Matthew Miller sentenced to 6 year labour camp in North Korea, other trials expected

I think it's a bit harsh to judge all Marxists past, present and future by Nikita Krushchev - unless we're also judging Republicans by the standards of Richard Nixon.
 
Krushchev and Nixon were both men of their time, I think. Out of the two, Krushchev may have the best of it. Marginally.
 
Liberal in the sense of criminal?

edit: I don't mean to offend you, btw. If you've something personal invested in Nixon, then I apologize. I can only report how Nixon has come across to me.
 
I'm not liberal, so why would I be offended by referring to a liberal as a criminal? :confused:

Nixon was both staunchly anti-communist and properly Keynesian. He wasn't afraid to use government to enforce things like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, and other "big government" programs (like continuing Johnson's "Great Society" aka our modern "welfare" state, such as still remains), because he understood that these things are not anti-capitalist in the slightest, and he wasn't afraid to use the American state, both domestically and abroad, to combat communists, progressive movements, and anti-imperialist projects. He was at the end of the era of such men, like Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman; after him is when neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism begin to take hold, and both sides rush to prove who is more afraid of being political closer to Those Red Bastards, even if both are light-years away.

To be quite frank, Nixon is the last time political liberalism (in the classical sense) actually made any sense. It was forward-thinking, logical, and very much not afraid of its own shadow. It was continuing an economic and political trend begun back in 1847-48. Degeneration and reaction are what follow his administration. Perhaps that is the result of the Oil Shock, but I would need to think more on that to figure out precisely how and why that "shocked" people into irrationality and hysteria, although the Critical Theorist hiding inside me very much wants to attribute to to extended fallout from May 1968...
 
Nixon was a complex character. A racist who genuinely desired the advancement of blacks. A symbol of the establishment who always regarded himself as an outsider. Arrogant and deeply insecure. Ideological but also extremely pragmatic.

And he was also probably the most intelligent American President of the 20th Century.
 
I'm not liberal, so why would I be offended by referring to a liberal as a criminal?

Indeed. My silly mistake. I wasn't thinking straight.

And he was also probably the most intelligent American President of the 20th Century.

This may well be true. For a sufficiently flexible definition of the word intelligent. Or maybe it's just a sad reflection on the general intelligence of American Presidents?
 
Nixon was a complex character. A racist who genuinely desired the advancement of blacks. A symbol of the establishment who always regarded himself as an outsider. Arrogant and deeply insecure. Ideological but also extremely pragmatic.

And he was also probably the most intelligent American President of the 20th Century.

In many ways, he was similar to Winston Churchill, except that Churchill had charisma while Nixon was awkwardness itself. Remove that variable and you had almost the same persona.
 
Come. Nixon wasn't that bad, surely. I mean, certainly he had no charisma (while Churchill had his surgically removed in 1946). And he prolonged the Vietnam war for 3 years for no good reason other than his personal ambition.

I still prefer him over Churchill.
 
Come. Nixon wasn't that bad, surely.

It sometimes is better to forgive misdeeds and move on than dwell on it to the point you can only think 'government sux, Somalia isn't that bad'.

Churchill committed many crimes - Dresden being one example. So did Charlemagne with his massacres of Saxons. In the end, it wasn't what defined them, as the Holocaust defined Hitler, for instance. Winning the Battle of Britain and founding the Carolignian Empire were.
 
Churchill won the Battle of Britain? That's a very strange take on it. I've not heard that one before.
 
This guy... this freakin' guy. Some people are so dumb you can't even feel pity when bad things happen to them.
 
We don't know his history though, do we?

Maybe his back story (born into a family of Wall Street financiers) is so dire that even North Korea looked good.
 
You kidding me? Nixon was the last liberal president, in every sense of the word. He was the end of an era.
Any particular reason you don't extend that to Carter or Ford?

FP said:
I think it's a bit harsh to judge all Marxists past, present and future by Nikita Krushchev - unless we're also judging Republicans by the standards of Richard Nixon.
It is pretty common, at least in American history textbooks, to sort of imply that Kruschev was the "one good communist" whose liberalizing agenda was undone by the hard line Stalinist reactionaries.
EDIT: Not sure where I was going with that....
 
Churchill won the Battle of Britain? That's a very strange take on it. I've not heard that one before.

Perhaps helped win the Battle of Britain would be a better fomulation. All in all, I doubt Attlee would have done as well as Churchill; he just didn't seem to have the war leader bug.
 
Perhaps capitalized on the blitz in order to further his own image, is more how I'd frame it.

And you're right about Attlee, perhaps. He was certainly a successful peacetime leader.

Churchill admittedly had a sense of his own destiny, his own place in history*. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

*Right up to the landslide of 1945.

Still, all this is rather off topic.
 
Nixon was a complex character. A racist who genuinely desired the advancement of blacks. A symbol of the establishment who always regarded himself as an outsider. Arrogant and deeply insecure. Ideological but also extremely pragmatic.

And he was also probably the most intelligent American President of the 20th Century.

So he was the "smartest guys in the room".
 
So he was the "smartest guys in the room".

Well from everything I've read on the man Nixon seems to have been pretty intelligent. Obviously not on the same league as say John Quincy Adams or Thomas Jefferson, but also much above the 20th and 21st Century average.
 
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