"You don't know what's happening here, do you, Mr. Jones?"

I don't know what the relationship between sulfur and the devil is, but as Mr. Chavez repeated it several times, it must have escaped what I had thought was my good Christian education. Of course, American pundits were quick to jump on that "tinhorn dictator", our own dictator wearing a solid sivler star, or is is that a spoon? More than twenty years ago Reagan was pushing the "evil empire" and his chilluns, the neocons, have their own axis of evil. All these epithets are provocative though vapid rhetoric. Let's everyone demonize everyone else. It certainly fits with American culture which more and more is a war of all against all. It's just competition, just a be all you can be society. And for nearly all of us we can't be much since wealth is flowing away from us to the winners.

Listening to "conservative" commentators one of them made an astute observation: reflecting on the week's events, including Chavez, his impression was that the world was "moving on" while the US was standing still. His senses were on the mark: the US is fighting a counterrevolutionary war around the world. Freed from choosing sides in a Soviet-US worldspace, nations are feeling their independence, flexing their muscles and seeking a way forward that doesn't require submission to US captial. Of course, there is only one true opponent to capitalism and that is socialism, and since Soviet leaders sold out their countrymen for disorder, destruction and a few billion dollars, the world's budding socialists will have to make do without Soviet protection.

Seeing the poverty and death that the Bush/Cheney junta is unleashing upon the world, I decided to look into the past, as in just how evil was Reagan's evil empire? This is a complex task, and very time consuming. One thing that stands out, in quite stark relief, is that the USSR seems to have been a brake upon the unchecked aggression of the US. Today we have an America uncontained and the picture is ugly.

And if one studies the history of the USSR and its relationship with the US it quickly becomes obvious that to really understand things you have to go back decades, you have to learn about Stalin and the socialism he built and the methods he used and the reasons things happened as they did. Looking through my local, very well-stocked library, they have dozens, literally, of books just on Stalin, and they all mimic each other and even use each other as sources. But we know all about Stalin, don't we? The world's worst monster; the biggest mass murderer; inventor of the personality cult; creator of the gulag; a megalomaniac; etc. And if you really look deep, reading original source material, you find very little of this. The evidence that Stalin murdered 20-30 million Soviet citizens basically doesn't exist. That difficult and painful times occurred and that many suffered is undeniable, but to take anecdotal reports of famine and spin these tales into deliberate murder through starvation is grandiose; more, it's grotesque. For example, one writer does the usual Western thing in belittling Soviet statistical reports (they always lie, you know) then reverses course and chooses to believe their census reports of 1929 and 1939 and an expected growth rate and concludes that 10 million people disappeared (or were never born, he allows) and attributes these to famine deaths in 1931 alone, an acknowledged bad year early in the collectivization compaign. And this guesswork alone is the source that Stalin murdered 10 million people in 1931.

Even if it were true that the Soviet population were short 10 million, a more reasonable surmise (there are not enough facts for an inference,which is logical deduction, or for a conclusion) would, in 2006, and given the death and birth rates in post-Soviet Russia, be that in tough times the birth rate falls drastically due to fears and uncertainty about the future and that this rate takes years to recover. Should Sachs from Harvard be charged with crimes against humanity because his advice to the Yeltsin government caused so many "deaths?"

The sources that most of these writers use are few, inconclusive, and slanted. A favorite one is Leon Trotsky (Bronstein). Reading old Soviet material it seems the Trot had it in for Stalin from the beginning and the best surmise I could form is that it was based on class snobbishness. Trotsky always derided Stalin for crudeness and stupidity. Both Lenin and Trotsky were petit-bourgeios in their backgrounds while Stalin was raised a true proletarian. I was surprised by this discovery. An obvious thing I thought I'd find was Stalin's authoritarianism but it turns out that the Trot was even worse: he wanted to militarize the factories with non-compliant workers subject to military discipline,ie, shot. I thought I'd find that Stalin was power-mad and revelled in being king of the heap, and a bit, well, slow. But if you look through as much source material as you can you will find... what? Stalin had a first class intellect, a prodigious memory, difficult and aggressive in debate though not in a personal way. He would not suffer fools or laziness or incompetence but with fact-based, well-reasoned arguments anyone might win the day. To Stalin none of this was personal. He lived simply and a leather, fur-lined coat that he wore in the winte r of 1917 he was still wearing 36 winters later at his death.

There is a lot more to say, and to learn, about the Stalin era. It seems he wasn't crazy, or stupid, or incompetent or bloodthirsty. But I already know about a lot of the lies our Leaders and Teachers tell us in the United States. Why shouldn't much, if not most, of their tales about Uncle Joe be lies as well? The world is moving on, trying to find ways of living peacefully, harmoniously and survivably. Meanwhile, Dubya and his reactionary, counterrevolutionists are fighting to keep back the tide and us under heel. So much we need to learn; so much we need to do.