[Chad Fairbanks]

I've heard of that book, but never read it.

However, as a kid, I had a socialist uncle who defected to Cuba, and he sent me constant streams of propaganda, communist texts, books on Marxism/Leninism, and various left-wing guerilla warfare manuals - It was pretty fascinating for a young kid to read this stuff. I learned to read russian a little in order to digest some of the stuff that wasn't in english LOL

Then, researching on my own, I began looking closer at history, and I was able to see clearly that not only was Communism evil, but was able to see how amazing they were at manipulation of the masses - it scared me, in fact...

I became, much to the disappointment of my uncle, a fervent anti-communist, and it was really his fault - the "too-good-to-be-true" stuff he was sending me made me look closer, and that is what did it - looking closer.

[MEG33]

The NYT Herbert Matthews was Castro's Duranty.He called him an agrarian reformer.I think your experience with the literature of the utopian Communists gives you a better perspective on how they work.

[radiohead]

I had a similar experience.

In college, I had my own copy of Mao's Little Red Book. The propaganda that I saw from Russia didn't look too inviting, but I thought it worked well for people who'd been under the Tzar. I remember writing a paper on why communism was great for China and capitalism a poor choice for India.

Then...I met some Chinese intellectuals who'd been ripped from their jobs and families and forced to go into the fields (I have a feeling they suffered a lot more than what they were willing to talk about). I met Cambodians whose whole families had been wiped out, Vietnamese who risked pirates at sea to get out. I watched as a Chinese man I was escorting for business stood teary eyed in front a Chinese opera exhibit at the Smithsonian. Chinese opera had been banned by the communists and this was the first chance he'd been able to hear it in years. I became friends with a Jewish Romanian immigre whose family had to flee due to their religion. She would come to me because, as a convert to Judaism, I knew more than she did, since under communism she could not learn about her religion. I had a Ukrainian client, whose family had been devastated by their holocaust.

I think that a lot of Americans who support communism do so because they think that things should be 'fair,' and that communism reaches that goal. However, if they ever met someone who lived under that system, they would be disabused of that notion in a hurry.