[Architect]

I was responding to your snide aside, not to your earlier comments. I am no lefty and your attempt to characterize me as one was slander.

As for your earlier substantive (e.g. non-slanderous) comments, they are wrong about the Soviet Union. Yet again a consequence of your incapacity to separate Western ideas, such as communism, from the West, a place. Besides the Soviet Union did, in fact, invade Afghanistan.

You also refuse to acknowledge the Western influence on Syria while preening yourself about Western influences on Jordan. There is plenty in Rousseau and Marx to justify Assad's thuggery, just as there is plenty in Locke and Mills to back up Hussein. To my mind, they are both largely home-grown monarchies. But the Western influence is undeniable, just as is your selective choosing of what is western and what is not.

Oh, and I stand corrected about the death of the old buzzard. Of course the point is irrelevant to the discussion. But I was wrong.

[walden]

I said that your comment on Iraqi sanctions was straight out of the far left playbook, which it is, so I will not apologize for the statement. If you're not a lefty, fine, but when you quote them verbatim, you must accept that you will sometimes be taken for one. I did not, however, strictly speaking, call you a lefty. Considering that in the past week I have myself been called both a Marxist and a Nazi on this board, I think you got off relatively lightly. :)

I acknowledged several posts ago that the Soviet Untion as a country was a mixture of eastern and western cultures, but that communism was certainly a western invention, despite the fact that it has been most widely implemented in the east (China, North Korea, Vietnam, and half of the Soviet Union, if you want to look at it like that.) And, certainly the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan-- I merely disputed whether they ever actually "ruled" it.

As for Syria, before Assad (in the horrible Colonial days), I believe it was ruled by the French although I could be wrong. However, tracing Assad's "thuggery" to Rousseau and Marx I believe is fallacious-- basically, wherever there is thuggery and any history whatsoever of western occupation or "influence", it's the fault of the west? Thuggery is a part of human nature-- the Chinese monarchs were wonderful thugs long before they had ever met anyone or read anything from the west. In fact, most rulers throughout history, from the beginning of time, in all parts of the world, were thugs, if by that we mean ruling by force of arms.

In fact, when I think about it, as I sort of mentioned above, Marx was a much bigger hit with the rest of the world than he was with western democracies. (In fact, many true communists will tell you that the reason communism has never worked properly in practice to produce the utopian society is that it has never been tried in the most ideal place-- i.e., the United States.) I wonder why that is? Why does the rest of the world pick up and run with all of the worst western ideas rather than the best? They seem to only read selected authors instead of observing what we do in practice.