I can't recommend enough "The Man Who Stayed Behind". It's out of print now but you can find it for cheap on half.com or where ever.

Written by Sydney Rittenberg, who stayed behind in China after the war and rose to become one of Mao's right hand men. The only foreigner to ever reach anything like his rank in the Chinese Communist Party.

The book first answers (and very effectively so) "WHY did Communism seem like the answer at the time?" It's an intimate and poignant look at the system's rise and evolution in China.

He THEN answers how it all went wrong - and paints a clear picture of what early Communists thought they were doing, and what it turned out they were actually doing.

One of the most educational books I've ever read. (Not to mention fascinating. And his agenda is merely "insight" - for better and for worse.)

The fear of history is often expressed in Americans by their inclination to avoid considering any cosmology that does not put a male diety in power whose invisable wrath is a cynical and slippery morality assuming human iniquity at the center of it. Europeans tend to see history as a fairly impersonal force driven thought process. The understanding that the private citizen's "choices" are subject to social, economic and political forces that overwhelm and transcend the individual is not an idea American audiences like the sound of. That is why so may bloggers here voice frustration at Marx for having been so uncouth as to wear a beard but have reached middle age never having read Das Kapital. Americans obviously mistrust the mind but still love personalities. The only way most people can tolerate ideas is if the they are stripped of their historical content removed from context and regarded as luxuries of the personality.

Unfortunately the ongoing celebration of celebrity anti intellectualism and illiteracy as masculine culture has had political consequences and while personalities like PJ ORourke may be symptomatic of them, I would not hold my breath waiting for him or Henry Kissenger to explain them... if that is what anyone out there is waiting for. The Domino Theory has certainly had consequences but we are miguided even as we are being entertained, if we still believe that 20 minute pizza delivery is one of them.

Thanks 06271, that's interesting. I think that England didn't make education compulsory until the late 19th century, so I always assumed that it was in Bismarck's time or after, in Germany. Thanks for the clarification.

"But I don't think that there was any compulsory education in Europe during the time that Marx was writing. I may be wrong.

It was affirmed in Prussia by Frederick the Great in 1763.

The main idea behind it was that peasants should be enabled to read the manual of a musket.

In other protestant states of Germany, it was discussed since the reformation. The translation of the bible comes into play here. Who can be close to his/her god if s/he can't read.

Catholic state didn't make elementary education compulsory until the early 19th century (some forced by Napoleon - France got hers with the revolution)

"IBM supplied the punch-card systems that the Nazis used to implement their Final Solution"

... and Germany paid royalties to Standard Oil until the end of the war, as Standard helped IG Farben to develop Cyclon B.

While Cologne was bombed, the citizen of Cologne used the Ford factory for cover, knowing that the British/US bomber waves wouldn't hit the factories. Despite the fact that Ford built parts for Wehrmacht tanks.

Hitler also pulled Germany out of the Depression by 1935 due partly to public funding of the autobahn

I don't know if this was mentioned already, but the construction of the Autobahn did very little to the recovery of the German economy. The major part is the heavy re-armament. However, this economical growth (for the population - Krupp, Borsig, IG Farben et al still reaped in) only went until about 1937. At the invasion of Poland, Germany was bankrupt.

Both, autobahn and re-armament weren't btw. plans from the NAZIs. The ideas originated already during the Weimar Republic. The NAZIs themselves hadn't anything constructive to offer ... besides a perceived stability by taking out the threaded Social Democrats.

Another amazing fact: The German social net was introduced by Wilhelm II and expanded under the NAZIs. Both in fear of leftists.

During that same Victorian era, universal compulsory education became the norm for the industrialized world, but in order to provide a more competitive soldiery, in a highly militarized world. Not that it should be that way. But I don't think that there was any compulsory education in Europe during the time that Marx was writing. I may be wrong.

--Most of the 60's radicals that you elevate to some kind of saintly status are the ones that hold the very same puppet strings that you so vehemently abhor.

PJ O'Rourke had a great line about the switching of roles. He said: "60s radicals, like those demonstrating at the Chicago Democratic convention, wanted to effect a working-class revolution along Maoist lines and destroy the power of the sons and daughters of privilege. What they didn't realize was that this had already happened. The working class had all gotten jobs as policemen, and were beating the shit out of the sons and daughters of privilege."

The proletariat were the lowest class , propertyless citizens under the ancient Roman constitution. It became a term of derision in Victorian times, used to indicate the use of propertyless people as property of the state, of service by having children and living by selling their labor.

Marx, who wrote in this period simply reversed the positions of ownership of capital and production without regard for human rights and individual liberties. The result had to be a dictatorship and had to create the slavery and state totalitarianism to survive. The bread up of the Soviet Union released a lawless race for private ownership of resources, again at the expense of the proletariat.

We are bow enduring the effects of this same philosophy that continues to treat those with property as a special class of citizen and refuses to understand that labor, health and education are resources, not commodities to be used by the owners of capital and the means of production, but to secure a better quality of life for a nation, not a party.