under Bush are really part and parcel of what went on under Stalin or Hitler or other totalitarian states is nonsense, based upon the sheer discrepancy in numbers if for no other reason. The problem with making clever arguments based upon analogies is that, well, the analogies have to be accurate, and most of the time they are not.
Innocent, naive and whimsical. And somewhat footloose and fancy-free.
