Who has the better understanding of the differences between communism and socialism ?
I guess the Americans haven’t experienced even the benign ‘socialism’ as practised here in the UK during the early periods of government by our Labour Party. It would seem their confusion stems from post WW2 US propaganda regarding the military threat emanating from the Eastern Bloc and what turned out to be the mistakenly, but at the time real, perceived threat of WW3. It was quite easy for the so-called free-European countries to take on board this fear especially given the threatening behaviour of the then East Germany along their common border with West Germany & also in the divided city of Berlin. However, the political history of Western Europe shows Communism being widely experimented with from its embryonic stage and mainly, due to its lack of support, its weakness within this environment was accepted as a ‘non-threatening’ political entity. Accepting this premise, many western Communists, post 1917, turned their attention to reforming and watering down their political dogma. O
