Luckily I’ve grown to see the ‘Was a great man except for all the bad things he did’ trash for what it is: a load of garbage.

Oh sure Stalin may have destroyed some very evil people that got in his way to power, but he murdered millions more innocent people for the same reason.

we also have in our history a “foreigner” that was more patriot that the king of France, Napoleon

also among our immigrants, those who access to key administration positions, work with more zeal than the nationals, included in police !

It is like they want to prove that they are more french than the French

Too funny…….I lived in the Czech Republic in the mid 1990′s. More than once, I heard the story about the year centralized economic planning failed in the most miserable way. Not enough toilet paper.

Brilliant!

The Spanish Inquisition began even under the Caliphate.
The muslim Caliphate ruled the Iberian penninsula with a bloody and ruthless hand for EIGHT CENTURIES.

The Spanish (to this day culturally afflicted) merely continued the boorish Moorish practices during the interregnum in which Rome gained power first, then shared it with the rise of the Castille/Aragon axis.

All very complex I’m sure, but the bottom line is this: the Inquisition reflects the Muslim stamp of 8 centuries on what, even today, is a nation of Dhimmis.

And the U.S. relations with Spain AND Latin America need to account for its legacy in this century.

Among liberals, here and there, you find that Stalin isn’t quite the evil villain that he is with some other groups. I can still remember, years ago, reading a short review of Dmitri Volkogonov’s bio of Stalin in Foreign Affairs. The review stated that it should be read in conjunction with a more “balanced” book by a Western writer, because it was too harsh on Stalin. Imagine that…the book was harsh on Stalin. After all, it was Volkogonov’s fellow citizens, his ancestors’ neighbors, who were killed, and he was emotional about it. American, or Western, writers, were more apt to be objective, and weigh mass murder against social change and the advances he supposedly made, or at least was aiming at.

And last: ER White: I went to the USSR when I was 17 or so, during the Carter administration. I have similar memories: a guy trying to buy basically all of my clothes, down to my watch; a friend trying to sell his clothes, and having the buyer flash a badge at him to scare him off; going to the Bolshoi performing in the Russian legislature building; eating delicious vanilla ice cream (that was the only flavor they had) on the street that we bought from a vendor; trying to find the rest of my group by talking German with a very bemused doorman at the hotel, who had probably last used *his* German in 1945; and of course watching construction workers next door to our hotel, in a partially constructed building, destroy pane after pane of glass intended for windows. It was truly a strange place. We did get to see Lenin, though; he looked better than Keith Richards does now, and Keith is supposedly still alive!