@judgedread

> used to

Still does, last I heard.

> fled to the US and regrouped, and funded communism to get revenge.

Well, this is interesting but contradicts some of Rockefeller's remarks. I think, you know, if you treat it like a communism-vs.-whatever problem rather than "top-down, planned, orderly societies appeal to people that believe they can control the top" problem, you miss that. Mussolini was already on the "USSR isn't real socialism" meme, in those exact words (though it was in Italian): he said it was better described as "Russian state capitalism". That's the essence of communist societies: they are run top-down, like a business that you can't resign from, and it's the same with any totalitarian system. It appeals to them for really obvious reasons. The end goal is control. A magical being comes down from the sky or out of a bottle you've rubbed and tells you that you have been given absolute authority over a country, and you don't ask "Are they communist or capitalist?" any more than you would care about the color scheme of the flag or any of the other branding. It's just control.

"There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them." :wtsherman:

> Putin is hated because

You should read Kissinger's book.

Anyway, Putin's corrupt as hell and has still managed to make the most stable government they've had in a while. I mean, look at Chechnya: nobody managed to handle that, he managed it. He's also kept up the Soviet strategy in the Middle East and continues to undermine the petrodollar. And he did all of the things he did while counter-signaling all of the key facets of the neolib agenda, and that's one of the main issues: the propaganda is central, it's been the core facet of the entire strategy for a hundred years. Denying the propaganda with a large enough microphone is reason enough for the propaganda to target him; look at Khaddafi, look at Ron Paul, the press is unkind to people that don't respect the press (or the CIA :nixonmad:). But they can't paint Putin as a backwoods idiot, so they have to make him Hitler.