--Now, why doesn't someone write a book on Nazism with 'delicay and nuance'? So much better than the 'hysterically obsessive' morally judgmental stuff.

I am a historian, and I've studied Nazi Germany quite a bit. Almost none of the histories that I've read of it have spent more than a paragraph or two per chapter, or even only a few paragraphs throughout the book, on deploring the Nazis' acts in "moral judgment." They don't really need to, of course, since a simple recounting of the facts suffices to trigger the readers' moral reactions.

In the case of Communism, I have read works that have been crude attacks either on behalf of Communism, or against it. But Nazism has no serious historians promoting it as a system. Communism still does, and therefore, those who are against it feel that vehement rebuttals are in order. This is why, although Nazism and Communism (at least as practiced by Russia, the Eastern Bloc, and China) have similar records of brutality, paranoia, purges, and mass murder, their historiography is not comparable.

This is probably why the author made mention of "delicacy and nuance." There are probably a few cartoonish or simplistic histories of Nazi Germany, but there is much, much more oversimplification of Communism, from both sides. Nuance is welcome, because it connotes honesty, free from ideological bent or vent.

Even those red-staters are notorious Marxists.

What with those farm cooperatives, labor-pooling, extension services, crop subsidies, price supports, and ag grants, those red states are just hotbeds of socialism.

I long ago suspected that the same arms race and military build up that Republicans credit with ruining the Soviet Union would achieve a momentum impossible for our democracy to control. The resulting imbalance of our vastly greater military reach and pattern of over investment would in time propel us along a trajectory inevitably toward the kind of international conflict characteristic of empire and the sustained erosion of democracy at home resulting finally in the ruin of America.

As do many others, I believe this has already taken place or has certainly accelerated with a momentum beyond the means of our political breaking power to halt in the remaining space and time of our history.

In the final analysis corporate state capitalism metastasticised into a remarkable pattern of symmetry with the state apparatus of Soviet Communism in the 1950's. These systems both began as deeply flawed 19th century materialist economic theories and both failed along almost identical time lines.

The simultaneous decline of Capitalism and Communism unfortunately never produced the higher levels of social invention and artistic achievement that distinguished the Roman empire.

One of the lessons of American decline is that the corruption of civil society by the corrosive influence of religious extremism wed to an overreaching international militarism is a reliable recipe for producing rapidly collapsing empires. The attempted export of Neoliberal economic theory supplied the hidden agenda for pursuing an catastrophicly wasteful hi-tech arms build up and woldwide military baseing stucture that proved economicaly unsustainable. These fundamental economic pressures coupled with the nationalist mania of a fundamentalist religious crusade together crystallized into the intellectual and moral hubris, diplomatic isolation, fiscal bankrupcy and that now pushes over the edge into the abyss dragging all of us along with it.

Surprisingly enough the most prescient assesment of these outcomes we are now confronted with was produced in the 1960's by often otherwise innocent young radicals and it is a fitting epitaph to blind ambition that so many warnings of the comming calamity would be stupidly ignored.

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. I don't believe there is a "Star Chamber" or some other cabal that led us to this quandary. Human failings like greed and hubris have led us along the rosy path toward the present. Scratch the surface of any capitalist and you will find a closet marxist. The same holds true for the converse. I know from personal experience that it is a lot easier to get laid and way more fun to pretend to be one of the ones that is outside looking in. I hear you can find Che T-shirts wholesale... just follow my link... GET IT?

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.

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."