COULDN'T HAVE SAID IT BETTER!

There is an excellent piece in the Guardian today by Martin Kettle recalling the famous Khrushchev speech on Stalinism in 1956.

I actually believe that the riots in Berlin and in Posnan were earlier indicators of the essential instability of the Rule of Terror Stalin imposed on his European satellites. And Berthold Brecht's supposed retort when the East German Democratic Republic claimed in 1953 after the riots that the Germans were not worthy of Communism, "Well then, why don't you select a new people?"

Here is Kettle's final paragraph:

But the cold-war syllogism lives on today in a new guise. Too many haters of capitalism and the United States still cram everything into the frame of untruth and self-deception that says my enemy's enemy is still my friend because, even if he blows up my family on the tube, murders my colleagues on the bus or threatens to behead me for publishing a drawing, he is still at war with Bush, Blair and Berlusconi. It is 50 years this month since that simplistic view of the world lost whatever moral purchase it may once have had. It is time such thinking was, to choose a sadly appropriate word, purged. Too long, my brothers and my sisters, too long.

Reading the foreward to David Horowitz's new book, The Professors, will demonstrate that many tenured radicals in the American academy still believe Stalin and the USSR are better than the USA and Capitalism.

And they are continuing to teach their students this completely discredited point of view.