I just watched that old Carl Zha / Noah Smith debate (I was doing housework for hours…) and had to suffer through yet another lib morphing into an ultraleftist when discussing China—criticizing everything that’s done there while readily admitting that America also does bad things. On the face of it, this seems like principled opposition—until we apply it to other contexts. If I were a centrist living in Nazi Germany, and if someone said that life for Jews in America is better, I could easily say, factually, that life for Jews may be hard in Germany, but it’s no picnic in America, either. Whom does this kind of argument serve? All it does is deflate criticism of the status quo. It’s actually just an insidious and underhanded method of maintaining the status quo. “Things in the imperial core may suck, but it’s impossible for anyone to do better, so you might as well make the best of it.”

Operation Osoaviakhim

From the Wikipedia article:

Between midnight and 3am, when everybody was asleep. They knew exactly where I lived, first of all: a few days before I was captured, a fellow came. They had a key – they had everything to the apartment, to the door. There was one interpreter who told me [in German]: "Get up! You are being mobilized to work in Russia", and there were about half a dozen soldiers with machine guns, who surrounded me. When I wanted to get to the toilet, they checked it out first to make sure there was no escape hatch. It was a very tight operation. They did that with every family. Many families came, while I was alone.

lol

These are good points but I have yet to meet an actual anti-communist liberal who's read history. I think they're few and far between.