many academics, like sidney and beatrice webb, arthur kessler, journalists, harry hopkins and lincoln stefans in our own government fail to see the utter degradation and failure of these regimes and they supported them. and my question is, and i think it's a fair question, why is it that these regimes were supported by journalists and academics who should have known better and had plenty of evidence that things were going wrong there but, nevertheless, continued to support the state mandated socialism? why? why was there this kind of result? >> well, there are a lot of angles on that one, i think. the first thing that came to my mind when i saw that question is that the impact of the great depression on people's thinking in the west. >> uh-huh. >> and the fact that the soviet union under its system seemed to navigate those waters better than the western capitalist systems. you know, they had these statics. john mentioned earlier that the statistics were not always the best and i know that for sure because a very good friend of mine did a lot of work on that subject 50 years ago. but t