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Adam Curtis is entertaining but his generalised sweeping statements are silly and unnecessary.

Yes the world is complex, but it’s not impossible to understand. For example, Brexit: there were many contributing factors but we can identify major ones: globalisation and those left behind feeling resentful; lack of an outlet for those voices due to a rigged electoral system; anti immigration feeling amidst unprecedented high immigration from the EU; propaganda made possible by unethical social media platforms like Facebook; and ruling class power games.

Most of those problems have plausible corresponding solutions. Complicated, but not insurmountable.

It wasn't Facebook it was unelected media barons who hated the EU because they dint have the power they had locally.

The media planting the seeds ever since the attacks on major over Maastricht. Ironically probably didn’t have an enormous influence come 2016 given how few people were reading papers by then, but the brainwashing about bendy bananas and Iraqi refugees had been planted. All it took was a leaflet from the “man of the people” saying iraq and Syria were following Turkey into the EU and bobs your uncle

Maastricht only barely squeaked through to acceptance in France, in a referendum with an even narrower victory margin than the Brexit one. (The UK carefully avoided putting it to any kind of referendum because its government didn't have to.)

Citation needed here. Iirc, the media were quite anti-brexit.

Brexit was the result of thirtyish years of the media printing misleading clickbait about Europe, followed by uncritically publishing the "all upside no downside" claims of the Brexit side.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/15/brexit...

Besides, there's no boundary between "media" and "politicians"; early on while he was PM Johnson was paid more to be a Telegraph columnist than his official PM salary.

I think "culmination" rather than "result", because whilst I think the right wing gutter press (and I include the Mail and Times) were a factor, I don't think they were the most important factor.

"UK press coverage of the EU Referendum" https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/uk-p...

The report is based on analysis of two days of press coverage each week for London editions of nine national newspapers over 4 months of the campaign. Of the 2,378 articles analysed which were focused on the referendum, 41% were pro leave as against 27% pro-remain.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190531154332/https://blogs.ec....

The original site is no longer maintained and redirects to the new wayback machine, but that site is down, sadly. So here's a snapshot from the old wayback url.

Fake news about the EU was so prevalent that the EU started maintaining its own list. Note that one of the "journalists" that wrote these fake news stories was Boris Johnson himself.

"Citation needed": every article mention the EU in "The Sun", "Daily Express", "Daily Mail" multiple times and also "The Telegraph" for the posh version of most of the same crap.

"Media was quite anti-brexit" not really. Unless you really think the GDPR prevents kids from writing letters to Santa Claus

Some media was quite anti brexit - The Guardian, The Independent, the FT, the BBC a bit. People had a choice as to which to read.

> That's not true.

True enough to have become the standard periodization of Russian history from early-1970s to mid-1980s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Era_of_Stagnation The deepening paralysis and apathy of administrative and security apparatus eventually made tanks non-scary. It takes willpower and determination to use them, but that was nowhere to be seen, everyone just sat on their asses and preferred to wait things out instead of doing what the Chinese did on the Tiananmen Square.

The political violence by state did not stopped. The secret service was still looking for enemies, arresting people or threatening their families. Not just physically, but also by forcing you to relocate, preventing education of your children or moving you into worst job possible. Just because violence and threat was not as high as during monster processes, it does not mean it did not existed.

You really really don't need tanks for that. An ordinary police is just enough. You really don't need willpower and determination to arrest people nor to confiscate their properties. You just ... do it. Easily.

Yet also, it is not like people and society would recover from repression instantly and forgot what happened a year later. The people stay traumatized and scared.

Indeed. I saw an interview with the tank commander that was ordered to drive his column through the crowds in front of the Kremlin. He refused. In China they did it.

But the Chinese were smart. They used units recruited in the regions, far out in the countryside with no connections to Beijing or the big cities. Tiananmen Square wasn’t a spur of the moment response, it was meticulously planned.

I wonder why this is downvoted so much. My reaction was exactly the same - ignoring very real violence and threats of it the regime relied on. It did a lot to keep potential discontent under check. It was milder in the 80ties then before, yes. But it was definitely factor.

And I think that this is general mistake people from human rights mostly respecting places do when they talk about oppressive systems. They completely ignore how large the actual danger can be and how it shapes not just the culture, but also the possibilities people have.

> I wonder why this is downvoted so much.

I believe that it's a preference for "oh, that's interesting" explanations. "No, it wasn't a complex system of propaganda and psychology, it was mostly guns and labor camps" is a simple explanation that's less entertaining and evokes rejection.

I mean ... it was complex system and did not functioned in a simple way. Guns and labor camps played the role, but the propaganda did too. But also stuff like "you kids wont be able to go to college" or "you will get only really bad jobs" or "we will regularly harass you" or "people will be afraid to socialize with you".

And stuff like "still being traumatized from having relative taken away or from being arrested 10 years ago". It is complex, just darker and less facile, less directly comparable.

Definitely, but in the end it came down to guns and labor camps. Propaganda and other "softer" ways of forcing people to comply are added so you don't have to execute/exile quite as many people, but if you only have propaganda and no guns & gulags, you're not getting anywhere -- who'd relocate just because you say so if they know you can't make them and there is no "or else"?

You can build upon guns with multiple layers so that, eventually, a word is enough to control people, but they have to trust that the word is, in the end, backed by a gun. That is, if you don't comply when you hear that word, you'll get into even more trouble with the letter that follows, and if you ignore that as well, they will physically show up and take you away. If you're not cooperative in the talk that follows, you'll get to see the window-less rooms, and if you don't break there, you go to the camp. If you break that chain, the word means nothing.

This is an interesting comment, because arguably although those countries did know well what they didn't want (Soviet domination, socialism and the one party system), it's not at all clear, from the developments in these countries, what they did want, or how they intended to achieve it:

- Poland now has an extremely illiberal system of government, without the basic republican separation of powers, secularism, or civic freedoms. - Hungary also is run by an extremely rightwing government which dismisses most foundations of democratic republics using antisemitic conspiracies. If - Romania is run by kleptocrats and considered borderline too corrupt to be a full member of the EU. - Despite the GDR having been integrated very smoothly and quite generously into Western Germany, the exemplar of a stable Western European democracy, around half the voters in the former East support either pro-communist or xenophobic, pro-fascist parties. - Lithuania fails to guarantee basic rights to minority groups. - Bulgaria - both communism and fascism remain extremely popular. - and so on. You also loaded your examples - the countries which did join the EU are generally quite a lot better than the ones which didn't such as Moldova, Ukraine, etc.

To be clear - I think that Poland and Polish people have an absolute right to self-determination, and it was never ok for them to be dominated by the Soviet Union, whether by soft power or by violence. However, I think it's fairly clear that if being a modern Western democracy like Denmark was what they wanted, then they failed to achieve it. They have the absolute right to be what they currently are, but they should at least be honest about it.

There's also an irony that in the 1970s and 1980s, when progressives in Poland claimed that they wanted Western-Europe style liberal democracy, the communist apologists, both in Poland and in the Soviet Union said that they were actually fighting for domination by the Catholic Church, inequality, exploitation by rich capitalist countries such as Germany, antisemitism, and so on. Well, they got rid of communism, and what did they adopt? A right-wing, institutionally antisemitic, illiberal system, socially controlled by the Church, and trapped in an economic system run by richer countries.

> I think it's fairly clear that if being a modern Western democracy like Denmark was what they wanted, then they failed to achieve it.

In 20 years? How on earth would they have pulled that off? Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, The Netherlands etc stand on hundreds of years of relative wealth and industrialization. Sure, the world wars didn't leave them untouched either, but it's much, much easier to rebuild an industry than to build it in the first place. And then they had the Marshall Plan, 50 years of peace, 30-40 of which were a giant seemingly never-ending economic power boost.

Comparing that to a country that only emerged from Soviet occupation in 1990, joined the EU in 2004, and didn't have a long history of self-determination more of less in its current form is like comparing a 12yo to a professional athlete and saying "well, if he wanted to, he could run a 5-minute mile, the other guy can do it as well, clearly he just doesn't want to".

It seems ridiculous and frankly patronising to claim that the last 30 years of Polish history are an abortive attempt to become Denmark, rather than a sincere and partially successful attempt to become something which is neither Denmark nor socialist Poland.

My point is: even if they wanted to become Denmark, there's no way that's going to happen in 30 years, and you won't see much progress 30 years, which is an extremely short amount of time.

Firstly, were the pro-democracy activists in the Soviet times not aware of this constraint, or did they choose to ignore it? Secondly, the Communist period only lasted 50 years. Before the Second World war Poland was a (post-feudal/capitalist/republican) European country like many others. So why was that 50 years extremely significant, but the following 30 years just barely time to get started with change?

You are judging Soviet-era Poland on the society which actually existed, while judging post-Soviet Poland on what they claim they are trying to achieve. That isn't fair. If you judged them both on what they said the goal is, you would have to compare the democratic paradise with the equally utopian and unrealistic communist paradise which was supposed to be just around the corner. Or you could judge them both on the actuality, in which case the present day looks like just a newer iteration of a grim, hopeless and broken society.

> Firstly, were the pro-democracy activists in the Soviet times not aware of this constraint, or did they choose to ignore it?

I mean, they came out of a world war where they were shared between Hitler and Stalin and then watched what happened in Prague in '68 when somebody dared to explore non-Soviet-Union ideas.

> Before the Second World war Poland was a (post-feudal/capitalist/republican) European country like many others.

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

Money quote: From 1795 until 1918, no truly independent Polish state existed, although strong Polish resistance movements operated. The opportunity to regain sovereignty only materialized after World War I, when the three partitioning imperial powers were fatally weakened in the wake of war and revolution.

That's not anywhere close to Denmark, Germany or The Netherlands. Really.

I'm not judging Poland at all. I'm trying to tell you that you shouldn't judge them without considering the circumstances. Their history is completely different, and I'm sure most Poles would be super happy if their history was as wealthy and successful as the Danes'. Instead of running around as Vikings raiding stuff and taking slaves, they suffered enslavement.

I agree with that lack of vision is hard on these countries, but I think lack of vision is the status quo of the current political landscape experience.

What these countries needed was political and ideological stability, some time to deal with the experienced trauma, and to find the value of basic human rights on their own. However time doesn’t stand still and as a reactionary movement to social media (which increased fragmentation), migrant crisis and Islam hysteria + LBGTQ going mainstream went the “traditions and the past” route. I don’t care if these issues are “real” or “make sense”, but ask around here and these are the 3 main ones everyone will point to when asked why we are where we are. And for the ex soviet block “traditions and the past” route can mean both voting for ex-communist and for the pro-fascist options. On some deeper level they are not that far apart for us (I live in one of the countries you mentioned here).

We can see that old democracies are struggling hard due to the same challenges, and the post-soviet block does not have the goodwill of its people to go through it. In general distrust, insecurities, and fear due to Russia is very strong here, people are still in many ways rigid and not very open to new ideas. There is this feeling while being surrounded by western ideas and media that we need a lot of catching up to do, but no one is interested in how someone else is hurt while being hurt themselves. Due to the fact that West is struggling just as hard a lot of people here don’t see the point in following in its footsteps, it just does not seem appealing or logical. That is where the lack of vision of the west fucks ex-soviet block as well. And we try the old “traditions route” because we don’t know anything better.