"S888Wheel" wrote in message


I suppose that Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev had
thought that the slavery, death, starvation, and torture
inherent in their rule were just wonderfully good things,

Slavery? I don't recall slavery being a part of the system.

Shows how incredibly poorly-educated you are sockpuppet wheel. Or how
forgetful.

It was a nifty 2-step. First you declare vast numbers of citizens to be
criminals, and then you put all these millions of *criminals* into prison
camps where they are worked to death.

I thought that was us up until the civil war.

That was then, and this was how things were in USSR through most of the 20th
century.

Death? Did capitalism cure death?

Stalin ordered the murder of about 29 million of my ancestors during the
first half of the 20th century. I believe his justification went something
like "To make an omelet, you have to crack some eggs". Again, this shows how
incredibly poorly-educated you are sockpuppet wheel. Or how forgetful. Do
Mensa IQ tests cover things like this? I suspect not!

Starvation? People don't starve in other non-communist countries?

People starve in houses that are full of food, occasional starvation is not
the problem. No capitalism can't do away with all of the effects of
naturally-caused famines, but in the past century capitalist countries have
pretty much managed to avoid the kinds of government-policy-induced famines
seen in North Korea, USSR, China, etc.

and that the freedom and high standard of living
here in the US were just about as bad an evil as anyone
could imagine..

Do you think the standard of living went down for the Russian working
class under communism?

In accordance with communist state policy in the USSR, increases in the
standard of living vastly underperformed such mediocre or worse increases in
worker productivity that somehow took place despite state mismanagement of
the economy. The issue was called "Guns versus butter"

Were the peasants enjoying an American level of freedom and standard of
living when the Czars ruled Russia?

From the time of the organization of the USA onward, improvements in the
standard of living of virtually all social classes in the US vastly outpaced
increases in the standard of living in the USSR. Communism, if anything
increased this disparity.

I think this anecdote is relevant. I associated with a Cameroonian who was
working on his PhD in Math for a number of years. He ended up living in one
of the nastier public housing projects in downtown Detroit, which was so bad
that it was subsequently dynamited. He received his undergraduate degree
from the University of Moscow, as I recall. He said that his Detroit housing
situation was vastly superior to that *enjoyed* by middling-high communist
party members in Moscow. His apartment in Detroit did have its nasty
aspects, but it was relatively spacious for two people, well-heated in the
winter, served by a working modern elevator, and had other refinements that
were according to him, fairly rare in Moscow, even among their equivalent of
the middle class.