Via Edward Maltby How to explain Marxism to a Financial Times reader Similarly, take the idea/l of democracy, you wouldn't blame it for the 20th century horrors that wrecked Europe. Those were the consequences of the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism. Or, in a more subtle way, they were the "dark side" of capitalist democracy, not of the ideal of democracy per se. In wikepedia entries on the nature of former Eastern European regimes, pervasive and unhelpful conflation of "socialism", "communism" and "Stalinism" is abound. Poland, for example, according to wikipedia, was socialist before 1990.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51