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See now, you say that having been brought up in a violtently capitalist country never having experienced any part of a communistic life. So it's easy for you to say "how happy were they?" The point is that they probably were happy. As i've said before, they had jobs, they had an education, they had healthcare whenever they needed it and crime was not even a worry. Now if that was all you knew, you'd be happy too.

And as for Stalin, sure he did a lot of nasty things. But in ten years he brought Russia foward industrially by over a century and turned Russia from a nation that could barely defend it's own boarders into a superpower capable of keeping the USA at bay. Now even if he was a nasty piece of work, you cannot deny that's one hell of an achievement.

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Cuba has got just about the highest literacy rates in the world and one of the best healthcare systems. Some governments would kill for that. And if it wasn't for the USA's bloody minded ban on exports from Cuba it would be a very prosperous country.

And four dollars per month, doesn't sound much to you and me. But if they were getting paid half that previously, and still living, then it sounds pretty damn good to me.

Scenario B.  If communism is so grand, and there are still a handful of communist governments lying around (China, North Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba...)

Where do you guys live again?

I don't quite understand your scenario B. I think you must have mistyped something or my brain has ceased to work...

As for where I live: Cornwall.

What i find amazing about this whole argument. People are all coming at it with their own views from their own style of Democracy and hearsay about how it was. If i am reading this right, no-one making their statements about it truely lived under a communist rule. Mark and Bjorn are perhaps best judged to give examples as they have lived in and around areas effected by it, but remember, you cant judge something properly till you have lived it dont make generalisations.

Fair enough.
But remember things like Nazi Germany werent a true representation of communism or how it was ever supposed to be. As someone said in theory communism is all well and good, infact it would be a very good idea. But in a way the human nature of greed would soon stop it in its tracks.

I've always said that Hitler (early on) and communism in it's purest form was a very good idea...but it was the bastardization of the concept that proved fatal.

Sure, if you could make everyone have the same, it would work beautifully.  But as humans, we have an inert desire to want more.  That's the first catastrophic flaw in the theory of communism.

George Orwell hit the nail on the head

"All people are born equal ...... but some are more equal than others."

and thats where the purest communist and democratic models fail.

I would suggest reading Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 for some sort of comparrison on how both "democracy" and "communisum"  if looked closely at aren't really that far apart. Both are open to abuse, greed and human nature.

60 years on from the end of the war, wether WW2 was worth it is not for us to speculate on ......... ask the guys who took part in the war from all sides. They are the ones to judge wether it was worth it.

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