Your not talking at one of those campus faculty parties where the winner of the debate is the one who can blow the most smoke out of his ass. I was wondering how long it would take for an apologist to start dropping fog terms like "dialectic materialism" into the mix, not to mention the "subjective" view of objective facts, a wonderful concept that eventually leads to such terms as "Bourgeois science" and, in more recent years, "white man's math."

Am I to be accused of making a value judgment when I condemn the murder of over eighty million people on the altar of Karl Marx?

I was still in college when I heard that pathetic excuse about "communism works. It's just that nobody has done it right." I didn't buy it then either.

The fact is that a "classless" society, i.e. one where no one is any better than anyone else or succeeds more than anyone else, is not possible if you are working with human beings. Try ants.

Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Castro, and the rest are not people who came in and "messed up" Marxism. They are the inevitable result of Marxism.

Some other facts:

- From Jerry Pournelle:

Let me point out a curious phenomenon. From before Marx began to publish to the death of Hitler, more than 100 years, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist. EVERYONE. There are no known exceptions. Since 1945 we have had some tribal genocides and ethnic cleansing, but even so, the mass murderers have all been elitist socialists. All of them.

I myself would extend this some distance past the death of Hitler to modern times, to encompass such worthies as Pol Pot.

- As for your excuse that Marxism just hasn't been applied to the "right" culture or economic system: Every single government that has claimed to be Marxist has resulted in oppressive totalitarian regimes. This is across a wide spectrum of cultures, backgrounds, economic conditions, availability of resources, etc.

Cuba, North Korea, China, Cambodia, East Germany, and the vast variety of states in the Soviet Union couldn't be more different from each other in these terms. Yet all ended up as poverty-ridden, murderous dictatorships.

Yet again and again, someone pops up with socialist and communist solutions and says, like Bullwinkle trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat, "This time for sure!" Might be worth remembering that one definition of insanity.

Might I suggest a reading of the book "The Black Book of Communism?" Available at Amazon.

Why in the name of everything sane are you defending this crap?? You've got to know you are sawing off the branch you are sitting on. If you are an academic, in an academic environment, you could at least claim self-defense, since speaking ill of Marx at a university is kissing your career goodbye, but that doesn't apply here.