I have no respect for the ideology of Communism, any more than I do fascism, Nazism, or any other type of totalitarian government.
And BTW, American "McCarthyism" cost some people their jobs in the movies, but that's about it. Comparing it to the Ukranian famine, Holocaust, Soviet gulags or the Cultural Revolution in China is absolute B.S., no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
I’m afraid it seems you’re confusing economics with governments. Economic systems are capitalism, mercantilism, communism and so forth. Totalitarianism, anarchy, monarchy and democracy are examples of governments. The Soviet Union, for instance, was a totalitarian government that worked to attain communist economics, something it never did and never claimed to have done.Now I have to tell you something that I believe is very important to bear in mind especially if you’re not a communist. Communism is an ideology that has the best interests of humankind at heart, only communists may be a little too ideological in assuming everything will work out.
Definitely, but I can’t see that anyone made that comparison, though. From what I’ve gathered most of the ‘communists’ of the McCarthy era were either socialists or capitalists. Very few if any of them, I think, were actually Marxists.
I agree with what seems to be the thrust of your argument - that theoretically, Communism could work. Unfortunately, every place a Communist government has sprung up, there has been total disaster and oppression (USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, North Korea, etc.), some places certainly more than others.
And just for the record (though I may have already said this): "High Noon" has no political elements that I'm aware of. I think that Wayne was being hypersensitive, if you ask me. I love the man but sometimes I think he read too much into things. I remember reading that "Rio Grande", according to him, was supposed to be an allegory of the Korean War (a major stretch).
And by the way (it annoys me to repeat this) the governments you speak of weren’t communist (because obviously communism isn’t a type of government but a style of economy); they were totalitarian governemts with a more or less socialist economy working to attain communism.
I’ll let you have the last word, Groggy, not because I’ve run out of arguments, but because it’s really gone a little off-topic by now. It started out as some John Wayne trivia, and now we’re discussing this. Enough is enough.