yeah, I'm a communist too, so deal me in!

Once when I was an exchange student in Georgia, guys would approach me asking what it was like living in a "socialist country". And at one really backwater dump where we played golf, some donk said "cool, last year we had one from Hindu".

Generally, Communist=bad=socialist=evil. Hey, Jesus was a communist! Didn't he break the bread and pass out to the starving, sharing his wealth?

And once, I just couldn't resist the temptation. When taking some silly test, there were standard job application forms to be filled out, where some passages would require one to say that "I've never been part of a communist organization". Hihi, of course I wrote that I founded two, and was very active some others.
I was almost kicked out of that school because the red-neck dean had some relative that had been killed by "them Nazis"...

Overall, it is a sad state of affairs that the general American public is just soo out of it. But propaganda and fast food obviously has its merits. People don't think too much.

I recall one supposedly educated lady, a professor in music theory and composition, who asked me once about the genoicide in Rwanda. " It was chernobyl, right?"

Did I say I'm drinking RED wine?

Cheerio,
Rush

Remember that you don't want to put communism in the same category as democracy...it's communism vs capitalism. One is a system of economics, the other of government. None of the communist countries that you're talking about were really democracies...and that was one of the biggest problems. The only 'sucess' story - if you can call it a success since it's still in its infancy and has a HUGE hole to dig itself out of - is Venezuela. So, time is going to tell on whether a democratic communist society can work...because we know that communist dictorships sure didn't (which is what you're talkinga about). There's a conjunction of economic theory and democratic theory...don't blame one if the other isn't there too.

Proplayer...you really need to get your head out of Michael Moore's ass and think for yourself. Sure the US has totalitarian tendancies, and Bush has made some pretty wacky comments, but you're way off when you think that one country MUST get rich by impoverishing another society: the world (economy) is NOT a zero sum game. Zero sum games are where, in order for one member to gain, another must lose an equivalent unit of measure. But, thankfully, the world doesn't work that way: read Jeff Sach's "The End of Poverty" for starters. But you've totally missed the point of our discussion anyway...