Against forgetting

The day that Russia's President, Dmitri Medvedev, cautions against amnesia of Joseph Stalin's huge crimes is a day I can agree with him.

My own caution would go further. It was the economic failures of capitalism in the first 30 years of the 20th century that gave rise to Hitler and Stalin, helped on by the social and political failures of royalism. Those failures put us in America, along with our friends in Europe and around the world, in the terrible position of having to choose to ally ourselves with Stalin.

That's why the stakes have been so high in prevention of another depression. That's why the costs in debt were bearable.

We have spent the past 30 years tearing down the bulwarks we had built to keep capitalism's dynamic energy safe. Now is time to build those guide-rails back again.