Quote from: myrkul on July 27, 2011, 07:44:31 AM

Let me ask you something: Do you believe that your opinion is shared by a majority, or a minority of the population, or that if presented with the information that lead you to this conclusion, that a majority would share your opinion?

A majority of the population of what country? America? Hell no. But you have to keep in mind that we've been getting a steady diet of anti-leftist propaganda for 100+ years - since before there even was a socialist country to point fingers at. Hell, you should see the NY Times headlines from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution if you think propaganda now is outlandish. We even sent 14,000 soldiers over there to fight alongside the White Army. We decided before they even took power that we weren't going to give them a fair shake, and that just seems really wrong to me. It's my opinion that constant Western interventions, meddlings, and government overthrows were at least partially responsible for the paranoia and abuses of 20th century Communism. Not entirely, of course. There was still a lot of stupid crap like Lysenkoism in the USSR and the disasters of Mao's Great Leap Forward in China, but then we've certainly done stupid crap that killed a lot of people in the name of progress, too. One thing that gets forgotten is that both of those countries did make a lot of progress towards industrialization during those times (they were both mainly agrarian societies before that), though at an extremely high human cost, which is definitely not a good trade-off. Although if you look at it from the perspective of a country realizing that if it didn't make that progress, half the world was waiting to wipe them off of the map, you can sorta see why they did it.

Learning to put yourself in the shoes of others and try to see things from their perspective is an important excercise that's severely underappreciated in America, it seems.

I don't have a link handy, but I read a study once where Americans were told how things might work for them under socialism and how things might be organized, but the important thing was that they never used words like "communism" or "socialism". When the concepts were divorced entirely from those thoroughly demonized words, a startling number of people were actually in favor of it. Go figure.