something not about the novel

This is primarily a blog devoted to the novel,"A Neurotic in an Exotic Land."

However, it may occasionally attract the attention of readers with an interest in Central

or Eastern Europe.

For them, it might be of interest to note the claim that the suffering of people under the so-called Communist regimes--while real, and even cruel--was not as bad as that endured by people in Central and South America. Put more bluntly, the USSR was a more benign master than the USA--and by saying that I do not endorse masters or power politics. Here is the source of this idea:

It is not seriously in question, as John Coatsworth writes in the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War, that from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.” Among the executed were many religious martyrs, and there were mass slaughters as well, consistently supported or initiated by Washington.

--Noam Chomsky, "The Responsibilityof Intellectuals, Redux", Boston Review

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.5/noam_chomsky_responsibility_of_intellectuals_redux.php