Bret Devereaux

Says the fool with 'tankie' in their handle! Sorry, I know too many eastern Europeans to take anyone seriously who embraces that label voluntarily.

Thanks for sharing your honest appraisal, and I'm sure an interesting discussion could be had on that topic regardless of the personal experiences of your Eastern European acquaintances (of which I also have a few) but I'm not the one serving up WWIII agitprop, Mr. Palmer is.

'Tankie' literally calls to defenses of the USSR's use of force to crush opposition in Hungary and the (modern) Czech Republic. It's as if there were people on twitter calling themselves "Anschlussies" but claiming that the only did it because they liked Hitler's vegetarianism.

Yes, that's the definition. In a life-and-death struggle against the USA, of course the Soviet Union was going to use any means necessary to maintain its position against the intended erosion and dismantling that western powers pushed for. Were they supposed to just do nothing?

What about establishing a free society that wasn't instantly repudiated by all of their oppressed colonial people (let's be honest about what the USSR was here) the moment the Soviet boot was removed from their necks?

Perhaps instead of piling tremendous resources into a vast slave-labor-execution-complex, they could have put that labor into improving the standards of living for their own people? Or the people they held in bondage?

Why are we discarding the increases in life expectancy, literacy, living standards, calories intake, etc. that occurred under the USSR's "soviet boot"? Are we supposed to pretend these material facts never happened?