Sorry, I found it necessary to drop out of the discussion. Whilst there is a lot I could say in response to Col's polemic against socialism in general I think he really should get back to addressing the points concerning the Vietnam War, including those made in my posts.

I was wondering where socialism and British political history was mentioned in the article. Then I realised that comrade Col Rouge was yet to start Art School in the UK, perhaps he was dreaming of being another Peter Partridge. Unlike Americans and Australians of the time, he actually didn't have the Tet Offensive fought on his TV screen in the nightly news and he wasn't being forced to swallow the Domino Theory. More importantly his hide wasn't on the line in the conscription ballot - the thought of slogging through the jungle in an unwinnable war focused young men's political awareness wonderfully.

Passy wrote on Wednesday 13 December: "You cannot impose democracy from the outside."

In fact, the Chapter in Naomi Klein's "The shock doctrine" dealing with the invasion of Iraq, reveals that democracy was beginning to work in Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. Iraq could have become a secular democracy. I don't think that this would have justified the horrors of invasion, but at least the story would have had a somewhat happier ending.

However, democracy was suppressed by the occupying administration when they realised that it would get in the way of their plans to privatise Iraqi government assets and sack large numbers of Iraq's pubic servants and variously impoverish the whole nation. So, possibly hundreds of thousands more have died to allow the likes of Halliburton to profit at the expense of Iraqis and the US taxpayer

Thanks Daggett

I was actually doubting my own comment when thinking about Japan. For ten years US troops imposed their rule on japan after the war. Yet Jaan is a democracy of sorts.

So maybe there is an example that contradicts my comment.

In terms of Iraq I was more thinking that it was up to the Iraqi people to overthrow their dictator and establish democracy. Certainly Eastern Europe is a good example of that, with some of the countries involved being more or less democracies.

Passy,

You're welcome.

I think the Marxist approach of seeing every capitalist society as being equally bad has been a serious mistake. Clearly European capitalist societies such as Sweden, France and Norway have a lot going for them in comparison to Anglophone countries under the grip of the extreme free market agenda.

And the US, under new-Deal economic policies had a lot going for it in comparison to what it became under Reagan and his successors.

In Iraq, a Marshall plan and democracy, even under US occupation, would have been vastly preferable to the abolition of democracy and the extreme free-market anti-Marshall plan that was imposed by the US administration.

Had this happened, most of the problems we see in Iraq now would not exist, and it would have demonstrated that even an imperialist capitalist country like the US could indeed liberate a country like Iraq from a dictatorship, even though that outcome was far less likely than what actually did occur.

Of course, I strongly believe it was still correct to oppose the war. However, once Iraq had been occupied if the anti-war movement had focussed on trying to make the US live up to its rhetoric about wanting to bring democracy and prosperity to Iraq, it may have been possible to thwart some of the plans by Rumsfeld and the neo-cons to ransack the country.

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In regard to East European countries, the baby was thrown out with the bath water. The publicly owned enterprises and utilities were worth preserving as such even if the regimes were not. it seems to me that much the left in these countries was so fixated on the evil of Stalinist rule that they were blind to the plans of local and international capitalists to steal those assets from the people of those countries.

In the chapter on Russia, it is shown that Yeltsin was a dictator little better than Pinochet as a number of his proponents openly acknowledged.

Daggett.

The problem is that the invasion of Iraq was never about democracy. It was in part about showing China that militarily the US was still the biggest and best and that it would use that military superiority if necessary to support its continuing economic dominance. In this regard it has been an utter failure for US imperialism, so they continue to look for other targets - Afghanistan, Iran, even Venezuela. Unfortunately none of them are or will be the pushovers the US imagined or imagines.

Even if it was about democracy, a democracy born of invasion and imposed on the population (perhaps against their will) is not democracy. Democracy can I think only come from the oppressed themselves. As Marx wrote the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class.Ttransfer that to national struggles against dictators or for independence and the same logic seems to apply. It is the struggle itself which liberates people.

DAVID_Boaz says about the reference to gallows that it means hanging people in violence. I think you will find the reference is really to the historical gallows - the dustbin of history if you like.

DAVID_Boaz may also be misinterpreting the idea about the road the Jerusalem. That is a reference to the liberation of Palestine, a liberation for both Palestinians and Israelis. It is not a reference to a shared capital which accepts the two state solution.

I agree that we are a long way from John's vision. However the unrest in Cairo at the moment is class based. Whether it increases, and whether it continues in a working class direction or is sidetracked by the islamists, who knows? I suspect it is but one of many skirmishes before a bigger battle. We shall see.

As to democracy and Vietnam, it is interesting that the US cruelled the 1956 elections because they knew the result would be a landslide win for Ho Chi Minh. Almost twenty years later and millions dead the nationalists (parading through Stalinism as socialists) won the victory the US denied them in 1956.