Communism...

... Bolshevism, Maoism, Marxist-Leninism, call it what you want, was/is unspeakably inhuman.

Now, I appreciate that isn't news to most people, but I came across something today that finally confirmed it (irony there). If, as some people still do, we put on one side mass murder on an industrial scale, the most complete totalitarian societies ever seen (Stalin easily beats Adolf on that), genocidal policies, and deliberately induced famines, we still have the sort of thing that the Chinese-British author, Jung Chang, mentions in an interview in today's Daily Telegraph magazine:

'My younger brother Jin-ming loved collecting stamps as a child, but under Mao people weren't allowed to collect as it was seen as bourgeois'.

 

'I remember walking in Hyde Park for the first time. Gardening had been banned in China because it was considered bourgeois.'

 

 



Yet I have known highly educated, well-off, members of western societies happily defend Mao and Maoism.

 

But, back in the land of the sane:

 

The Sea Hurricane makes progress. The cockpit is pretty reasonable out of the box, and includes a decal for the dashboard. But the cockpit walls are totally bare, and the Hurricane cockpit was built inside a pretty prominent tubular framework. So, I tried to deal with both issues by adding in half-round section plastic strip the approximation of the frame. It should look ok once the fuselage is closed up.

The great toy soldier cabinet move continues, and today's haul includes these:

Holger Erickson (from Spencer Smith) in imagi-nation, sort of Seven Years War rig out. All shiny and toy-soldierly.

And, some Fench Resistance doing their best to look like mean hombres:

With Ulster Home Guard in 1940, in their unique black uniforms (I mean unique in the UK, of course).

 

Finally, the view out of my downstairs room window today:

 

Mao wouldn't have liked it.