<Pedantic alert>

I.F. Stone  "If Communists are some supernatural breed of men, led by diabolic master minds in that distant Kremlin, engaged in a Satanic conspiracy to take over the world and enslave all mankind - and this is the thesis endliessly propounded by American liberals and conservaties alike...."

Well fuck me running - I don't know if I believe in Satan, but yes, Stalin killed say 30 million over 3 decades in power, and his power split with Hitler in Poland and his takeover of almost all East Europe counts as "enslave mankind", even if not "all".

What the fuck do you want me to say? This was August 1954, 14 years after Darkness at Noon, 5 years after the Communist takeover of China (though 4 years before the disastrous Great Leap Forward) and after the diabolical Korean War with Chinese & Russian invasion that we barely pulled a draw out of.

Yes, I.F. Stone was an asshole and a holocaust denier, even if not the exact holocaust people usually mean.

You don't have to admire McCarthy to not take a pollyannish view towards Stalin & Russian Communism among several shitty variants.

But Glenn Greenwald is living in 2017, not 1954, so presumably he can use 60+ years of history to draw more than a daft brainfart at the ensuing time and appreciation of how nasty a piece of work the Communists were.

All the "Glennzilla" can muster is that Putinesque Russians aren't really Communists, which, bravo bravo, they're really nasty authoritarian quasi-Czars/crony capitalist bullies with large armies and weapons, spies and subterfuge. The KGB is still at work, but not as much surveillance and human rights violations and torture as the 1984-ish Soviet state entailed, but certainly enough atrocity at least in the Chechnyan phase to express horror. Now it's more a heavy-handed petrol bully with significantly more overreach and resort to law & order than the US, but at least not so far a direct threat to mankind everywhere, as was the case in I.F. Stone's time and long after.

The difference with Germany is that they've largely stopped acting like assholes, including the official government, and have even apologized and paid $billions and $billions in reparations, among other acts of penance. Russia, not at all. They're still hanging onto Kaliningrad/Konigsberg and the Kyril Islands, among their other residiual displays of wanton imperialism.

<pedantic alert over>

<oops, more pedanticism>

I.F. Stone writes re: @the impossibility of dealing with the Russians, the wickedness of recognizing the Chinese, the danger in permitting East-West trade..., the wickedness of those who speak of co-existence. " "If these are the assumptions of our national policy, how avoid the Syngman Rhee logic which flows from them? Is it not better to fight now? Will not the struggle be worse the longer it is delayed?"

Arguably we learned all that, and containment was likely much better than a full-out war with both major Communist states, which we might quite possibly have lost in a direct confrontation combining large armies, nuclear & chemical weapons, guerrilla warfare and economic disruption. As it is, after a near rout, we pulled out the status quo in Korea, had a brief flirtation with mutual self-destruction over Cuba, fought the holding-pattern proxy war in Vietnam for a decade and got them finally stuck in Afghanistan, even as East Europe largely withered on the vine. China being less intent on exporting revolution after a while proved more amenable to normalcy via trade. Again, this is basic history - I.F. Stone may not have been able to predict the future, but certainly Greenwald should be able to predict the past.

Yes, Kruschev was better than Stalin, Brezhnev perhaps worse but dragged the empire down, Gorbachev was a refreshing sea-change, Yeltsin was a buffoon that largely didn't help the country adapt to new democracy, and Putin's a throwback combination of economic oligarchy, Tsardom and state police. We've tried to do trade with Russia - overall easier to deal with China. Russia of today is overall nothing compared to yesterday, and thus containing their over-the-top behavior and worst excesses has been successful. Few pretend that it's utterly horrid, but there's enough deplorable behavior to keep up the pressure. Co-existence is more or less what we *do* have today, but the continual returns to past behavior, such as destruction of Chechnya and the unilateral annexation of Crimea, along with targeted assassinations and economic blackmail over former vassal states, make it still not ideal for normalized relations.

<extra dollop of pedanticism over>