Americans have no clue how nauseating this is to those who have suffered through Soviet occupation and its aftermath.
"On June 2009, a survey conducted in Germany showed that 57% of eastern Germans defend the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Of those polled, 49% said “The GDR had more good sides than bad sides. There were some problems, but life was good there.” The poll was reported on Spiegel Online (which, however, tried to vilify GDR with anti-communist lies) and consists a proof that, according to historian Stefan Wolle, “a new form of Ostalgie has taken shape”."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-d...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-communism-nostalgia/speci...
Please do us (the ones who lived the horror) the courtesy of refraining to comment on things you don't understand or simply move to Venezuela or N. Korea where the blessings of communism continue even this day.
>Yeah, so great that the borders patrols killed people trying to escape every day and the state prisons were full of the ones caught.
Well, if we're comparing prison populations, what one could say for the world's champion of internment, with 25% of the global prison population when they have a mere 4% of its total population?
You've also crossed into personal attack, insinuating that someone else might be an enemy spy. That's a bannable offense on HN. Please just keep all such stuff far away from here.
You can't post like that to HN, both because it's personally uncivil and because national/ideological flamewar is not welcome here.
The world is big. People have vastly different perspectives. One person's experience doesn't contradict another's. Commenters here must remain respectful, and it costs nothing except a bit of effort to do so.
There's one secret ingredient to socialism: it requires a well run capitalist economy to afford it long term. Something the DDR never cracked. By the 1970s every BRD worker owned a car and television. And the rest is history.
[EDIT: I didn't mean to start a comparative discussion of the horrors of various totalitarian regimes. I just thought this particular photo essay was rather innocuous.]
See also Holdomor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Not all brutality is made the same. For Nazi Germany it was because Germans were "superior race" and others the scum of the earth, including Jews and such who were seen as subhuman. Death and destruction was part of their agenda starting from the Main Kampf.
For USSR, the persecutions were the result of defensive paranoia and over-reaching (e.g. in the early days) and power plays, but those that were sent to the Gulags or executed were merely seen as traitors, as often happens in revolutions (e.g. 300.000 people executed in the French one) and civil wars.
Sure, most of it were ploys from the party elite to keep their power, but that doesn't mean the regular people didn't share a dream of changing the world for the better. In fact so much so, that they inspired people all around the world.
Heck, European colonial powers resulted in the deaths hundreds of millions (from Latin American natives, to Aboriginals and to all the proxy wars and land grabs they participated in thousands of miles from their borders were they had no place to be) and enslaved 2/3 of the world (including ALL black Americans before the 20th century), and they are painted as A-OK (because they won and they got to write the history from their perspective). And that was pure greed and cynicism -- not some over-encompassing vision for some free humanity.
Atrocities committed in Soviet Russia/Soviet satellites are different from atrocities committed by the Nazis because one set of atrocities was motivated by racism and the other was motivated by various other stuff?
I suppose you can argue that they're different. But I'm not sure how important the differences are. As long as people are being subjugated and murdered to "make the world better," it's all pretty much the same to me.
I also don't know why you think that what the European colonial powers did is "painted as A-OK." Maybe some people think that, but as an American I was taught that what was done to native Americans was definitely not "A-OK."
Yes. Basic human morality 101. Even courts understand this, and have since time immemorial. It's another thing to do something out of pure hate/greed/etc and another to do something believing you did something good, or that you did it in self-defense, etc.
>As long as people are being subjugated and murdered to "make the world better," it's all pretty much the same to me.
Well, then fighting Nazis is the same thing as being a Nazi, after all both kill. Or killing people in the Civil War to abolish slavery is as bad as any civilian murder. But in reality people understand circumstances where killing is considered justified, even if bad.
It's just that some only apply those things to the kind of causes and people they care about.
>I also don't know why you think that what the European colonial powers did is "painted as A-OK." Maybe some people think that, but as an American I was taught that what was done to native Americans was definitely not "A-OK."
>I also don't know why you think that what the European colonial powers did is "painted as A-OK."
Because they got out of it with a slap on the wrist (if not on top), because they pull the same shit even today, and because they feel pretty damn good about having done it, when they're not totally ignorant about it.
>Maybe some people think that, but as an American I was taught that what was done to native Americans was definitely not "A-OK."
And yet everything done still today to native Americans and/or blacks points that few care -- and of course nobody is giving any land back, are they?
In general, I'm not comfortable speculating about various groups' motivation for mass killing and subjugation and then ranking those instances of mass murder based on the purity of their supposed motivation. That entire exercise seems incredibly silly to me.
I think it's easier to talk about motivation when we're discussing crimes committed by individuals, but even then, I think it's something courts should do less of.
Well, the motivation of communists was to stop people from "killing and subjugating other people" in the form of imperialism, wage slavery, and so on.
So?
>That entire exercise seems incredibly silly to me.
Well, that's history to you.
That is precisely what the Nazis did. They defended themselves from the subversions of the Jewish people, and united the German-speaking peoples.
"Broken down demographically, nostalgia towards the Soviet Union is most likely to be expressed by older respondents. Only 20 percent of people in the 18-24 age group said they expressed regret about the breakup of the USSR, while 42 percent said they didn’t. In the 25-34 age group, there was parity, while groups aged 35-54 and 55 or older had the highest number of respondents who said they felt regret." https://themoscowtimes.com/news/majority-of-russians-regret-...
I would say Westerners are quite intrigued about what life was in Soviet Union in good and in bad as that world feels so different from us and the information has been limited and more propaganda than anything else. Been talking about it with my Estonian and Hungarian colleagues and wouldn't mind understanding more about it.