Glenn and John, you are doing a great service bringing to your listeners a calm exchange of differing opinion, well informed by your divergent points of view. When politics first appeared on my radar Reagan was on the ticket. Anyone I knew said he would bumble us into a nuclear exchange with the Soviets, and my young life would be over in a flash, and I believed it. That scary story determined my vote in that first ever presidential election. With much reflection, I've come around to the view that the fact we didn't have to die was no accident. You see, while building the best country on the planet, capitalism helped raise the military stakes on the Marxists, and showed the bully if they started something, it'd cost them, plenty. Most liberals thought that arming for war would bring it about, and still do to this day. I believe the credible threat of nuclear annihilation was a nasty but effective deterrent to an expansionist Marxist juggernaut, bent on world domination, that claimed many more lives by democide, than a nuclear exchange would have. Estimates say about 100 million innocent civilians were killed by their own governments in the 20th century. And my question is, what have the Marxist revolutionaries got to show for it. You can find on maps where the killing fields are scattered across countries enslaved by Marxist tyrants. Lenin promised a worker's paradise, if we were willing to break a few eggs. After 100 years and 100 million innocent lives, where's the omelet?
I know some will question the estimates of 100 million lives, fine. These are estimates. The fact that there's a rough tally of tens of millions would constitute enough evidence to investigate more thoroughly what malignant force in human nature rose up and devoured that many innocents in a couple of successive generations, mostly during conditions having nothing to do with all out war.
With apologies, in advance, to my fellow TGS interlocutors, who came for a polite discussion on the Marxist theoretical critique of capitalism.
Glenn and John, you are doing a great service bringing to your listeners a calm exchange of differing opinion, well informed by your divergent points of view. When politics first appeared on my radar Reagan was on the ticket. Anyone I knew said he would bumble us into a nuclear exchange with the Soviets, and my young life would be over in a flash, and I believed it. That scary story determined my vote in that first ever presidential election. With much reflection, I've come around to the view that the fact we didn't have to die was no accident. You see, while building the best country on the planet, capitalism helped raise the military stakes on the Marxists, and showed the bully if they started something, it'd cost them, plenty. Most liberals thought that arming for war would bring it about, and still do to this day. I believe the credible threat of nuclear annihilation was a nasty but effective deterrent to an expansionist Marxist juggernaut, bent on world domination, that claimed many more lives by democide, than a nuclear exchange would have. Estimates say about 100 million innocent civilians were killed by their own governments in the 20th century. And my question is, what have the Marxist revolutionaries got to show for it. You can find on maps where the killing fields are scattered across countries enslaved by Marxist tyrants. Lenin promised a worker's paradise, if we were willing to break a few eggs. After 100 years and 100 million innocent lives, where's the omelet?
I know some will question the estimates of 100 million lives, fine. These are estimates. The fact that there's a rough tally of tens of millions would constitute enough evidence to investigate more thoroughly what malignant force in human nature rose up and devoured that many innocents in a couple of successive generations, mostly during conditions having nothing to do with all out war.
With apologies, in advance, to my fellow TGS interlocutors, who came for a polite discussion on the Marxist theoretical critique of capitalism.