Hugo

Well, your post actually sounds like complete rubbish. I notice there aren't any facts or citations to back it up. 1 in 5 Israeli citizens are Muslim. They have their mosques and freedoms, without any diminished rights. There are also Muslim MPs in the Israeli Parliament. How many Jews serve in the leadership of Hamas or the PLO? How many synagogues are there in Palestine, or in Syria or Iran?

Oh, and it's certainly working. I haven't heard any outcry over Gulf II, has anyone else? I mean, everybody is so united behind George W. that you'd think it was impossible to even have a different opinion!

Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian terrorist who converted to Christianity and fled the Middle East, has been speaking out on the true nature of the foe Israel faces. He described that in his school, in which he was the only Muslim in a class of Christians, anti-Semitic hatred began early. In kindergarten, the first song he learnt was entitled "Jews are pigs", and this was typical of what he learnt. Even Christians in Palestine are taught to hate Jews. He compared the PLO and Hamas regimes to that of Nazism in their evil and their raw hatred. Shoebat states that a slogan every Palestinian knows is "Saturdays first, Sundays second" which means that after world Jewry has been liquidated, the Muslims will move on to Christians and slaughter them too. A widely-told prophecy is that the slaughter of Jews will go on until the stones and the trees cry out that there are Jews hiding behind them, calling all Muslims to come and kill them. He claims that the PLO and Hamas agenda is not the reclamation of Palestine but the destruction of Israel and of world Jewry. This is what they tell their own people, and these are the messages that Palestinians learn from birth. Dhimmi, he states, is a facade. Jews and Christians being allowed to live in Arab nations with diminished rights are living on borrowed time, because the calls of militant Islam are clear that no Jew or Christian is to be spared, dhimmi or no. Shoebat has no reason to have invented this, quite the opposite, in fact. Muslims who renounce their faith, as he has, also relinquish all of their rights, including the right to life. Typically, the extralegal punishment for conversion is throat-slitting. Shoebat's own American mother was held hostage until he was able to have her released, and it was only then that he learnt she was herself a Christian. His life is in danger and the Bank of Bahrain has placed a $10m bounty upon him. Indeed, the lives of all dissidents in PLO and Hamas-controlled areas are in grave danger. Shoebat states that no dissent is tolerated and it is treated with brutality. Those who renounce the faith and the Palestinian cause are killed, and their families killed. Original articles: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadA...le.asp?ID=12855 http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/ReadA...le.asp?ID=12210

You're pretty uppitty for somebody who cannot defend his own opinions. Where is your reply to my post, directed at you, at the bottom of page 3 of this thread? You have a really schizoid idea here. Half of the time, you want the US to become isolationist and stay at home, the other half you're asking why other evil regimes are not being invaded. So, do you want the US to ignore tyranny and terrorism brewing overseas forever? Or would you rather they went out, guns blazing, against the whole despotic world? Because if you think the first, I invite you to read The Gathering Storm by Winston Churchill. It should illustrate nicely to you the problems with ignoring tyranny overseas. And if you think the second, I'd like to see your idea of a military plan whereby the US could successfully fight a war on so many fronts of this magnitude. 40% of the world's population live in undemocratic nations, and I think it is very unrealistic to expect the US to take on that 40% all at once. Oh, and if you claim to be a follower of international law and the UN, one might equally ask what, exactly, the UN is doing about Rwanda and China? I originally read it in a column at www.capmag.com, although that author gleaned it from an interview. Personally, I believe it was a mistake to go into Iraq first. I would have eliminated Iran before Iraq if I were President, since they are bigger sponsors of terrorism and a bigger threat to world peace and a much better case can be made against them. Saddam had to go, but there were more pressing countries to be dealt with first, in my opinion. Some of the evidence that George W had to get rid of Saddam was false, we know that now. That doesn't necessarily make it his fault, because we all make decisions based upon what we know or what we think we know and if our knowledge is incomplete or wrong, our judgements will be too. It doesn't mean we are evil or stupid, though, just misinformed. So hindsight is 20/20, and what's done is done. The war has happened, Saddam has gone, and the question now is whether or not the US stays and tries to foster democracy and freedom for the Iraqis. If they leave now, almost certainly they are handing the country over to the militants and the Islamic fascists, which would be very irresponsible, much as in Gulf I when George Sr. incited the Iraqis to rise up and then decided to pack it in and go home, leaving Saddam to brutally squash the uprising. Practically, it does work. You have to recognise that capitalist nations have far greater real incomes, average incomes, standards of living, life expectancy, literacy and so forth than uncapitalist nations. Theories are all very well, but theories that do not fit the empirical facts are wrong, and therefore theories that state that capitalism does not produce the best quality of life for the average man are wrong. Plain and simple. Those problems are far worse in noncapitalist societies. Also, capitalism isn't perfect. The world is not perfect. You are going to have to accept that human sin has been with us since the dawn of time and will always be with us. Men are not angels. I really cannot explain it here. I just suggest you read Adam Smith, Michael Novak, Benjamin Franklin, Jacques Maritain or the later works of Rienhold Niebuhr (very interesting to read this last guy, as he began his intellectual life as a die-hard Marxist and ended up a staunch democratic capitalist). Thousands of pages have been committed to explaining how the democratic capitalist system produces the best for humanity and I cannot condense that to a few paragraphs for you, I'm afraid.

Not so much elected as constitutionally wrangled. But anyway, US power restored democracy in Germany and, you are correct, created it in Japan. I'll leave you with some words to mull over. These come from Ali Mentari, nuclear physicist at Baghdad University. "You got no idea of what we must do to survive under homicidal maniac... Saddam say 'build atomic bomb,' but we got no stuff to make bomb. So we…send reports to Saddam about great progress. We are truly sorry your CIA intercept them." When Saddam himself had no idea that his WMD program was a fiction, it's not really surprising that the Bush administration didn't know either.

Um, Germany? Let's see... you accused me of "giving blowjobs" (figuratively), and in this latest post of yours alone you accused me of being Stalinist, of speaking "jibber-jabber", and "bo**ocks" is a swear word where I come from. Would you say that word to your grandmother? But anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm not complaining to Greg because I feel that the weakness of your arguments is well illustrated by your boorish and insulting debating "tactics". Onward and upward... You are, once again, missing my point. I'm not talking about the means, I'm talking about the ideas behind them. If you want to discuss the means of Gulf II, let's see, a multilateral organisation of 30 nations agreed that Saddam's regime posed a threat to world peace and acted upon it in full accordance with the Geneva Convention and with no more force than was necessary. I think that the motivations behind Gulf II were genuine, the war was fought as cleanly as wars can be fought, and the end result was perfectly desirable for all except Saddam and those who prospered under his tyranny.

They don't have bookstores in your town?

Accuse me of being Stalinist (which is not the same - Stalinism is the belief that any act committed to further socialism is a moral act), and then totally misunderstand the point. Nice job. Did I say that was the end goal? No. In fact, I said that it does not necessarily matter what the end goal is, thanks to the invisible hand. The end goal of capitalists and corporations is to get rich, but the end result is prosperity and wealth for everyone. Similarly, the end goal of US foreign policy is the perpetuation of US power and dominance, but because the values of the US are those of political, economic, social and religious freedom, perpetuation of US power is in itself good - so long as those values hold true, and relatively, they are. Take a look at what the rest of the world stands for, and tell me who you'd rather see dominant. Red China, where being Buddhist or Christian is grounds for imprisonment? Fascist Islam, where the penalty for religious conversion is throat-slitting? Regardless, I see we're back to insults, foul language and refusal to engage in debate, which apparently is what passes for a concession from you as you've done it in several threads now where you have been shot out of the water, according to other participants and readers.

Ideally, no. But until we have an international body that actually respects peace, human rights and democracy, it's hard to see an alternative. The ideal would be to boot all undemocratic nations out of the UN, but that isn't going to happen.

So what? The right thing has been done and Saddam is no more. That's a good thing. The justification for Gulf II is two words: "Saddam Hussein." This is what leftists such as you fail to understand: the invisible hand and the democratic-capitalist idea of ethically imperfect motives leading to ethically good results. Individual greed creates an economy in which all prosper, and in parallel we can see that whatever the US motivation for Gulf II, we can all agree that the outcome - the removal of a brutal dictator and a chance at real freedom, human rights and democracy for the Iraqi people - is a good one. So what we have here, BlackDog, is the typical leftist obsession with method over results. You don't care that the end result of socialism is tyranny or that the end result of a mixed economy is economic hardship, you care that the idea of capitalism seems wrong and so you condemn it in favour of the theoretically superior but empirically very, very inferior idea of socialism. Similarly, you condemn the US for the methods and motivations you perceive her to have, but you ignore the fact that the US has guaranteed, preserved and saved the freedom of more people than any other nation, while the enemies of the USA - the USSR, the PRC, North Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, etc. - have been the biggest tramplers of freedom and of human rights and history's biggest murderers, tyrants and warmongers. But all that doesn't matter. End results are meaningless, empiricism is meaningless, what matters to BlackDog are theories and empty ideas no matter how often actual events prove them wrong.

So, basically, you feel that doing the wrong thing somewhere, at some time, disqualifies one from being allowed to do the right thing anywhere, at any time? Or do you believe that because you cannot find the best time to start a job, then you should never start that job? Do you still have a black-and-white television, BlackDog?

Why? Do you feel that Saddam Hussein deserved the benefit of the doubt, and that a more valid pretext was needed to attack him - more valid, say, than his murder of 300,000-1,000,000 innocent people, torture chambers, aggression against neighbouring states, sponsorship of terrorism, use of weapons banned by the Geneva Convention, starvation of the Iraqi people to fund armament programs, etc.? I'm serious. What pretext would have satisfied you? How can you defend and advocate the continued power of an inhuman butcher like Saddam Hussein? Have you no ethics at all?

Firstly, you seem to be making the error of pinning your argument on a single example. This is the same as denouncing all corporations on the basis of Enron - the example suits your argument, but the bulk of evidence that you have ignored does not fit your theory at all. Secondly, you are not arguing for your opinion, you are, in fact, arguing for mine. You allege that it is the union of Air Canada that has caused the business to fail, and that unions in general cause this problem. This cannot be true by virtue of the thousands of unionised corporations throughout the world successfully doing business. A good theory must fit the empirical evidence, and yours does not, therefore, your theory is wrong. I am arguing that state involvement in industry is the real problem, not unionisation. Your example of Air Canada supports this. Why is Air Canada so badly run and their union so greedy? Easy: they have learnt that the government has a limitless bag of (taxpayer) cash to bail them out in any circumstance. They have no need to be efficient, no need to become more competitive. The union has no need to be moderate to protect the host company, because they know that whatever trouble they get the host company into, the government will bail them out of. This is the problem with Air Canada.

Being unionised does not guarantee either success or bankruptcy. All major airlines are unionised (including the ones you mentioned). Some went under. Some did not. It's the same with non-unionised businesses. For internal flights maybe, but then, that means you have answered your own question - and the answer was not "unions bad." Smith was discussing guilds, not unions, which are different. Unions compete with other unions in other companies. They have to help their host company be successful, or they will not succeed either. Then don't bother, and go wherever you feel that insults are welcome, because they are not here.

The Big Six airlines - American, United, Delta, Northwest and US - are all unionised. In fact, I'd be amazed if you can find me a single major airline that doesn't have a union. The union is not the reason why Air Canada is in trouble. No, they are not. The union must also be a team player, they cannot make unreasonable demands because if they cause the parent company to go bankrupt, everyone becomes unemployed and everybody loses, including the union. The union and the corporation are not opposed, they are partners, but as in all partnerships the parties have a right to ask for a different share ratio.

I think I'll finally offer my opinion on this matter. As a staunch capitalist, I support trade unions wholeheartedly. They are a natural product of the capitalist system and an essential component of it. Socialist economies do not generate trade unions, capitalist ones do. This is a product of economic freedom. I am a capitalist because capitalism gets the most freedom and the best standard of living for the average citizen, and unions are a way of maximising that, so I support them. In a free market, individuals will band together for profit, forming an organisation within the larger system - the economy - realising that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is the definition of a corporation. It's also the definition of a trade union. The union is a group of individuals (employees) who have formed a union to get more profit (pay, benefits, rights) within the larger system (the corporation). As BigGunner has said, in a free market with freedom of association you will get unions. It is a natural product of the capitalist system, as capitalism encourages co-operation as much as, if not more than, competition and capitalism produces a flourishing of co-operative enterprises of all kinds like no other economic system can do. You cannot remove this. A lot of people in this thread have expressed anger at unions, but that anger seems very mis-directed. Let's look at it. First, people are envious that union employees can get paid more. That's not necessarily true, for a start. I have a friend who is a foreman in a unionised company, he is a union member, and he makes about 2/3 of my salary. I'm not unionised but in a similar line of work. Also, even if we assume that unionised employees get paid more, so what? This is the basic tenet of capitalism. The money is out there, go and get it! It's a very left-wing idea to see someone else having more and demand that it be taken away from them and given to you "just because", and I find it very strange that some of the right-wingers on this board have taken such a Marxist stance on this issue. If you see union employees getting paid more, go join a union or start your own! If you see Bill Gates getting richer and richer, don't whine, go make something better and beat him at his own game! And if you can't, doesn't that say something about why you are getting less? Secondly, people are angry that unions sometimes strike. That is their right. But the anger is missplaced. Let's say GM employees go on strike tomorrow. What difference does this make to the consumer? None! You can still buy or service a car. You can still buy or service a GM, in fact. Just because the employees are on strike doesn't mean there aren't plenty of GMs in the dealerships and plenty of mechanics to take care of them. The only people who lose are the strikers (pay) and the employers (work), so it's in the interests of both to resolve the dispute as quickly as possible. That is how it is supposed to work. Now, last year the Toronto garbage collectors went on strike. The city stank for weeks, trash piled up on the streets, tourists stayed away, and so forth. Big problem. Say the teacher's union goes on strike again. Kids don't get taught. There are no other options, unlike the GM case. Is this because of unions? No. It's because of state-run business. The real problem here is not unions, it's government enterprise and public-sector economics that cause the breakdown. That's what needs to be addressed.

What we are seeing is the democratization of the political process, just as deterioration of entertainment is the result of democratization of entertainment. I shall illustrate. A few centuries or so ago, the arts were exclusively the privy of the rich, particularly landed gentry and old money. Nouveau-riche capitalists generally didn't have an awful lot to do with the artistic world, so it was left up to those who led a life of leisure and patronised the arts. It was more cultured and highbrow because these people were cultured and well-educated, the cultural and intellectual elite of society. Since they patronised art, the prevalent artistic trends reflected their tastes. As the lower classes became richer, and as the proletariat disappeared to be replaced by the bourgeosie, so the average citizen came to be the primary patron of arts. He was not raised in high culture, was not highbrow or intellectual and worked for wealth. Therefore, art came to be dumbed-down as a direct result of that. Same with political process. Back when one in seven men had the vote, and all of those had independent wealth and were landowners, things were very different. Men of independent means and plenty of leisure time can afford to devote time to political matters and, a few hundred years ago, practically everybody who could vote took every opportunity to read and educate themselves and to debate their peers about the issues and parties of the day. Soundbites didn't exist because they would not have worked on such a politically savvy people. Since universal suffrage, though, the pattern has been repeated. The mandate has been given to those who do not devote much, if any, time to political thought, debate and research. I have heard innumerable people tell me how proudly they vote Liberal when five minutes in conversation will reveal how blitheringly ignorant they are on all political matters. As unartistic, uncultured people now decide art and cultural output, so ignorant and apolitical people now decide political process. What is the solution? It's difficult to say. I believe that education is the best start, to try to educate children more in the arts, politics, literature and so forth instead of increasing amounts of sex-ed and multicultural-friendly activities, but we are on dangerous ground if we decide that certain people are not capable of cultural or political output of any worth and restrict their options or attempt to change the way they are influenced. In the UK, each major party is allotted an amount of airtime on the BBC for political broadcasts in the run-up to an election. No other advertising is allowed. Generally, the parties spend this time getting big-name celebrities to endorse them and have them dreamily gazing into the future of how wonderful Britain will be under the <insert the blank> Party. I assume that that is the kind of thing you have in mind? Whatever minority will decide what political content is acceptable. I used to believe that a good solution for better democracy would be to have each voter answer a few simple, multiple-choice questions on political matters before they would be allowed to vote, to ensure that a voter was not voting in ignorance. However, I realised that this was going to be a bigger problem in and of itself. First, who would set the questions? Secondly, post-election time would be a complete farce and every losing party would be crying 'foul', saying that the questions were biased and so forth. The sort of flap we saw about the US 2000 Election would happen every single time, at every government level. This would not exactly lead to better and more efficient democracy. In principle, I agree that attempting to sum up political issues in soundbites is not a good idea. If you removed political broadcasting you would force the electorate to actually go looking for the answers to their questions, which might make things a little better. My concern is that then we will start looking at all partisan content and have a serious issue with freedom of speech. Moreover, it might not be "fair" to smaller parties if the biggest source of information on politics becomes the mass media, who are only concerned with the big, frontrunner parties. Parties such as the Green Party, Family Coalition Party, Communist Party and so forth would probably be severely damaged because there would be next to no content available on them except their own material, and if they can't make that available, they have a huge problem!

Do you really think the main part of that is political advertising and party political broadcasts, or television and news networks with obvious bias (e.g. Fox being right-of-centre, and CNN being left)? That being the case, is it your proposal to censor independent political opinion from non-partisan sources? I don't like the sounds of that. You could end party political broadcasts, but I don't think it would make much difference to anything. They are rare and most people who'd take the time to watch them have already made their minds up who they're voting for anyway. So a minority will impose it's decision upon the majority in the name of democracy? That's an odd idea! You don't think it does, but what about everyone else? Do you think a case could not be made to ban Satanist materials because of their advocacy of criminal activity, cruelty to animals and so forth? What about a case that the Koran is full of incitement to violence against other religious groups (thus making it hate speech)? It was already ruled that certain extracts from the Bible cannot be printed in newspapers for fear that they offend the homosexual community. Yes, that would eliminate the problem at the source. The onus is on the citizenry. I blame the education system for telling students what to think, not how to think. Advertising only works as long as people believe it, as do soundbites and political broadcasting. The politically savvy are generally not taken in by soundbites and minute-long broadcasts, as IT professionals are not taken in by dancing spacemen.

I can see the objection, but the fact remains that any solution that I can see would be worse than the problem itself. Advertisers are not allowed to lie already. Apple Computer got in trouble for that, some of their ads were banned in countries like the UK and Dell just successfully filed a complaint with the authorities about their US advertising campaign, because it made false claims. Anything else is basically censorship, dictating what may or may not be said besides an outright lie. Who is to say what is permissible? You? A panel of judges or experts? What right do they have to infringe upon economic liberty in the name of their idea of what makes a good advert? And this is the crux of the matter. Any attempt to restrict advertising beyond actual falsehoods is an imposition of one group's standard on another group and a restriction of economic liberty which sets a dangerous precedent for further restrictions of liberties either economic, political or social. After all, if you can pass judgement on communication for economic purposes, why not on communications for political and social purposes - religious texts, materials of certain political parties, and so forth? It is dangerous ground to be on. I would rather suffer the "ill effects" of advertising (whatever those are - it seems that as advertising grows in scope and extent, so rises the standard of living) in exchange for the preservation of my liberties.

Then why did you start a thread entitled "state or religion - which is worse?" If you truly believed what you are saying, you would have started a thread called "individuals or individuals - which are worse?" You, too, know that religions, states and other institutions become entities in their own right, in much the same way as your body is an entity in its own right despite the fact that it is actually a collection of a few billion cells. Your general pattern clearly shows this despite a couple of sentences you have written denying it.

I would suggest that you need to read Marx. Yes, pretty much. The state in this instance gives legitimacy for murder and excuses it. It also dehumanises it's enemies to make the slaughter easier. The state is an institution and exists in it's own right. A state can survive the death of an emperor or dictator and it can survive if practically every state servant is murdered, and their murderers murdered, as Stalin discovered. The state can grant legitimacy to the actions of the people involved or it can not. Most Nazis on trial at Nuremberg claimed that they were just following orders. Perhaps the state consists of individuals, but to those individuals it doesn't seem that way. What they perceive is a monolithic entity that gives out orders. This is not true. Marxism is not just economic theory, it is political theory and Marx himself said so. Dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx politicizes economics,joining the economy and the polity, and this is his first mistake.

I would just like to say something here about advertising, especially TV advertising. The reason it works is not because of some magic in the television set, the reason it works is because people do not know enough about 90% of the things they deal with. A medieval peasant had a very simple life and he knew about everything in it. Our lives are infinitely more complex. There just isn't time in the human life to learn everything possible about cars, televisions, washing machines, VCRs, computers, mobile phones, cameras, beds, plumbing, wiring and so forth. Therefore, advertising works because people don't know any better. People informed on a given subject won't be swayed by advertising. IT professionals are unlikely to buy Intel simply because of dancing men in spacesuits. Car buffs won't buy a Dodge Caravan just because TV said it was the best-selling vehicle in America. But people who don't know the first thing about computers or cars might make those decisions. A reaction against advertising is basically saying to the common man, "since you are ignorant we are going to take away your right to make certain decisions and make them for you by way of restricting the information available, because we are concerned that you will make what we have judged to be the wrong decisions." This is a very bad move for liberty and for democracy. Once we get the idea into our head that common wisdom is no longer to be trusted and that appointed experts should be making our decisions for us, we have undermined the idea that common wisdom should be trusted in government and democracy will be in danger. You cannot undermine economic liberty without undermining political liberty, and an attempt to "free" people from TV advertising will probably end up further enslaving them.

This doesn't actually answer anything in my post. You did not dispute the fact that Marxism prescribes massive and ongoing human rights abuse, but yet you expect me to accept that it is not evil, just wrong. 2+2=5 is wrong. Calling for mass murder is evil.

Well, Michael, you haven't left me with anything to argue with! I agree with your idea that democratic institutions are outdated and have failed to keep up, and I, too, would be in favour of reform to build better democracy in a manner more in tune with the free markets of the information age and modern culture. Yes he did, but he didn't change the meaning of the word "physics". You are asking me to ignore dictionaries and to ascribe a false meaning to a word. Since I believe in precision of language and communication I won't do that. You can proceed if you want to, but you'll find it difficult to debate because everybody else will be using different terminology. You are building a language barrier where none exists. Yes, it requires abstract thought (human intellect) and the ability to communicate that abstract thought (human language). You mean since they invented, or rather, developed, grammar. Yes, they do. Think about music. In the middle ages, musical scores were not sophisticated enough to include information about the duration of notes and pacing. Songs had to be learned by repetition and it was impossible to sing or play a piece of music with just the score - you had to hear it and learn it. Since those times, musical scores have been developed to include all the information you would need to play the song. I am a pianist. You could give me a sheet of music I've never seen before and send that same sheet to a pianist in New York or Paris who had never seen it before, and the songs we played would be virtually identical. Apply that to language. Language with a predefined structure provides a standard by which all speakers of the language can communicate. Because we both understand English grammar, we can communicate, even though we are separate individuals and grew up thousands of miles apart (I assume you are Canadian-born). Grammar is an essential part of language. If it has no grammar, it is not language. Therefore, what you are comparing is non-linguistic communication (higher animals) to linguistic communication. A cat can express fear, hunger, pleasure and so forth, but it can't express anything beyond basic emotion and feeling, it can't express anything abstract, and it can't express anything in the past or future tenses. Islam seems to be making quite the comeback. It's the fastest-growing religion right now and may become the world's largest religion in a few decades. I think also Muslims tend to take their faith a lot more seriously than Christians or Jews, especially in the Middle East and Africa. This is a half-truth. The average man is not a spiritual athlete, never has been, never will be. If you look at the new-age movement, increased interest in wicca and the occult and so forth you'll see that nobody is forging new spiritual ground. Funnily enough, the orthodox churches (Catholic and so forth) are seeing growing attendance in the West, larger congregations, particularly amongst the young. Conversely, the more permissive faiths (Anglican etc) are in decline. True, but the premise doesn't work. By the 3rd Century BC, the Chinese state alone had murdered about 15 times as many people as all religions in the world were to murder in the entirety of history. Technology has nothing to do with it. Religion has the accumulation of power as a secondary motive. To overtly seek power undermines the faith, so when religious authorities seek power they generally do so covertly. Churches wished to influence the king, not become the king. States, historically, have overtly sought power and, in order to concentrate power, you have to kill people. The more power you want to concentrate, the more you have to kill. Totalitarian states are history's biggest murderers. But you won't put up any evidence or logic in support of this argument - why?

This is a gross misconception right here. It's not your fault as it seems to be received wisdom these days, despite the fact that it isn't historically accurate. Lenin and Stalin did not bastardize anything. Their tyranny was perfectly in keeping with Marxist vision. In fact, they actually put a kind face on Marx and their version of Communism was more humane than Marxism. How? Well, they still allowed the existence of private property, which Marx did not. He would have destroyed it by forcible confiscation. Lenin and Stalin also allowed women to keep their rights, whereas Marx believed women were the property of the state and that no woman should have the right to refuse sex to a proletarian. Lenin and Stalin also preserved the traditional family, whereas Marx wanted it destroyed and for children to be collectively raised by the state. Fatherhood would have ceased to exist since, by the condition above, nobody could be certain who had sired whom anyway. Let's not pretend that Marxism is a wonderful vision that was abused by historical figures. Marxism is evil to the core. It preaches and prescribes violence, tyranny, and human rights abuse, and it decries liberty and equality of opportunity every bit as much as Nazism, and like Nazism, it is based on invalid theories and ignorance of history, and facts are twisted to fit the theory rather than vice-versa.