[Burkeman1]

"The Black Book of Communism" has a chapter on North Korea that sent shivers down my spine. The only chapter worse in that book was the one on Cambodia and that nation's descent into utter evil and depravity.

[swilhelm73]

One of the things that amazes me - the left was completely and utterly wrong about the Cold War and the various communist states. From denying holocaust after holocaust to excusing said holocausts later on the grounds that utopia was just around the corner, leftist thought should be held universally as morally bankrupt, much like fascism.

However, it simply reinvents history when it can, and its past when it has too. It really is mindboggling when you stop to think about it.

[thinktwice]

Speaking of shivers, I went to my copy of Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" for inspiration in commenting on this article. Therein I found (on pp page 214) a story about Estonian elderly intellectuals in 1944 Tallinn that ... "discussed how they might break out of that iron ring ... " in which they were trapped between Germany and Russia.

As Solzhenitsyn writes it: " ... all those dreamers were siezed in their Tallinn apartments. Fifteen of them were imprisoned in various cells of the Moscow Lubyanka, one in each, and were charged under Article 58-2 with the criminal desire for national self-determination."

And now, we have the Russian empire carved up into supposedly independent nations.

I find it hard to believe that those controlling the USSR -- the Politburo -- would give national independence back (in violation of that Article 58-2) without massive bloodshed.