Can we move this thread to com-priv only? I got enough to read. Or at least maybe you could discuss primatology, which at least I find interesting. Thanks, Selina

On Wed, 15 Jan 1997, Vadim Antonov wrote:

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Their "partnership" with censors of a communist regime is repugnant. Using the modern technology to build a giant brainwashing machine is very scary.

Since you are a person that saw up-front and close the democratizing effects of a telecommunications network on the democratization of a communist country, I find this a rather surprising statement.

The network will let more Chinese citizens communicate with each other than ever before. And I strongly expect that there will be dozens of gateways between this "intranet" and China's Internet providers.

You, of all people, should realize that withholding commnications technology sterngthens and isolates communist regimes. But hooking them into the global capitalist economy at the state level will eventually pay dividends by creating a bourgeois class (the educated middle class) which will force democratization to occur.

Not everybody follows the U.S. model of democracy, for instance Canada does not. But that doesn't mean we aren't free and it doesn't mean we aren't happy.

Have you changed from a Soviet imperialist into an American imperialist? Don't you realize that parallelism can be exploited in politics as well as in routing? Create millions of small opportunities for Chinese people to share information and they will do the rest.

Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-250-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com