It's worth pointing out that both groups, also, depend on scrambling to power over a bloodbath of political "enemies" who are closer, rather than further away, from their own expressed political position. This has a long tradition on the left (it may also apply on the right, but I haven't studied it as closely). Rather like the anecdote of the young MP who referred excitedly to the group on the opposing benches as "the Enemy". "No," said the older MP who was showing him the ropes, "they are merely Her Majesty's loyal opposition. " He turned round and surveyed the Government benches. "Those are the enemy."

And it goes back a long way. Look at how rude Engels was about Lascelles, compared to the amused tolerance tinged with respect for a smart operator he afforded to Disraeli!

I had a very interesting talk about Chavez (whom I hadn't realised was pronouced as though he was a prominent member of the Welsh scrum) with an English ex-pat in Venezuala over a game of pool in the basement bar of the FRY (their table was so much better than the ones I was playing on at the T&T bash, which was in a cavernous nightclub with exterior decking somewhere in the Queen's Quay area, which were even worse than the one at the Walt Disney Swan and Dolphin) in which he seemed both like an old-style Marxist-Leninist cult-of-personality type and like Tony Blair.