Communism

            Contrary to the popular belief of the average American, Communism is not "evil". First of all let's explore where this popular idea came from. After the revolution in Russia in 1917 (when the Soviets gained power from the cruel Czars) the control of power in Russia was taken from the slim minority by the workers (for which Communism freed) to make life better and to keep the terrors of WWI from happening again. When we were attempting to stop Japanese aggression in China, Stalin and his comrades were not deemed to be "evil", at least not when wee needed his help. In fact, we decided not to fight the Germans from the east when cities such as Stalingrad were being destroyed, so if anything the Soviets have the right to distrust us. When we discovered that the soviets had detonated an atom bomb in 1949 we immediately branded them as evil spies when actually they were just fulfilling their greatest need for defense in the new age of technology. Had the Soviets built the first A-Bomb we would have done exactly what they had done, used our vast spy network to catch up to the Soviets (as we did after Sputnik). We (as did they) used the excuse of national defense to rationalize the arms build up of the Cold War. The Children of America were not taught that the Soviets were "evil", they were simply not told anything about Communism. People fear the unknown, and to teach that Communism was evil would be a too obvious use of propaganda. Ask anything about the Soviet Union and Communism to someone who grew up in the 1960s, you will invariably get an answer which is vaguely about government ownership of businesses and an Evil dictator. It was not until the early 1990s when the U.S.S.R. fell that people began to talk more about Communism, and even now it is still hidden in a shadow of the unknown. Communism vs. Democracy, the greatest psychological war the human race has ever faced (almost bringing the species to extinction), and it gets less than 50 pages in a 900 page American History book.