It seems that Lenin actually read a lot of physics and spent considerable effort trying to find out the extent to which it was compatible with his philosophy (rather than vice versa).

In their joint book, Sagan notes in the preface that he let stand some of Shlovskii’s remarks to the effect that dialectical materialism requires there to be life on every planet.

The ideology of communism is based on materialism and therefore fully supporting and/or being equivalent to physics in terms of philosophy. China being as an authoritarian regime does not and should not be representing communism at all. It is sad that Fang Lizhi had to suffer from such a regime. However, such things should not be attributed to communism at all, but the regime that currently communism is ‘survived’ somehow paradoxically.

In fact, during the US and the USSR cold war both political parties have done equally harms by teaching wrong ideologies. For example, it is always said that soviet citizens were not allowed to travel abroad. However, that was equally true for americans who could never visit soviet/communistic countries. Since the world divided into two, here the concept “abroad” would not make any sense. For the rest of world soviet/communistic countries should have been referred to as abroad. A clear example is Feynman’s several attempt to get permission to visit the Soviet Union; it was never granted and even he was ignored for many times. So it is sad that the world of politics (but at least not communism) has never been better.

By the way, Phillip, Lenin was a genius and he knew physics very well. His “MATERIALISM and EMPIRIO-CRITICISM” is an example of it, in which he proposed that atoms are not the final unbreakable particles, and that the ladder continues all the way down.

@3. Just a Person,
“…cold war both political parties have done equally harms by teaching wrong ideologies…” There is a huge difference in both kind and severity between the “wrongs” of capitalism and the “wrongs” of the system that led to the Gulag, purges, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and the Stasi’s network of people policing the thoughts of their neighbors.

As for your travel argument, there’s a huge difference between limiting travel to a few countries which are your avowed enemies (especially such travel by a genius national treasure with an insider’s knowlege of the US nuclear development program, like Feynman), and making it illegal or impossible for people to take a weekend trip anywhere (even within your bloc) without explicit govt permission. There were periods in the Soviet system where people couldn’t even choose what apartment to live in, much less move to another city. You either don’t know or choose to ignore an awful lot of important history. And just to run with your Feynman example: he never got to Russia, but he traveled unimpeded to basically every other part of the world, and spent months at a time in Brazil. Ask Andrei Sakharov if the two systems were in any way comparable.

“By the way, Phillip, Lenin was a genius and he knew physics very well. His “MATERIALISM and EMPIRIO-CRITICISM” is an example of it, in which he proposed that atoms are not the final unbreakable particles, and that the ladder continues all the way down.”

I have a (quite good and very thick) book on particle physics which was written and published in the former East Germany. There are no “elementary particles” in the book; they are “microparticles” (translating from the original German in both cases).

One does have to distinguish between people not being able to travel because some country doesn’t let them in and people not being able to travel because their own country does not let them out.