Sugarcoating Socialism

I had an interesting conversation yesterday. After church, a group of us went to lunch and one man, let's call him Leo, asked me what I do. So after I explained my research, he boiled it down to a few keywords, healthcare, migration, 21^st century…to which I added "and post-socialism." Which led him to question my use of the word "socialism" instead of communism. I explained that we use them essentially as synonyms, although that we know – "we" meaning in academia – that although there is a difference that we are talking about the same time period. To which he asked why we don't just call a spade a spade? And I just said that I use a variety of terms, including post-socialism, -communism, -Soviet, -Cold War, -1989…and that it's really about a time period. He pauses and says "okay, you're an anthropologist…I'm just trying to figure out who would want to sugarcoat this." At this point, I was getting a little offended and said "we do not sugarcoat it." I tried to explain that first, we weren't sugarcoating anything and that other people in fields such as history, economics, political science, sociology, etc use the term post-socialism. That the term is more neutral. That many of our organizations and journals use "socialism" rather than "communism." That in my view, we can all agree that these governments were socialist, especially when they called themselves socialist republics, they were run by the socialist parties, etc. But that not everyone agrees that we can use the term communism because true communism was never met. He agreed that he had heard that argument before but he seemed to want to put it in the same category that I would put comments that the Holocaust never happened or that the 1969 Moon landing took place in a Hollywood backlot. I was basically trying to make the claim that we use a neutral term because we are scientists but he just kept accusing me – and I'm not overreacting because his tone and words indicated this – of belittling the terror and trauma that people went through during the Soviet era (he liked the term post-Soviet era). He also said that by using "socialism" that we are painting the Western socialist with the same brush – to which I countered that it's about context and that any educated person knows (yes, I was getting a little catty here) that we don't mean the same type of socialism when we talk about the former Eastern Bloc, or even China or Cuba, that we do about France or Sweden. But that I understand how that word can be used as a boogeyman, like it has recently in our own Congress while debating the bailouts. I guess what bothered me about this conversation was that I felt that I could not influence him to see my way and if not was it my fault? That at the end of the conversation he seemed to think that what I do is try to erase the bad times…Was I not making my argument strong enough? Or was it him? Oh, and I forgot to mention that this is an American. I believe his wife is Czech. I know that words have power. And we have discussed the use of terminology in our classes. So, maybe this conversation helped me to justify to myself why I lean towards certain terms and not others.