> I don’t want to take any side. It’s just that I really don’t believe in absolutes. Do you believe that absolutely? On a more serious note, how can you lump

> I don’t want to take any side. It’s just that I really don’t believe in absolutes. Do you believe that absolutely? On a more serious note, how can you lump the Soviets (and socialist regimes like the CCP) with everything else? It's like conversing with someone who, having been told that Bob murdered Alice, responds by saying that everyone makes mistakes and that, on a good day, Bob could be a nice guy. Communist regimes were at a whole different level of evil. The sheer number of people murdered, the social and cultural destruction and dysfunction it wrought, the deeply warped wordlview it imposed through the tyrannical apparatus of the almighty and pervasive state. The list goes on. I guess dissidents were just being ungrateful, eh? They didn't appreciate the good parts! I will agree that Americans and others should engage in more self-criticism because American culture and its establishment are degenerate and share some eerie similarities with their Soviet counterparts. But this sort of whataboutism doesn't dismiss the glaring truth about the Soviet regime. For someone who says he doesn't believe in "absolutes", you basically demonstrated that you actually do. We're talking about different magnitudes and variety of evil here. People made lasting friendships in concentration camps and gulags, they even found their calling in those awful places[0] in a kind of metaphor for life in general, but no one would say "Eh, you know, it wasn't so bad. There were some good things in those gulags. And after all, American public schools are traumatic and soul-destroying, so..." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Ciszek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Ciszek