A tale of the true communism

[htpcl]

Lo, dear history revisionists fans of the objective truth! It's your fave provider of alternate history parables anecdotal experiences speaking again. See, today is "an" historic day in the... ehm, history of my tiny country situated on the fringe between Europe and Asia. Btw Monday was another historic day too. All in all, seems like this week is

Comments

[reality_hammer]

You have to admire the way the former USSR and its clients state have embraced free markets.

The best pr0n now comes from there!

Good thing Putin keeps wasting money on the Soviet Russian military. It keeps them from out-Chinaing China.

As for the American tendency to rail against socialism in all its forms: we've learned from the best (worst?). You don't wait until you have a Hitler or Stalin or even a Mussolini or Trotsky or [insert French guy]. By then it is too late to point out the dead-end.

So you start when people use euphemisms like "distribute wealth" and "make people pay their fair share" and "evil corporations".

That way you are fighting a political fight and not a real war with bullets.

[htpcl]

The best pr0n has always come from these lands, my dear. It's just that the Iron Curtain didn't allow you to see it. :-P

[reality_hammer]

I'd agree if there were no basis to the claims.

However, every indication is that for the past century socialists (who were basically absorbed by the Democrats here in the US) have been working to implement their goals.

There are some things that are innocuous, of course. I don't think anyone views calls for a shorter work week as the first step toward a gulag state, for example.

But things like the government take over of health care are obviously more than a single step down the path to socialism.

[htpcl]

The government offering a public option in parallel to the private one =/= "taking over" health care, no matter how hard you try to twist it.

[policraticus]

The point is, there's still this ghost roaming the Eastern European societies. The ghost of communism.

Was this a deliberate invocation of the Communist Manifesto? Please say it was, cause that would be awesome.

[htpcl]

Anyone remotely familiar with Churchill's story would've detected the reference.

[anfalicious]

I think he's referring to the opening of CM, not the iron curtain speech.

[underlankers]

I very much enjoyed this post.

Could it be said that one weakness of Communism in the Eastern European states was that only in Yugoslavia did it arise from any truly indigenous element, meaning that foreign-backed fascist governments were generally replaced with foreign-backed Communist ones but nothing aside from the type of party-state changed for the average person?

Is there also a possibility that in the heat of the Cold War that the US tendency to see all Communists as Moscow's puppets prevented the Western bloc from seeing adequately the inherent weaknesses of it in the Eastern?

On another note-I keep seeing in Western histories that Bulgaria always felt some kind of alliance and attachment to Russia, but then in World War I it was one of the Central Powers and spent most of WWII as one of the Axis. Can you perhaps clue me in as to where that bit of WTFness in US history as regards Bulgarian comes from?

[htpcl]

Yes, although communism, unlike fascism, did have some support ever since 1917, it was more or less an externally imposed system which suddenly arrived here without being demanded by the majority of society (i.e. it came unnaturally). And everything which comes suddenly and unnaturally as opposed to things that come as a result of evolving processes, is doomed to ultimate failure, no matter how hard the authorities try to tune society into the new system. Unfortunately this is also valid for democracy, as we all painfully realized here in the last 2 decades

[underlankers]

Ah. Basically there was actual support, though limited, for Communism in the various Eastern European states, but the fascists always required either German or Italian armies to bolster them and hence those regimes were never secure and more likely to be bloody in imposing themselves

[htpcl]

That's the curse of being at a crossroads. Everyone suddenly thinks you're too important.

[mahnmut]

And thus, gradually, during the teen years (which they called adolescence), the lack of freedom to move and develop along your own chosen path would eventually turn those awake, curious, cultured and skilled kids into identical robots as if cast from the same mould, inactive adults, who were used to sitting on their asses without doing much more than following their tasks, without raising their head too much, because the system had its effective mechanisms to squash them in a minute - a tightly knit society which was pretty much self regulating morally and socially, a planned but stagnating economy which relied heavily on ineffective use of financial and natural resources, and a mass of people who turned out to be spiritually crushed, socially inadaptive and mentally handicapped.

Wonder why this sounds too familiar?

[htpcl]

Some things will never change.

[magna_carter]

Thanks so much for sharing this. I've never heard about what it was like to grow up with Communism. This was a very interesting read!