roy

A fact I bet you didn't know and would have never guessed: When I was in middle school, I held Josef Stalin in the highest respect. I remember having to do a biography on a world character in middle school, and I jumped at the opportunity write about him. I actually had pretty strong Communist leanings/tendencies (what do you expect from a kid who was obsessed with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky) up until freshman year of high school when apathy kicked in. What's amusing is that I remember reading this book written in the '70s or '80s.

I'm still quite fascinated by Communist states - not because I ideologically believe any of the obvious perverse implementations of Marxism, but because it represents the existence of an extremely different state of living than ours. Democracy has its plus points, but there is something to be said about nation-states like North Korea which continue to survive. Reading about Ceausescu's former regime in Romania and the current Chavez regime in Venezuela have to make you wonder - how much are these guys driven by ideology and how much just by the allure of power? I have to believe that at some point these guys believed in their ideals, but the realities of government (inefficiencies of bureacracy, corruption by lower officials) made them fail in their goal.

I guess what's really weird for me is that although I sip the American lemonade (democracy + free markets), I can't help but sympathize with some of these guys. Specifically in regards to North Korea, I refuse to believe NK-US issues are as black-and-white as the Western media portrays - the truth is always complicated. (For example, do you remember the NK-US crisis back when Clinton was president? The big "victory" for Clinton was in getting NK to stop its plutonium production in return for two light-water reactors and oil shipments from the US - the deal stalled out when the US said NK was violating by starting a uranium enrichment while the NKs accused the US of dragging its feet on the oil shipments and the light-water reactors - it's clear that both sides really made this deal fall through. Even later on, a newspaper report leaked the fact that the US was still listing NK as potential nuclear strike targets, thus violating the agreement)

That said, I wonder if these guys mean well, but are just placed into positions where they are led to be corrupt. I mean, look how bad middle-class kids in America become when they're not exposed to the lower class difficulties that plague our own nation (example: see Duke Lacrosse kids). Now imagine if you're constantly surrounded by yes-men and live in a life of complete opulence... how much of a role does that play in distorting reality?