GTCharlie:

> Cold war adversaries were the same
> fraud and hypocrisy

That is exactly my point. During the Cold War NOBODY was good.

The US can claim moral superiority but the reality is that the USA (through the CIA) promoted fascism and dictatorship in many countries. The USA (as well as the UK, Canada, and other western governments) subverted democracies when the governments elected were not ideologically aligned with American expectations. Governments were toppled only to be replaced by military dictatorships whose function was to exterminate left wing groups, unions and anyone opposed to the economic interests of big corporations. The USA declared war on countries both openly and subvertly. Millions of people were killed in the name of ideology (freedom and democracy) with the end result being big capitalist corporations making billions in profits. Capitalists are incapable of acknowledging that in order to keep capitalism alive they readily dispatched millions of people to their deaths, including anyone who dissented from the capitalist system. When those nice dictators sent left wingers to their deaths, they were killing dissidents, not some foreign element external to the system. What were the McCarthy era witch hunts if not the pursuit of people who dissented from capitalism?

Of course, everyone knows what Stalin did, or what Mao did? Power-hungry men will do anything to acquire even greater power. People on the other side of the Iron Curtain suffered too much. Millions were also killed and even more millions oppressed. Equality of all workers, revolution, the end of capitalist exploitation. They all have a nice ring to them, and they were the excuses used by Communists to exert power and brutality.

People are defined by their actions and in the end ideology is just empty talk. In any system all that we have to do is look at who acquired wealth and power. In communism it was the communist party elite. In capitalism it was the corporate elite. Everything else was (and still is) nothing but empty ideology. Higher principles have always been swept aside when it has become politically and economically convenient.