(March 22, 2016 at 10:02 am)abaris Wrote:(March 22, 2016 at 4:38 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: How many actually do, and how many are born into it?
But your notion that the populations of former Communist countries were brainwashed is nonsense.The numbers of East Germans who died trying to get West demonstrate otherwise. The popularity of Solzhenitsyn in samizdat in the Communist days shows otherwise. The revolutions of 1989 show otherwise.
But many fighting against the regimes were actually fighting for democratic socialism. Such as the short lived experiment in Czechoslovakia. Fighting against an oppressor doesn't mean the west was seen as an ideal to imitate in every aspect.
Our right wing nuts are really no different than the nuts in the Middle East. Combine religion with nationalism. No different than Hitler did selling Germany as "God's chosen people". No different than Stalin did convincing Orthodox Russian Christians to support him in WW2. Combine economic and religious ideology, sell fear, light the fuse.
As soon as you convince the gullible a utopia is possible, you have set up the stage for human horrors.
