don't you have some NWO conspiracies to peddle??

I am not a Stalinist. That, however, does not change the fact that the Soviet Union was invited into Afghanistan to deal with the CIA's misogynist killers. Historic truth is historic truth. I think the following is the writing I did that Ron refers to. It was to show how absurd a comparison that was made between Che and Bin Laden was:

Unlike Bin Laden, Che did not target innocent people. In addition, Che was strongly in favor of women's rights, science, the arts, and education. Bin Laden is against all of these things.

Bin Laden the misogynist killer was on the CIA payroll, well known for its disregard for human life. Che was firmly opposed to the evils of the CIA.

The clerical fascists of the Taliban would have never come to power without massive U.S. military aid to the organization they came out of, the Mujahideen with Bin Laden. They were put in power with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid and CIA training.

This massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was in opposition to a revolutionary Afghani government led by the PDPA that came to power in 1978 on issues of promoting women's rights and land reform. Literacy campaigns began teaching the poor and women how to read and write.

As early as 1979 the CIA was involved in trying to topple this progressive left nationalist government.

Religious fanatics and wealthy defenders of the old feudal system came together in a terrorist organization called the Mujahideen. With massive assistance from the CIA these fanatical cutthroats waged a war that included murdering women for teaching little girls how to read and write and throwing acid into the faces of women who had become liberated from the veil.

Also included in this holy war against women and literacy were up to 100,000 religious fanatics from other countries who joined with the CIA's Mujahideen. To do this, the CIA directly recruited these foreign fighters and also worked with Islamic groups such as Hamas.

Later, to stop this massive foreign intervention, at the invitation of the Afghani government, Soviet troops moved in to try to stop the CIA's Mujahideen.

U.S. intervention devastated Afghanistan with war and put the worst possible elements in power.

The Red Army was fighting a just cause in Afghanistan while the CIA was giving billions of dollars in military aid to misogynist killers.

Today the pundits of capitalism want to justify U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in the context of the cold war as the U.S. carries out it's next set of atrocities in the country.

A comparison between Afghanistan and neighboring Soviet Central Asia is helpful in seeing the potential modernizing influence of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. In 1980 (before the PDPA came to power) Afghanistan had an illiteracy rate of 90% while Soviet Uzbekistan had a literacy rate on par with the United States. The average life expectancy was 40 in Afghanistan while Uzbekistan's was 70. Afghanistan had one doctor for every 20,000 people while Uzbekistan had one doctor per 380 people.

The status of women in Soviet Central Asia was better than anywhere in the Islamic world. This was reflected in government with 18 percent of all judges and 45 percent of legislative members from the village level being women in Uzbekistan.

The role of the PDPA, with the help of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan had great potential in helping advance the country. Instead, the victory of CIA financed counter-revolution plunged the country backwards.

While the Soviet model did not live up to the potential of a socialist society with real workers democracy, the Soviet Union did, however, make advances that would have been impossible under their capitalist-feudalist system before the 1917 revolution. Today as a result of Yeltsin's capitalist counter-revolution Uzbekistan is falling to the level of Afghanistan. We should not adopt the mistakes of the Soviet Union in the fight against capitalism, but it is also important to reassess what was reality in Afghanistan and what was cold war propaganda.

Ronald Reagan posed in a portrait with the Mujahideen calling them the moral equivalents of the founding fathers. The pundits of capitalism want to simply dismiss this as justified in the fight against communism, but we should never forget the cold war holocaust that was perpetrated in our names by the United States government. In the 1980's alone U.S. support, from Democrats and Republicans alike, to the death squad governments of El Salvador and Guatemala; to the contras of Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan; to the racist governments of South Africa and Israel; to the genocidal governments of Indonesia in East Timor and Iraq and Turkey in Kurdistan; to U.S. invasions of Granada and Panama; the U.S. murdered millions and created misery throughout the world.

Unfortunately, the billions of dollars provided by the U.S. government succeeded in putting the Mujahideen and the Taliban in power. The Mujahideen / Taliban counter-revolution put women back under the veil and stripped women of the right to work, education, and movement in public without a male relative for escort. Women have been beaten in public. Women have been stoned to death for adultery and other so-called crimes against Islam. Starving widows have been buried alive.

Whole villages with people of differing ethnicities and Islamic beliefs have been rounded up and murdered. Homosexuals have been executed for being homosexual. Hindus have been forced to wear insignia showing they are not Muslim. Atheists have been executed for being atheists. Foreign aid workers have been being tried for spreading Christianity. Dancing was not allowed and irreplaceable ancient art has been destroyed.

These were the people the United States put in power in Afghanistan.

The United States continued to support the Taliban up to the year 2001. That year alone the Taliban received more than $120 million in U.S. aid. This means, if indeed it was Osama bin Laden who destroyed the World Trade Center, that this was possibly done with U.S. tax dollars paying for the operation. In any event there is no question as to who put the Taliban in power. By proxy or by Frankenstein Monster the U.S. government is responsible for the September 11th attack. In addition, the U.S. government is responsible for decades of war and oppression against the Afghani people.

Che, on the other hand, is responsible for liberating Cuba from the bloody U.S. backed Batista dictatorship. This, among other things, brought land reform, free access to good healthcare, education for kids even in the most remote rural areas, free education through the university levels, an elimination of hunger, an end to legal discrimination and segregation that existed against Blacks, women’s rights including birth control and free abortion on demand, environmental policies that the World Wildlife Fund says are the only passing policies on global warming in the world, and a promotion of culture.

Che, in fact, is the opposite of Bin Laden.