Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Ad | Hacker News Reader

Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Ad

foreignpolicy.com

95 pointssmacktoward53 comments

Recently watched Werner Herzog's Meeting Gorbachev; it's an oddly fawning portrait, but still very interesting and insightful (and ultimately quite sad, much like this article).

>> “We always wanted the hero of the ad to eat the pizza,” Helbing said.

>> Gorbachev held firm. “‘As the ex-leader, I just would not,’” Helbing recalled Gorbachev saying.

It is not clear why he wouldn't do that.

Many world leaders or people of prominence are wary of eating anything on camera. The President of the United States is not allowed to be filmed eating on camera unless approved by the secret service.

> Many world leaders or people of prominence are wary of eating anything on camera.

Indeed.

No-one will ever let Ed Miliband, the then leader of the UK Labour Party in 2014, forget his unfortunate bacon sandwich moment. Hell, the event even has its own Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband_bacon_sandwich_pho...

We're truly doomed as a species if the image of someone eating a sandwich is the death of a politician's career and not all horrible shit politicians actually do.

Not trying to sound pernickity here but do you have a source on that? I find minor details like that really interesting and I couldn't think of good reasons why except PR, and if that was the only reason why would it be up to the secret service to decide? I tried Googling but couldn't find much.

There's no way the Secret Service could enforce that rule. Freedom of the press applies - the best they can do is avoid having the President eat in public.

Politicians looking goofy eating (eating pizza/hot dogs with a fork is a pretty common gaffe) has a long history. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/19/photo-p...

The funny part is that Obama smoked through most of his presidency and no photos ever emerged.

The administration claimed a couple times that he quit for long stretches.

How do you know this?

I saw it quite a few times in reputable publications. I'm the last person to have a high opinion of the press's honesty, but multiple orgs lying about it would be a bizarre and easily-defeated conspiracy.

There's a scandal every month about some politician eating wrong -- whether it's them being too messy, or not messy enough. It's especially bad in UK politics.

There was a big furor over Donald Trump eating pizza the wrong way (by New York standards) quite some time ago.

There was furor over Trump wanting two scoops of ice cream instead of one[1]. I believe that in a post-Trump world, the American President will just never eat as far as the public knows. All meal-related meetings will be held behind closed doors, with not even a peep as to what was on the menu. All President-related meals will henceforth be national secrets revealed only to those with top security clearances. The White House kitchen will be treated with a similar secrecy as Area 51.

---

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEahmx0Btw

President will just never eat as far as the public knows

If the president never eats in public, how do we know they’re not a robot? This was a major plot point in the Asimov short story Evidence. The character went to extreme lengths to avoid being seen eating (and turned out to be a robot in the end).

Baby Alive has been able to eat since the early 1970s. Pretty sure robopresident could find a place to internally store consumed food until returning to its maintenance pod.

Robots have been able to fake eating since de Vaucanson's mechanical duck in 1739: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck

In the story above, the candidate is capable of eating (and does so in front of one of the roboticist main characters). She points out, as you do, that it would be trivial to store food internally for later disposal

You’re assuming that robots otherwise indistinguishable from humans couldn’t manage to develop any system to temporarily ingest food or liquid?

How do you know anyone isn’t a robot who can fake eat?

How do you know anyone isn’t a robot who can fake eat?

This is the premise of the short story. The robot politician pretends to eat in order to trick his opponents who are trying to out him as a robot by proving he can’t eat.

Spoilers: they then try to trick the robot into violating the three laws of robotics. He ends up tricking his opponents by having another robot attack him, letting him freely defend himself when he otherwise wouldn’t be able to (since robots can’t harm humans).

It’s a fantastic story. Well worth the read. My description doesn’t do it justice.

This jogged my memory—they did the same with Obama and Dijon mustard. I don’t think it’s unique to Trump.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3198837/There-reall...

The ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9lvzzH0STw

Longer version: https://youtu.be/fgm14D1jHUw

Pizza Hut coopting the fall of the Soviet Union in an ad makes my skin kind of crawl

"Yeah we destabilized the politics and economy of a nation, but hey, we got pizza!"

I approve this ad.

Wow, I forgot what eat in pizza huts used to be like.

It's bizarre to me how many people idealize Stalin; scary really. But it might just be a case of lack of education. I have no idea how Russian history books generally describe that period in their history.

Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's bizarre to me that the British idealize Churchill. I wouldn't judge an Englishman for doing so, though, mostly because I can imagine that if I were in their stead I would be conflicted.

Back in the 1940s a lot of people in the UK hated Churchill - certainly my father who had been in the RAF WW2 loathed him. He was seen as wanting to return the UK to the pre-war status-quo - which is most definitely not what a lot of people were fighting for and why Attlee's Labour government (which gave us the NHS) was voted in as soon as the war ended.

Interesting, I had always heard him as being praised. A quick glance at Wikipedia shows some of the controversy.

"Widely considered one of the 20th century's most significant figures, Churchill remains popular in the UK and Western world, where he is seen as a victorious wartime leader who played an important role in defending Europe's liberal democracy from the spread of fascism. Also praised as a social reformer and writer, among his many awards was the Nobel Prize in Literature. Conversely, his imperialist views and comments on race, as well as his sanctioning of human rights abuses in the suppression of anti-imperialist movements seeking independence from the British Empire, have generated considerable controversy."

I guess it's always important to look outside your current 'bubble' and see what others think.

The sections on the Bengal famine gives a stronger indication of why he's so divisive.

It's just like with FDR for conservatives - for most, his greatness as a wartime leader generally overpowers whatever bad he may or may not have done elsewhere. I'd argue that Stalin ought to be looked at in a similar (but perhaps less idealized) light.

Sure.

But the UK actually lost the war. To the US.

The British don't idealize Churchill, right-wing British and Americans do.

He was not even that popular in his finest hour, as head of a cross-party coalition wartime government, being kicked out of office by the British people before the war had even ended and never once won the popular vote in any general election.

Edit: Someone obviously doesn't like easily verifiable facts.

He’s an incredibly popular icon and often tops any historic figure polls in the UK. Election results after the second world war don’t really mean much to his legacy. He also had (so far) the last state funeral in the UK, lasting for 4 days, something that is usually reserved for royalty.

His witticisms are often fondly repeated, and some of his most famous portions of his speeches are known to everyone in England. You also find some of his most famous pictures (cigar-toting v for victory) in a lot of places.

That’s not to say people adore him or would dislike you for talking poorly of him, but it’s a much wider segment of the population than you suggest.

It’s an interesting problem though. People are aware of his racism and more controversial actions, but the feeling is that it doesn’t really matter. For leading our country through a fight for its very survival, he gets a free pass, because who is to say that we’d be around to discuss winning WW2 if another man was in charge.

He did win the 1951 general election:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_United_Kingdom_general_el...

Yes, without winning the popular vote. From your link:

     Churchill: 13,717,851
        Attlee: 13,948,385

That doesn't really count for anything in our election system.

The point was about Churchill's popularity in Britain (real vs myth), not the British electoral system.

As someone who grew up in Russia, I can say that (in my humble opinion) Russians, even older generations, didn't idealize Stalin. They just knew that the country always needed someone who put fear into people to stop stealing, bribing and corruption at every level of society, which has historically been a problem in Russia dating back to the Czars. Back in my teenager years I remember reading somewhere in Russian literature about an incident when Peter The Great was told that one of the governors (gubernators) of a Gubernia was caught stealing from treasury. Peter responded by saying something along the lines of "There are so many of them stealing I can't even execute them anymore because I won't have anyone left." So instead he implemented a law to excuse theft of certain amounts by local government officials. Wish I could find a source for this, but it was so striking that it stuck in my memory.

It's bizarre to me how many people idealize slave-owning founding fathers. But it might just be a case of lack of education. I have no idea how American history books generally describe that period in their history.

They knew it was wrong - specifically Jefferson spoke out often on how wrong it was - yet he too was a slaveholder. That said, the political reality of 1789 meant that without Slavery in the constitution, there would have been no United States, the southern states would have split off and formed their own government. It was a left as an unresolved issue for future generations to resolve.

I have run into neo-stalinists.. who are not russian - its mildly disturbing.

The article links to another article that offers this quote from Gorbachev's recent book:

> “When Vladimir Putin became president, he inherited chaos. ... I can’t imagine how one could act under the ‘textbook of democracy’ in these conditions to find a way out of an almost catastrophic situation. ... The president of the country had no other choice but to take decisive actions. Some of his actions were interpreted as authoritarian and part of society was critical toward them. … If the aim of authority is to create conditions for developing a strong modern democracy, then I’m ready to support the president even if I disagree with some of his individual actions and decisions.”

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/10/29/the-biggest-takeaw...

Has there been a single example in which a strongman government peacefully gave way to "strong modern democracy?"

If anything it seems that strongman governments beget strongman governments. Eventually, something slips and all hell breaks loose. At that point the only way out is to find a leader willing to take decisive actions. And so on.

One of the biggest problems with the peaceful transition idea seems to be corruption. The strongman necessarily breeds corruption because his form of government is incompatible with rule of law. So even if the top-level institutions undergo a superficial makeover, the underlying rot of corruption persists, forever standing in the way. Frustration with the whole reform experiment builds until some event causes popular frustration to boil over, ushering in the return of the strongman.

> Has there been a single example in which a strongman government peacefully gave way to "strong modern democracy?"

Spain - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_transition_to_democr...

Czechoslovakia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Revolution

There are others.

Of the two, the case of Spain seems more in line with strongman government transition. In that case, King Juan Carlos I appears to have played a pivotal role in ending an attempted coup and ushering in the transition.

All actions of the state are violent; it seems that strongman military dictatorship is generally the only way a tyranny is reset, and whether it becomes a democracy or not depends largely on the personalities of the coup.

I think that Chile would qualify.

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