To think being Far left wing (communist) and praising the ussr is as bad as being far right and supporting the Bnp

[Dadistired1]

This is a question I asked myself, I have a colleague who is very far left in her political views and has the USSR flag as her iphone and laptop screen saver.

Aibu to think that it is just as bad as having a confederate flag or nazi flag as a screensaver. Aibu to think its shocking no one at work has said anything.

Im left wing, but praising a regime that killed millions and oppressed many is way pass the line.

(ps this colleague is not from any former soviet country)

I hate to interrupt your unsubstantiated assertions party, but who are these 1000s and which years are you thinking of?

Ha ha ha. Really? Do you know nothing at all of the history of the British Empire?

I think you might find that the banning of Gaelic and the kilt were a good long time before Britain could be described as a democracy.

And as for Wilson he retired in 1976, at 60 when he had long said he would. His wife hated politics, he had undiagnosed colon cancer and possibly his Altzheimers was starting to affect him.

As for the UK it was invaded by
The eighth to eleventh century invasions of the British isles by the Vikings.
The 1066 Norman conquest of England under William the Conqueror.
The 1216 invasion of England by Louis VIII of France and Alexander II of Scotland, during the First Barons' War.
The 1326 invasion of England by Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer, leading to Isabella's regency until the ascendance of her son, Edward III.
The 1386 invasion by France was organised but never executed during the Hundred Years' War.
The 1487 invasion from Ireland of the pretender Lambert Simnel.
The 1495 landing with troops at Deal by Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Richard of Shrewsbury, the rightful King.
The 1545 French invasion of the Isle of Wight during the Italian Wars.
The 1588 Spanish Armada was a failed invasion of England after it was heavily defeated by storms and the English fleet.
The 1667 Raid on the Medway and Felixstowe Landguard during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.[1]
The 1685 landing in England by the Duke of Monmouth and his supporters during the Monmouth Rebellion
The 1688 invasion of England by the Dutch Republic, also known as the Glorious Revolution. (last successful invasion of England)
The 1690 attack by the French on Teignmouth, Devon.
The 1704 invasion of Guernsey by Louis XIV's Third Army, known as Les Seinges Rose.

1066 was merely the most successful invasion.

Yellow Well quite math - there are so many examples even on these shores of how political systems commonly operate I didn't wish to confuse Elk with them all.

So now its the usual left wing apologista technique of pretending other posters are too stupid to understand sentences in the English language but a total absence of intelligent discussion or even basic examples (and I kept mine very basic...). I know its very difficult for cult members to see reality, but being belittling does no idiot any favours. And certainly not you.

I'd like to hear who Yellow would like to use to counter Snyder's very rational argument, how it fits in with the concept of the Just War and the theory of political polarisation.

Well, again thanks for the invitation Elk - but really, when one meets a western 'cult' dogmatist such as yourself one knows how difficult it can be for them to see anything else.
But I need to go to sleep now. Up in the morning to plan the next socialist revolution.
night.

cd are really being serious about Harold Wilson? All of those 'reasons' sound like the security services handbook.....
And those 'invasions' ffs. Nibbling at the edges of an island state. Surprised you didn't include the invasion of Lundy Island by those pesky puffins. Every bloody year.

Yellow the idea of the security service persuading Wilson to quit in the second term of his lame duck government is straight out of the loony
conspiracy handbook.

The 1326 and 1688 invasions were hardly nibbling away as they led to changes of government.

It wasn't the UK or Britain either way back in the day of all those 'invasions'. Nor was England in any sense a democracy.

What does that have to do with anything, you may well ask...

Dontloook --
You must not have heard of the man-made Irish Famine, which resulted in the death of about a million people and the forced emigration of about another million, altogether accounting for the loss of 20-25% of the population.

As a lasting effect of the Famine, which itself was a result of rigid adherence to to the demands of the dogma of free market Liberalism, Ireland is the only country in Europe that has today a far smaller population than it had 150 years ago.

In order to avoid the 'problem' of making the allegedly feckless, lazy and shiftless Irish peasantry dependent on handouts of government food aid, the Liberal Russell government decided to curtail aid. While a million people starved and died of typhus and cholera, food was exported from Ireland. Lesson learned, by the Irish anyway.

Lord Clarendon, a critic of the government, stated in a letter urging a change of policy:
'I don't think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the West of Ireland, or coldly persist in such a policy of extermination.'

About twenty years before the Famine the government compensated dispossessed Caribbean slave holders to the tune of £20million, and a few years after the Famine it spent £76million on the Crimean war. By contrast, £7million was spent on Famine related expenses in Ireland.

Compare the proportion of the Irish population that was deliberately reduced for ideological reasons with Stalin's toll?

The 1688 'invasion' took place at the behest of the anti Jacobite party that was motivated by hatred and fear of Catholicism. James II's fate was sealed when his son was born.

After the Glorious Revolution civil rights for Catholics were suspended and not regained for a century.

Meanwhile in largely Catholic Ireland, second class citizenship became a fact of life for the majority for many hundreds of years.

So much for inaugurating modern British democracy, religious freedom, etc.

The good things about communism were universal compulsory education (girls were often sent to school against the wishes of their own parents), socialised healthcare and attempts to eliminate destitution/starvation of the lowest classes. Everything else was pretty rank though.

Elke, a friend of mine used to work for the Stasi File Authority in Berlin. People would put in a request to read the files kept on them, and you can imagine the fallout from that. Learning who informed on you, where, and when. 'Why' didn't even come into it, as you already know.

There was plenty of that in NI too. Plus kneecapping and other punishments for those suspected of informing.

Ever heard of the Stasi? What did the Stasi do? Clue: they targeted very ordinary people, living very ordinary lives and made them disappear.

Now we have the NSA and GCHQ doing the same, scooping up metadata and jailing people who go against the orthodoxy. Unless you're part of their scheme like David Petraeous...

There is something very wrong with any political system if it needs a big long wall/fence to keep its own people in.

This thread is so interesting. I feel I am missing so much education about history and would love to learn more.
Can someone point me in the right direction to find out more please?

Stick a pin in any former industrial area of the north of England and what you will find from the election of Margaret Thatcher on is places that were run down and depressing and pollution levels were dreadful. Imagine spending the majority of your life in such a country.

Dickens also commented comprehensively on places that were run down and depressing, where pollution levels were dreadful, where small children worked in mines and as chimney sweeps, where the poor and the powerless were despised.

Then there was that wonderful newspaper Pravda, not even sarcastically named after the Russian word for "truth". Reporting ever increasing yields on its Five Year and Ten Year Plans.
And there is nothing like that anywhere else and never has been. No self-serving press here at all, oh noooo. It is hard to know what is worse really, news media owned and controlled by a government or owned by individuals such as Murdoch, or owned by corporations such as Disney, or General Electric. If you think most Americans get their 'news' from an unbiased news source, think again.

In the cities, families living in one bedroom flats with shared toilets and no showers/baths were fairly standard. Unless of course you were a Party member. Where in the Western world does any of that happen YellowJersey?

In poor parts of cities all over Europe and the US, tenement housing was the norm for huge numbers of people. There might be a single outdoor toilet and a pump for water in a filthy courtyard at the back of formerly grand Georgian houses now home to hundreds of people, with families crammed into rooms. In Dublin until the 1970s housing conditions were appalling.

Not a trace of sarcasm here either in the name -- in Dublin.
The woman at 5:00 speaks of her oldest son sent to an industrial school. Much has been written about Irish industrial schools. None of it is good.

is here.

For your further edification, here is life in (26:38 minutes). This was an improvement on the tenements, and places like Mount Pleasant, but it was very much a ghetto.

, just about the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and a bit afterwards.

It isn't just Communism that grinds the life out of people.

There is something very wrong with any political system if it needs a big long wall/fence to keep its own people in.

There is something wrong with a political system if it builds a wall to keep people out too.

Or nice high peace walls (no sarcasm here either ) dividing cities. (The wire fencing extending far over the top is to stop bombs being lobbed over.) This particular UK wall bears eloquent testimony to the complete failure of political leadership both at local and national levels.

I'm not saying walls to keep people out are any better math but if a country can't convince its people to stay put without resorting to putting a fence up with weapons that shoot at anything that moves then it is doing something very wrong.
I grew up about 100 km to the West of the Iron curtain, I've been to East Berlin 5 years before the wall came down and Prague in the same year, I absolutely know which system I prefer despite all its failings. It's certainly not the one where 1/3 of the population spied on the other 2/3.

There are lots of people who lived miserable lives in the west, utterly wasted, desperate, hopeless lives, thanks to 'the failings' of the dominant system there. Don't dismiss that, and don't minimise it.

There are also millions of people whose lives were and are to this day defined from the moment of birth thanks to the colour of their skin, in a state that goes around the world lecturing other states about how to conduct their affairs, democracy, blah, blah, blah.

Spying on each other and ratting on each other to the police was nothing new to Germans. It is how the Gestapo maintained control. You absolutely cannot blame Communism for that or try to imply that this only happened under Communism.

You must have been thoroughly brainwashed, is all I can say to that remark, Caramel.

I have cousins who grew up in Belfast. It was not a joyful place to live.

And I do not think this would have been anyone's idea of a worker's paradise.

The good old days.