"Here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions."
- Sir Terry Pratchett, 'Night Watch''

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly8TD0fKcvs

Could someone please explain to me how and why a US President
could take the word of a former KGB officer, now a Russian
dictator, over his own Secret Service appointees and bend
over backwards, with a wink and a nudge in humouring the
man? Does the US President not realise who he's dealing with?

The American Revolution was fought to establish a man's right to
liberty, and to restrain the power of his rulers. The American
Revolution thus created a concept of law which was, and is,
foreign to the system resulting from the Bolshevik Revolution
in communist controlled lands. The distinction is one between
freedom, liberty, and the right to the pursuit of happiness as
opposed to the interest, control, and domination of the state
over the individual. Lenin's perception of law is so
repulsive to the legal traditions of Western democracies, that
they have long been complacent in the belief that the specter
of Lenin's concept of law was confined to the sphere of
communist influence and control.

The conceptual differences between democratic legal traditions
and totalitarian communist systems which use law as a political
weapon are so great, that it is inconceivable that the two
systems would work for their mutual benefit in any matter
involving international political issues and human rights.

Yet, the US President has acquiesced to accept the words of
the Russian leader over his own Secret Service Agencies.

We need to ask - Why?

Dear Foxy,

Putin is trained as a KGB. Trump is not a cagy anything. He is a vulgar orange oaf and not a vulgar boatman. He has his own unintelligent agency.

Dear mhaze,

The Romanovs were of a ruling class which butchered their way through any Russians who got in their way. British Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald calling the Tsar a "blood-stained creature and a common murderer".

The pogroms against the Jews as well as a brutal suppression of the 1905 revolution are a couple of standouts in a pretty obnoxious period.

He can be likened to Gaddafi in a number of ways. Gaddafi's family were bombed resulting in the deaths of family members including a 2 year old daughter. When he was captured Gaddafi was sodomised with a bayonet before being shot and left to die over several hours. A horrific end to a regime.

In neither instance is the brutality displayed justifiable. It lessens us all.

That the Bolsheviks and their adoption of a warped form of communism were determined to match the French revolutionaries in their brutality can not be excused but it shouldn't taint what the gift socialism has bestowed on our modern nations.

Your link is tenuous at best.

Foxy,
Remember Trump's a compulsive liar, so we can't be sure he really did take Putin's word for it.

But if he did, it may be because the US secret service does have a track record of unreliability (remember the Iraq WMDs?) and Pissgate demonstrated incontrovertibly to him that so called intelligence can be nothing of the kind.

//In these days when an apparently large number of younger folk are warming to these socialist ideals while remaining utterly ignorant of what actual happens after the revolution//

So... like the Socialist ideals that people warmed to after the 2nd World War in Britain, resulting in the creation of NHS?

Socialism doesn't always have to involve revolutions. Sounds like you've been listening to the wrong people. Here's a clue on how to spot the wrong people: they'll be the ones wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. Those guys are twats, don't listen to them.

But don't write off Socialism either. It works quite well, and I wouldn't trade Medicare (our poor man's version of the NHS) for all the tea in China.