Kids who are too young to remember the existence of the USSR thinking that the USSR was cool. The USSR was not cool you wee wankers. (I don't mean on WF I mean in life in general)
Anyone who has done any kind of reading on the subject would know otherwise, so that kind of lets you know who you're dealing with when you come across someone who thinks the Soviet Union was awesome and that socialism is a great idea.
Ignorance is ignorance. What's the material difference between these kids and the ones who think Nazis are cool?
Commies are leftist, therefore put sand in MF's pearl duct, while Nazis blow through with no irritation.
Style. Nazis had the better uniforms, although the Russkies won in the facial hair department. Hitlers 'tache looked like he'd been rimming Speer, whilst Stalins looked like he spent his weekends in leather hoovering up all the biker cock he could find.
I always find it funny when some wannabe Marxist denies that the Soviet Union was representative of what socialism would be like.
That position is not entirely false, though. The Soviet Union was not socialist. It was actually more fascist than socialist. The problem is that socialism, in order to work, has to give an enormous amount of power to the state. The theory is that that is just a passing phase, and that once the people have "learned" how to do it, the state can disappear. Nevertheless, in order to overcome the power of corporations, the rich, and all the other "enemies of socialism," the state has to have a lot of power. "The state," however, is composed of people. People of exactly the same corrupt, power-hungry, selfish nature as the "evil rich" who exploit the poor for their own advantage. It takes the worst kind of blind wishful thinking to believe that a state with that much power won't use it to enslave the people. So it is true that the Soviet Union was not really socialist. It is true, however, that socialism could not really work because of human nature. Interestingly enough, the very reason that socialism could not really work is the reason that "pure" libertarianism could not work--a state powerful enough to deal with the "enemies" (of socialism, or of liberty) will necessarily abuse that power. It is not for nothing that the history of government is almost always a government that controls more and more things.
Perhaps these youngsters, who have grown up with memories of 9/11 in mind, simply see the Soviet Union as a more palatable adversary than Islamofascism.
I do. I was actually younger than that and I can remember the fall of the Soviet Union. I can also remember the first Gulf War and sending stuff to the troops in what was supposed to be some kind of a morale booster. Don't ask me how the scribblings of elementary school kids was supposed to make the people over there feel better, but the school made us do it.
According to Marxists, who are not representative of all shades of socialism. Of course, the eastern bloc claimed to be both socialist and democratic, and you don't see many people claiming it as a demonstration of how democracy can't work.
I'd agree with you if it hadn't been for the great shock value of wearing an iron cross necklace or rising sun bandana back in the hey day of punk. Kids have been trolling grownups with the boogie men of their era forever...
