Anonymous Quotes
The difference between eastern Europe and the United States is that the United States still has a Communist party.
Popular joke in Czechoslovakia, 1990
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
who worked with the Communists. The Communists were to Flip-flop again when Russia needed arms and assistance to fight Hitler when the pact broke down. See {595773}
The Red Scare had already reached most conservatives and Truman and most others had not yet been affected by the fear of Communism that so many people had through the 1970s.
Some on the extreme left of the Labor Party at the time were extolling Soviet Russia while denigrating the United States. Crossman, an avid socialist thought that was absurd and said so at every opportunity. The pro Soviet wing of the Labour party got smaller and smaller. He and many others thought that Russian Communism was a very poor implementation of socialist ideas.
The Italian Communists were culturally and ideologically very different from the Russian Communists. The Italian view was a more nationalistic one and was closer to a Socialist Democracy than a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Much more tolerant of diversity and not as ideological. See {637829} as a big example of the difference. Yet this was still in the midst of the Red Scare in America and some other areas of the West. After WWII, the CIA had secretly spent millions to get Italians to vote for the non-Communist candidates and helped organize Italian anti-Communist politicians who didn’t want the Communists to alter the Italian government to reflect any Communist or Socialist ideas. Meanwhile, the Italian party was under great pressure from Russia and some of the other Communist satellite countries to adopt a hardline revolutionary communist programs. Berlinquer and other Italian Communist leaders had many misgivings about Russian style Communism and they had to play off one side against the other for years.
