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Why is this thread forgetting Mao? He killed more of his countrymen than Hitler or Stalin by a substantial margin, but today we're friends with the regime he founded on death on the largest scale ever seen on the face of the planet, a regime that rolled tanks over the protesters in Tienanmen Square (whose major crime was erecting a model of the Statue of Liberty), and which aggressively censors Internet access. Wal-Mart is packed with goods from Red China.
Look, I'm a lifelong anti-communist who took a ROTC Scholarship during the Vietnam War and looked forward to fighting the kind of people who tortured innocent men, women, and children during the Tet Offensive at Hue, and later I actually did serve up against the Iron Curtain for three years. So I'm no apologist for the Communists. I lived most of my life equating Joe Stalin with the Devil - which may not be a totally incorrect judgment. But in fairness, consider this in assessing the campaigns of slave labor and forced collectivization and the intentional famine in the Ukraine to punish those who opposed collectivization -
In the early 1930's, Russia was the most backward major country on the planet, with few factories, few good roads, and only a handful of substantial rail lines. No substantial electrical generating plants. Insufficient harbors or canals for large-scale commerce or transport. Just plain primitive in every way. Stalin knew even then that war with the most advanced technological nation in the world - Germany - was inevitable. He figured he had just a few years to create an industrial infrastructure and military ordnance that could defend his nation against invasion: only immediate, full-time, aggressive and drastic efforts aimed at defense could save his country from German enslavement. The cost in human life was truly horrific: the entire nation became subject to what amounts to slave labor and millions perished. The result, however, was that the Germans were beaten back - though it was seeminlgy against all odds. For many years before the United States got directly involved, Stalin fought the Germans pretty much alone. I do not defend any of this, but in fairness, it needs to be laid out that what he did was not exactly pointless or undertaken just for the purpose of cruelty. And it is for that reason that he actually enjoyed popularity and gratitude by many other millions, and still has support today, as a Russian Patriot who saved his country. It is possible that Russia might have been preserved by no means less horrible. Again, I do not justify or support any of it, but fairness impels setting out what he might say in his own defense. And no, I do not support a morality that says the ends always justify the means. I condemn all of it as an atrocity.
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Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964
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