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Comment by yakshaving_jgt | Hacker News Reader

> The conventional narrative of Eastern European communism is one of technologically backward states that failed to enter the information age, locked behind an impenetrable Iron Curtain that prevented both people and ideas from circulating.

Yeah. That's typical Western Russophobia for you.

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For sure, but it's also the other way around, I read RTV for some time (everybody should), same news, very different angle. The fear and contempt of the west (the NATO) is palpable. I imagine it is the same the other way around, but I am just used to it.

Edit: A nice example:

EU: https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-2-gas-pipeline-what-is-the...

RT: https://www.rt.com/business/476844-eu-russia-us-sanctions/

Yes, I absolutely recognise that. I've spent enough time in both Sweden and Russia (and Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, etc, etc, etc) to recognise the same stories and military expeditions being told from different angles. It is absolutely true that each nation tells their citizens their own stories.

The point I took issue with was in the excerpt I pulled, which describes the Western perspective as the "conventional" one, which seems a rather Americentric thing to write.

This is literal whataboutism.

It is not, I think, if it's the _exact same relation in reverse.

It is still whataboutism. Do two wrongs make a right? Does an accusation of hypocrisy nullify any original criticism, no matter how true?

No, I get what you mean, but I still think it's a different argument in nature. It's not two wrongs, it's one and the same.

For me typical fallacy would be something like

"You did A. A is bad."

"So what? You did B. B is bad."

This tries to dismiss A , while "Both did A." tells us something about A.

You need to learn some history instead of propaganda. Both people and ideas were highly filtered in circulation. That's a fact.

>You need to learn some history instead of propaganda.

Just don't trust the history of your national side -- or the winners, in most cases.

WW2, for example

Especially that.

What with provoking the Japanese before Pearl Harbor to get an excuse to join the war, the propaganda over decades to dismiss the importance of USSR in the fall of Nazi Germany, Dresden, the reasoning behind hitting Hiroshima and Nagashaki, the cozying up with "ex" Nazis in West Germany (now an ally), and tons of other dirty laundry...

What, you expected at least this to be a clear cut "pure good vs pure evil" affair, the way "sanctioned" national histories retell it?

Here's but an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis#The_%22Voyage_of_...

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-in-...

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

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...

> provoking the Japanese before Pearl Harbor to get an excuse to join the war

Not sure really any significant group of historians push this. Japan invading China is basically universally condemned, they signed the Tripartite pact with Nazi Germany, and you think it's the US' fault they decided to stop airplanes and oil to that regime?

>Not sure really any significant group of historians push this.

No, just the accurate ones. The state sanctioned historiography pretends it's not a thing.

>Japan invading China is basically universally condemned, they signed the Tripartite pact with Nazi Germany, and you think it's the US' fault they decided to stop airplanes and oil to that regime?

Yeah, the kind US that warred in the Philipines, and toppled/established/promoted regimes all around the world for the whole 20th century (and the 21st) got so upset at Japan invading China...

The same Japan they earlier attacked as a sovereign state and forced-open to their trade and terms, just because they could... (Who invaded whom first here?)

Correct me if I’m wrong, I did not study US history as part of my education, but wasn’t the attack on Pearl Harbour sold to the American public as “unprovoked”?

Yes as is the general historian consensus around the world. There are some that try to make a case that the US also had done bad things, like force open Japan's ports 80 years prior, and then stopped trading oil and airplanes to Japan, as "provoking" a bombing attack. However these are probably the same people that think Russia is being "provoked" into invading other countries...

Essentially though, Japan had imperial ambitions across most of East and Southeast Asia, knew the US wouldn't allow them much more conquest, and miscalculated that attacking first would be the best chess move to negotiate and secure the rest of the Asian territory they wanted.

Minor in comparison to the larger propaganda over that war

It depends. The general shortage implied a relatively high average level of knowledge.

I grew up in Eastern Germany. At the time I started my studies, the country routinely created clones of the early 8086 PC. As a common user, you got a manual, describing things down to machine language. 'opcode hunting' (finding the assembly instructions from previously unknown opcodes) was kind of a competition among us aspiring physicists and mathematicians.

It's great that Bulgaria was so technologically forward in 1945!

If the Warsaw Pact allowed people and ideas to circulate, they might have launched satellites and men in space before the West!

Is any of those points wrong, though?

…Well, yes? Of course? How else do you explain a supposedly "technologically backward" society beating even the Americans in the space race?

I mean, even this very article immediately refutes that narrative.

Ok, but you're talking 1950s, when this article is talking about the '70s and '80s.

The US got so far ahead of the USSR in computing because of the military-industrial-academic complex that channelled vast public resources and knowledge into projects that had both military/state ends as well as commercial ones too. Especially after the launch of Sputnik and the subsequent sense that the US was trailing the USSR in a 'cybernetics gap', which triggered a huge amount of funding in the US for technical developments. This is the story of how the personal, graphical, interactive and internetworked computer was invented.

In the USSR the military did its own thing without sharing its knowledge and inventions with the wider society, especially with such cutting edge inventions like computers. As such outside of the military (even this is debatable), the USSR as a whole did fall significantly behind the West in terms of technological progress. Who knows, if it hadn't it might still be around today.

See Slava Gerovitch and Benjamin Peter's writings, for example:

InterNyet: https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterN...

I'm not really refuting any of that, and I think your point is orthogonal to the one that I'm making. As far as I'm aware, Western sentiment with regards to technological capability in the USSR didn't radically shift in those two or three decades. In fact I believe popular sentiment remained fairly static all throughout the Cold War which encompasses the decades you named.

> How else do you explain a supposedly "technologically backward" society beating even the Americans in the space race?

Invest in a small elite and let the rest of the country starve. That's old as civilization.

That's very unfair. The education was free for all, there was significant investment in education, 90% of schools in my rather ancient city were built during Soviet time, not before, not after. Same for university campuses and hospitals. That systemic investment into education along with state-wide industrialisation eventually paid-off. There were wide-spread programs how for example factory worker can get a higher education while still being able to provide for his family.

Invest in a small elite and let the rest starve was more of a motto of Russian Empire, where most of people couldn't read, yet there were some technological achievements nevertheless.

I argue that the ways of the Russian Empire weren't that much different from the Soviet Union ways - both internally and with its vassal states.

"New boss... same as the old boss." as they say. This is true for most regime changes in history. Those in power change, and their motivated reasoning may change, but the net effects on those down the stack is pretty much the same.

I would say that Russian Empire and USSR were similar in the methods of achieving their goals — a lot of rigid hierarchical structures, top-down management, a certain level of brutality. But the goals were very different.

Russian Empire was very different, like South Korea - North Korea different.

I think you're mistranslating "conventional narrative" as "we think this is a rock-solid fact". It doesn't mean that.

I'm not sure why you think that. I certainly don't think "fact" has anything to do with this, as this is all about narrative.

What I'm taking issue with is that this narrative is being characterised as conventional, which means in accordance with what is generally done or believed. I think this is only generally done or believed in Western society, which I already alluded to.

The propagandist wants the opponent to be strong enough to be a threat but ideologically weak enough to defeat. That should be enough for anyone to pause and think hard about what's really going on.

Russian boots on the moon when?

Dude, are you literally trolling right now? The space race did not end the way you think it did.

And no, the article does not refute that "narrative" at all, if you're reading carefully. The 80s were the years of the microcomputing revolution in the West, by that time most of the computing products of the Eastern block were knockoffs of the western counterparts. They were objectively lagging behind at that point.

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