How many here spent time in the USSR

before the Cold War ended, or to be generous shortly thereafter, and REALLY understand how life was?

that's why this whole america is fascist crap is so troubling.......so many people are so willing to call this Fascism.......We are not oppressed in this country, and it chaps my goddamn ass when people say we are living under a Fascist dictatorship..........There is a real disconnect when totally free people believe they are under fascist rule.......

it makes me sick.

We have the largest prison population per capita in the world... I'll bet there are a lot of people behind bars that would beg to differ! Remember Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer arrested in Spain on bogus FBI information? He might not agree. How about all those death row inmates being freed on DNA evidence who had "confessions" beaten out of them? They probably don't think so. What about US service members being forced to fight an illegal war, are they free? There are probably hundreds of thousands of Americans whose lives are being torn apart by govermnet malfeasance, they probably don't think so. If you're not oppressed, you're blessed.

and Darfur is Arab militias hell bent on killing, and etc etc ad nauseam........

We are nowhere near Fascism and the level of stupidity it takes to think we are is truly breathtaking.......

on the other hand, it isn't nor should it ever claim to be the freest either. To claim otherwise is equally idiotic.

I have just said over and over again we are not a Fascist state.

I would only have to talk to Europeans who survived the war to find out the true face of totalitarian terror. To be sure, some Americans have had their rights violated by the federal government. Others have been wrongfully convicted or have been denied any access to counsel. The Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have all leveled scathing condemnations against the federal government in recent years for these abuses of human rights, but it's true to say that we live in a world of different shades of gray. We are not "white" in color like we should be, but at the same time, we're not trending closer to "black" that our friends in the House of Saud or our trading friends the Chinese People's Communist Party are.

however some zealots only think we are fascists.........I say you are spot on sir or maam.......

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

Sounds like it to me :(

or others in order to really be opposed to them.

it's like if someone thinks Bush is bad but don't compare him to Hitler they feel they are in some way accepting Bush.

The nazis were a uniquely virulent political plague that combined elements of socialism, fascism, highly sophisticated and widespread propaganda, and scapegoating at a time when Germany's demoralized population was extremely vulnerable to such appeals.

I don't know why people automatically associate Hitler and fascism. I don't. Nazis are nazis. Fascism is a lot more banal, commonplace, and often seemingly benign than nazism.

USSR was a warped totalitarian version of socialism/collectivism.

The fact that most Americans are better off than most Soviets were doesn't mean the present US power isn't fascistic.

It sure as hell is NOT a democratic republic. Not sure if it really ever was, but it definitely is not now.

...for his work with the RAF in W. Berlin (he usually flew in, but wanted the experience of the train ride), and he also visited E. Berlin once. We have a piece of the Berlin Wall from his last visit.

I went to East Germany as well, on a train, and they seized all Western documents whether it was homework or a harmless magazine. Keep that piece of the Berlin wall, so many were hurt by it, and it IS a vital piece of humanity and what it should never be.

Seemed to be results from one of those polls on how good our "children is learning". Apparently a percentage of the younger generation today has somehow got the idea that during WWII, the Germans helped us fight the SOVIETS. Quite honestly, after several years of watching the idiots who appear on Leno's Jay-Walking segment, I'm disgusted but not surprised.

We have no plans of divesting ourselves of that piece of the Berlin Wall. My husband retrieved it himself with a hammer. And he's told me similar stories about the train ride; how the train was stopped at the E. German crossing, the engine was switched for an E. German one, soldiers got on board and took away anything they deemed to be contraband, and all the windows on the train were locked for the journey through E. Germany.

The worst thing, he says, was the stark contrast between E. and W. Berlin. It was like being plucked from a dead city and dropped into the heart of Times Square.

What hurt me the most was being in East Berlin, and realizing that the East Berliners could see OVER the wall, and see a better life in West Berlin. It was night and day. Few can understand just how bad it was, but your husband sounds like one who appreciates it. Absolute cruelty.

in 1972, after Nixon broke the ice and visited Soviet Russia (first U.S. president ever to do so). For one thing, the Russians we met loved Nixon, felt honored by his visit, and looked upon it hopefully, as a door-opener. Although the Russians were very kind to us, and there are magnificent things to see in Leningrad (the Hermitage Museum, the Winter Palace), what should have been on display was the success of the Russian Revolution for ordinary Russians. This was a very hard thing for me to gage, because of where they began--millions and millions of illiterate, dirt poor serfs and peasants, led by a few intellectuals, at the beginning, in 1905-1917--and Tsarist tyranny and centuries of tyranny before that. No experience of democracy whatsoever. Stalin took this country and performed a miracle of industrialization, prior to WW II and the war with Hitler. It was done at great cost in lives and often with forced labor. But it was done. Stalin was a dictator--and became a truly bloody and paranoid one--but, if it had not been for that amazing industrialization, which enabled Russia, at tremendous cost in lives, to resist Hitler's invasion of Russia, the Allies might well have lost WW II.

But I was young (a young 27) when I visited Leningrad, had not traveled much, and did not fully comprehend this history. Everybody having food on the table, everybody having excellent educational opportunities, everybody having a job, everybody with warmth and coats and boots to make it through the very severe winters, everybody with a roof over their heads--these were great accomplishments for Russia, especially under the conditions of the Cold War, and humongous expense in armaments to fend off a hostile U.S. And then imagine these folks putting Sputnik into space, ahead of us. What a great accomplishment! But what I saw was grim. Ugly, deteriorating public housing. Monuments falling into disrepair. Everybody in the same shapeless dress, all seemingly of the same dull patterned cloth. Meager supplies on the shelves of food stores. Truly dreadful food in the hotel. We were treated well, and got to meet other young people, whose avid hope was to have the material prosperity and glitz of America. They were floored to hear that workers in America could afford two cars (and also to hear that we hated Nixon, their hero). (--the Vietnam War was still raging).

I burst out of Russia with a great sigh of relief, and gloried in the many bright flowers--the gratuitous beauty!--and the awesome food, and color, and vitality, of Sweden--a socialist government, to be sure, but a mixed economy, in which everyone flourished, and people had time and resources for art and architecture and design furniture, and, above all seemed to be satisfied and prosperous and enjoying themselves.

I learned something about what the "American Dream" meant to others, and how much suffering the Russians had been through, and I learned to appreciate capitalism a little more, for all its faults, and also our tradition of democracy, for all ITS faults. We had armed guards with submachine guns escorting us in and out of Russia. The people we met were well-educated, but many of them were obviously not used to speaking their minds. (They were very shocked that we would badmouth our leader.) And they also suffered from a limited, confined view of the world. They were hemmed in, and not happy about it. The other countries we visited--Norway, Denmark, England, France--all with great beauty and no grimness (in that era), all mixed socialist/capitalist systems, were actually much more attractive to me than the U.S. (especially with that heinous war going on). We were just beginning to see homeless in the U.S. and the "war on poverty" and other progress was being curtailed. Many Vietnam vets were suffering. We'd just been through three traumatic assassinations of progressive political leaders only a few years before. And the Nixon repression--so similar to the Bushites (only the Bushites are much, much worse)--was well under way.

Even so, the contrast between "east" and "west" was stark. I would not have wanted to live in Russia.

The wall was down,there was still a stark difference between east and west. I traveled by train from Frankfurt to Berlin the minute we crossed into the former east Germany the tracks were rough and the train had to slow down. It was kind of like being in a time warp and traveling in early 1950s Germany...I did notice a lot of satellite dishes,I guess the people were finally getting better tv reception.

very very poor most of the people.

My favorite story was in the St. Petersburg Airport. Everybody probably used the vending coffee machine that drops down a paper cup and makes coffee. The Russian version replaces the paper cup with a metal cup on a chain. You put your money in a selected your drink. It came now into the metal cup. You stood and drank it and when done, there was a button on the machine that caused water to come out so you could "clean" the cup for the next user.