Comment by nosianu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nosianu | Hacker News Reader

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> This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism.

I know several other people already commented, but still I want to add my own view because this pains me.

I grew up in the 1970s/80s in an area of two 35 thousand people towns (plus lots and lots of smaller towns and villages - rural but it's still all densely populated).

We had all the freedoms to go anywhere except doing school hours - as long as we didn't drive (pretty far) to the German-German border area. Which I would not even have been able to point out the direction. I was in the forests and out alone ALL THE TIME, and so was everybody else. I also was a "key child", this too was very common, I had a house key and was left alone in our house all afternoon, and again, that was common.

Independence, education, sports - the East did not want to raise feeble people. Daily life was NOT some dystopian thing. Youth life was full of biking around in the afternoons, visiting friends all over the place or into the fields and woods, weekend parties, and we were mostly left alone, by parents too.

When I visited the US for two months, driving around in an old car I had bought (~20 - rental car was too expensive for that long, surcharge for being young too) - and sleeping in it most of the time. My impression afterwards was that the US was quite the police state. Sleeping in the care alone, never mind driving in an old car near the Mexican border once, got me lots of friendly meetings with ne police friends... never had any problems and it was all friendly, with my German passport and my story of driving from New York to Alaska to San Diego to Key West to Washington D.C. and lots of loops for scenery and NPs on the way, but I don't think I had a SINGLE encounter with East German police in all my life. Okay once, visiting the East Berlin airport, when I was with a friend who looked "non-standard", they only checked his ID and nothing from me.

And when I saw "Employee of the Month" parking at the very first McDonals I drove by in my new (old) car I could not stop laughing. THIS was sooooo East German! And we even had jokes about it, assuming such a thing would never exist in the West! And here I was in the capitalist mother country and saw a key component of "socialist" worker life.

I don't think OP referred to authoritarianism about children, but authoritarianism in general.

If you had tried to get over the wall you'd been shot and your family questioned. And they probably would have been suspects for the rest of their life.

I'm pretty sure you can find happy kids in North Korea too, it doesn't mean they're not living in an authoritarian society.

> I don't think OP referred to authoritarianism about children, but authoritarianism in general.

Thank you. I can't believe I had to scroll as far as I did to see your comment.

I'm not saying the comparison is or isn't apt, but what a side-track to bother arguing that the policy wasn't 1:1 identical.

Who is arguing other than you? What is there to side-track? People are providing their anecdotes about the Eastern bloc and growing up in it, and how it differs from the western stereotype.

A curious mind would encourage learning more about something you likely have had no real world experience with.

OP wrote in response to a very specific incident, and he wrote exactly about that specific incident before he wrote

> This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism. Police are out of control.

So I would say my assumption that he was talking about exactly that incident are quite justified, and this was specifically about children walking around on their own.

I have no idea how in that very specific text and context of OPs comment some general statement about Eastern Bloc authoritarianism can be deduced, or if it can, how it would make any sense to suddenly bring that up in that very specific context, which OPs comment maintains. As far as I can tell it's always within this frame of the story.

I see no reason why my response would not fit perfectly. The Eastern Bloc did not have that problem, it makes no sense to try to reframe it. How does it matter that they (we) had lots of other problems? ones not the subject of the current discussion?

> If you had tried to get over the wall you'd been shot and your family questioned.

Although I agree with aspects o your general point, this is a bad take.

Pretty sure this is also true of the US-Mexico border wall. It's just much longer so it's easier to get away with, but if you tried to cross illegally in front of a law enforcement official and ignored their orders to stop, odds are very good you'd be shot. And your family would definitely be questions during the ensuing investigation.

> if you tried to cross illegally in front of a law enforcement official and ignored their orders to stop, odds are very good you'd be shot.

How is shooting at someone crossing a border illegally reasonable use of force? It's a nonviolent offense that doesn't harm anyone directly.

> How

By force of law, which is my point :)

Maybe the Mexican border guards would shoot you for trying to illegally enter their country. But East German border guards were shooting East Germans who were welcomed by West German guards. Pretending that this is a typical state of border affairs is gross revisionism.

> Maybe the Mexican border guards

I think there's a good chance that you'd be shot at by US law enforcement if you tried to make an end-run through a border checkpoint, regardless of which direction you're going. In fact, they might even be more aggressive in the US -> Mexico direction (because follow-and-detain is less of an option and the presumption that anyone heading that direction illegally is either smuggling or evading arrest).

> But East German border guards were shooting East Germans who were welcomed by West German guards. Pretending that this is a typical state of border affairs is gross revisionism.

Of course. I think the point still stands.

As a counter to your story I grew up in the US, in a largish city, my friends and I also had basically total freedom to wander around, we mostly spent time in the nearby parks/playgrounds (of which there were 3), but we had quiet a bit of autonomy.

I’m sure there were children in Moscow, Kyiv or Cracow who had very different experiences from you. Whose parents did something that caught the KGB’s attention and then they were in for a world of pain.

I think it’s very accurate to say that for most people living in a relatively rural area anywhere in the world, they’ll be pretty safe from this sorta attention. The big difference is the degree to which your life is ruined. In China (or USSR) any sort of individual disagreement with the police would virtually guarantee a trip to an undisclosed location, bribes and probably torture. Here in the US you still have to deal with people and their egos but many of the laws will protect you from the worst of other peoples’ power trips.

> As a counter to your story

How is your grabbing at straws, bringing in something completely different - politically persecuted - and making assumptions ("I'm sure") and looking for the worst outliers instead of what is normal inside the distribution curve a "counter"?

Sometimes I'm just disgusted by the discussion. Some people, instead of curiosity and wanting to learn, have some cognitive dissonance issue whenever anyone says anything non-binary about the East. The responses are always exactly the same and perfectly predictable too.

Imagine somebody said something about their nice life in the US of A and then you would always and predictably get a slew of responses along the lines of "but police shootings", "not true democracy because only two parties both heavily dependent on big money", "health care", "prisons", "US wars after WWII", "guns", etc. etc. Point being, anything but pointing out to the negatives is accepted by those people, "Thou must not have any other truths!" kind of.

Just to clarify, I will paste what I wrote above:

>Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.

You could even extend this and say that the level of authoritarianism on display is what I was told Eastern bloc countries were like (and why they were bad).

This analogy is a huge hyperbole and the sole number of people addressing that suggests that many people might consider it to be misinformation that should be corrected before it spreads.

Even if you meant authoritarian approach towards citizen in general (not regarding parenting), this is also incorrect. People who stayed out of politics weren't really persecuted here in Poland. Activists, independent journalists and priests were persecuted by the police but ordinary people just went on with their lives (although it is true that the regime used to be very oppresive in the 1940s-50s before Stalin died in 1956).

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