Slovenly Logicians

While cruising the infobahn, I have from time to time observed these "corner-like" pronouncements as if they are "the truth" on their face.

"Socialism has been demonstrated as having ruined one form of society after another in this century."

Okay, bunky, can we have some evidence of this obvious truth?

I seriously would like to hear about which countries FELL DESPERATELY into previously unknown poverty & ruin BECAUSE of socialism in the last century.

This is a classic simple right-wing argument, browbeaten constantly into us during the cold war. Rather than take the repressive Soviet Regime for what it was, a thuggish totalitarian regime that placed upon it the lipstick of "socialism". The right used it to try to bankrupt anything that did not have to do with the purity of the free market. Industrial repression equating to the "real workers paradise" and don't do the following because it makes you a "commie", naturally the same as a "socialist" to them:

...Organize
...Protest
...Regulate
...Tax

You get the picture.

But, this whole argument is based upon a simplistic and incorrect fact. The Soviet Union didn't miraculously create a Eastern Europe poor, and newly repressed. It just placed another form of imperialism upon them, again the lipstick of socialism upon the pig of oppression.

Repression and poverty were, unfortunately, nothing new to Eastern Europe in 1945.

I'd really love to have just one wingnut tell me of the evidence for the VAST prior wealth and granduer or pre-Soviet Poland, Romania, Albania, Bosnia, et al. I mean, surely you guys cannot forget Poland after all?

I just want ONE previously "wealthy and unruined nation" that became poor and ruined exclusively "because" of the implementation of varying forms of socialism.

My request is not to justify the nature of Soviet repression, as opposed to the hope for more "democratic" regimes (one can be both democratic and socialist by the way). However, I would seriously like to ask them when historically say, ALBANIA, ROMANIA, POLAND or BOSNIA was wealthy and prosperous?

Those nations had been repressed by "varying" forms of imperialism for two millenia, whether it be Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, French, German, Austrian, Swedish or Russian. How for fuck's sake do you think Napolean managed to win over Poles but by promising them the benefits of the "Revolution" (liberty, fraternity, and equality), denied them by their Prussian, Austrian and Russian overlords? The repression of the Soviets was no more than classic imperial extraction and repression of nationalism bearing a "socialist" face. Same as it ever had been in those nations, but now, hopefully the last.

In the alternative, I'd like to hear how say modern day Sweden or Norway has been driven into poverty or ruin because of its implementation of varying degrees of socialism.

Oh, those poor, oppressed Scandinavians, UFF DA! I mean, other than us Viking fans, of course.