General Election 2010

but before you do just clarify your sentence because it could be read that the communists might have habitually murdered, raped and tortured their opponents (and their opponents' children) but they didn't use techniques and weapons provided by the U.S.

or it could mean that they did murder , rape etc etc but not habitually.

or do you mean that communists don't do those things but the U.S. sponsored right wing latin american governments that did and then the right wing capitalist media failed to report it to us , rather preferring to tell us lies about communist states?

It was really a point about perspective. The horrible tribulations and injustices suffered by the people of East Europe are well known to us and the figures who led the resistance to Soviet domination are well known. But the even more - and by a wide margin - horrible tribulations and injustices suffered by the people of central America are not. In the 60s, 70s and 80s thens of thousands of people 'disappeared' or were murdered and tortured in those countries. This did not happen in the Eastern Bloc. That is not in any way to defend the Soviet Union (though the way these discussions always go it is sadly necessary to point that out). It is simply to ask why one set of crimes are less well known? Perhaps because one set of crimes were carried out by our official enemies and the other by the US?
Reagan's responsibility, for example, for the horrors inflicted upon Latin America is every bit as great and direct as any Soviet leader's responsibility for what happened in Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia. The difference is those Soviet leaders are now regarded, rightly, as criminals and Reagan has an airport named after him.