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Comment by notyourday | Hacker News Reader

The love of communism among those that don't live in places that tried to implement it is something that totally baffles me.

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It's not that different (it is different, sure, but not that much) from how people who look at capitalism and only think of rich countries, ignoring the ample supply of capitalist countries with completely failed economies. Of course there is also a bit of survivorship bias here, because failed economies are much more likely to try out communism than flourishing ones. After the revolution, one easily blames communism for economic failure that actually happened before.

I'm not saying that we should all turn commie, but just looking at the richest country and acknowledging that they are not communist paints a very incomplete picture. (By that measure, we might also determine that we should ditch democracy, because look at how wealthy a few selected monarchies are!)

I think it's understandable. They see parts they like and either ignore or don't know about the rest. The most anti-communist places you'll find are in Eastern Europe where the old people remember going through sub-zero winters without heat.

> The most anti-communist places you'll find are in Eastern Europe

I'm not totally sure that's still true. It might be. But I think a lot of people are now nostalgic for communism after living what is apparently the alternative for them.

The most anti-communist people I know, though, are definitely some people in _the U.S._ from Eastern European countries, who moved here before or shortly after the end of communism. (I also know some people in the U.S. from Russia especially who are not particularly anti-communist. Russia definitely had it better than most other soviet bloc). (Also, the very poor seldom get to immigrate to the U.S. from Eastern Europe either before or after communism, immigrants are not a representative sample. Although I knew a lot of poor-ish undocumented immigrant Poles in Chicago in the late 90s. They weren't particularly anti-communist by and large.)

But yeah, the grass is often greener, as they say.

It occurs to me that when Yaili Jiménez Gutierrez, an educated citizen of Cuba that knows full well the consequences of being critical of the regime's policies, characterizes these circumstances as "slavery" we're hearing from a pretty courageous person. You don't do this lightly.

But this isn't flattering of the collectivist system so no love for her...

I see it as sort of the same thing as when, say, a city-dweller reveres deer and thinks they are somewhat magical, because they only have intellectual knowledge of deer. Whereas, take a rural-dweller, and they usually see deer as a nuisance and pest.

The grass is always greener I suspect.

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