Within just a fraction of that time, however, the military will probably have perfected proxy war in its ultimate form – namely robot war. Swarms of ultra-sophisticated drones will do the actual fighting, while the military stays at home hacking into the enemy’s computer systems.

As for South Africa, I do remember when all right-thinking white folk, especially the young, were expected to desire the Afro-Marxist triumph with passionate intensity. Considered as a stage along the Via Dolorosa of cultural self-abasement, that maybe wasn’t so insignificant.

If…

A rational route to land reform could have come into play at any of these stages to substantially defuse the situation.

Why would anything in China set the stage for collectivization in Ukraine? Talk about a non-sequitur

I didn’t say it necessarily happened in China.

As for the connection between collectivization in Ukraine and China, I think you underestimate the degree of involvement of the Western literati in providing international support for Stalin’s collectivization. Collectivization was an intellectual fad among them and this gave Stalin a lot of slack with which to do his dirty work. Stalin found it necessary to make statements justifying his actions to ideologues and The New York Times (see http://web.archive.org/web/20051106213446/http://ukrweekly.com/Archive/1983/378320.shtml) clearly played a role in supporting these apologetics.

Moreover, in “The politics of American Jews.” In M. Sklare (Ed.). The Jews: Social patterns of an American group. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, Werner Cohn states (pg. 621):

By 1886 the Jewish community in New York had become conspicuous for its support of the third-party (United Labor) candidacy of Henry George, the theoretician of the Single Tax. From then Jewish districts in New York and elsewhere were famous for their radical voting habits. The Lower East Side repeatedly picked as its congressman Meyer London, the only New York Socialist ever to be elected to Congress. And many Socialists went to the State Assembly in Albany from Jewish districts. In the 1917 mayoralty campaign in New York City, the Socialist and anti-war candidacy of Morris Hillquit was supported by the most authoritative voices of the Jewish Lower East Side: The United Hebrew Trades, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and most importantly, the very popular Yiddish Daily Forward. This was the period in which extreme radicals like Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman were giants in the Jewish community, and when almost all the Jewish giants among them Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, and the young Morris R. Cohen were radicals. Even Samuel Gompers, when speaking before Jewish audiences, felt it necessary to use radical phrases.

This hotbed of radicalism was the reason Leon Trotsky made his pilgrimage there prior to departing to hijack the Bolshevik revolution. It is also why NYC financier Jacob Schiff was a major if not the major financial supporter of revolution in Russia. This activist core was crucial to maintaining a political blackout on Stalin’s famine. If there had been an actual implementation of George’s ideas in China — which was a contemporaneous hotspot of radical foment upon which the eyes of the literati were fixed, it would have significantly weakened the unity of this activist core and put pressure on Stalin to pursue a less extreme path to land reform.

It is used by all actors as a substitiution topic. Ahmadinejad loved to do it, why not Obama and Kerry? If Israel and Palestine were transferred to Mars, it would make no difference to MIddle Easter politics – provided the TV continued its reports as usual.