If actions speak louder than words, then my parents actions spoke. They migrated here during the insane McCarthy years when right wing insanity was rampant; because I wasn't getting proper education in California, one of the better states education-wise; because my father could see the USA going the way of ancient Rome. I was behind educationally but soon caught up and was eventually put up a year. Several other rellies followed for the same reasons and because of the growing obsession with guns, violence and war. Others stayed but wished they'd come.

All rellies, both here and there, have been aghast about what was happening to Australia under Howard, from Tampa onwards as he was attempting to make Australia the same what I wrote in my first post.... poor education, health, infrastructure and encourage rednecks and religious fanatics.

I visited rellies in the USA for years but no longer go there because of the violence, a shooting on the San Diego Fwy when we were heading for the west San Fernando Valley before heading up to San Francisco to visit other rellies and just about everybody carrying guns. Not my thing. My rellies now come down there to visit and all are relieved that with Howard out there's a chance that Australia will return to the country I love rather than adopting all that is bad about the USA.

I would suggest that anybody who can't see what has happened to the USA, or the bloke who loves it so much, return or migrate to the USA. The rednecks might like to migrate there as well as they'd love it.

FrankGol “You need some 60s music as accompaniment to this Col. Come out from looking under the bed. Look out the window - everyone else seems to have moved on.”

I would note, the only reason people have been able to, as you say “move on” is because they have a choice which would not be there if the dead hand of communism and the soviet expansionist aspirations had not been checked and eventually reversed by the indemonstrable spirit of libertarianism (lead by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher) (aided by the internal corruption of the soviet system).

I would further note, the Berlin wall and Iron Curtain was designed to stop people escaping from the oppressive controls of the “socialist “ states.

I would further note, there was nothing “democratic” about the “Stasi” (and the other secret police forces) or what they got up to.

I would suggest Solzhenitsyn is a much better authority to how unpleasant are the things which you consider you have “moved on from”.

Just ask any Russian or eastern European émigré, over the age of 40, you meet here in Australia if they still have nightmares of the old country (under 40 are too young to have significant first hand experienced of life in one of “the peoples paradises”)

We learn from history only what we remember of it.

Discarding the lessons of history is to condemn future generations to repeat the same mistakes.

That you consider the influence of Soviet oppression so lightly means one of two things

A you lived in a vacuum through the decades of the cold war.

B you lack the intelligence to process the lessons of history.

Considering those options, I would conclude, no one can live in a vacuum.

Bobbicee “the insane McCarthy years”

In USA how many people were executed under the McCarran Internal Security Act or Taft-Hartley Act,?

I suspect less than the 30 million who died on Stalin’s command or the millions before and since him.
McCarthy was discredited partly by a USA free press (eg Ed Murrow).
No free press in USSR.