Comment by qez2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qez2 | Hacker News Reader

My dad was a military analyst in the Balkans in the 90s. I am telling this story second-hand, but I'll try to get it correct. While in Albania, my dad shared a taxi with an older Albania gentleman. The man recounted his time working in the Albanian military in the 60s. His platoon had constructed a large number of bunkers, more than any other platoon. The dictator Enver Hoxha was slated to visit, to give them an award for building the most bunkers in the whole country. When Enver arrived, he walked around, and looked at a bunch of the bunkers they had constructed. He pointed at the bunkers. "Look! You have not used enough rebar! Obviously, you are trying to jeopardize the security of our nation, by neglecting to use enough rebar! You are traitors to Albania!" He swiftly sentenced the entire platoon of young men straight to 30 years in prison, which they approximately served. This man, after serving this time, had just gotten freed from jail. The taxi was transporting him from the halfway house.

A father of a guy that I know was an engineer and he was part of the team that designed the highway between Tirana and Valona. Enver decided to arrest all of them because they were conspiring against the state and the highway was just a landing area for US airplanes to invade the country. He was really paranoid about this stuff

He seems more like a moron.

Good thing people are no longer electing such people to high office.

Trump is very stupid be he hasn't (so far) sentenced anyone to 30 years in prison for not using enough rebar.

At one point, every third Albanian had either been interrogated by the Sigurimi or they had been incarcerated in labour camps, around 25k murdered [1]

Albania was even within eastern communist block considered utter shithole run by mad paranoid guy. Well, he certainly was.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enver_Hoxha#Political_repressi...

Exactly. You can be interrogated by police and detained only to have watched Italian TV or listen Italian radio broadcasts. Anyway, this was a very common behaviour in Albania and it's the reason why most Albanians speaks Italian very well and know a lot about italian culture.

> Albania was even within eastern communist block considered utter shithole run by mad paranoid guy.

I may be wrong, but just across the northern border of Albania, things may have already been very different. Every time I visit a country of the former Yugoslavia, I get the feeling that Josip Broz Tito (the de-facto dictator of Yugoslavia from 1943 to 1980) is still respected, even idolized by some. As a German, this always surprises me, because the leader(s) of Eastern Germany (Ulbricht and Honecker) are today mostly ridiculed as bureaucrats without a trace of charisma. Tito certainly was an interesting character, and was the only leader of the communist block to challenge the leadership of Stalin. Again, I really have no first-hand experience and may be wrong, but my parents regularly traveled through Yugoslavia (mostly through today's Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro) in the 70ies and 80ies. They mostly stayed in cheap private holiday apartments, often eating dinner / breakfast with the owner families, and didn't get the impression that this was a particularly bad place to live in. AFAIK, it was also pretty straightforward for citizens of the former Yugoslavia to leave the country / travel to the West (at least this was explained to us by an older woman in Croatia who had traveled through France as a student in the 70ies to learn the language).

I’ve heard this all too. My father grew up and lived in the former Yugoslavia. He’s since spoken about how well regarded Tito was and the opinion many had that he played a big hand in keeping Yugoslavia united whilst he was alive. He’s also talked about how Yugoslavia was sort of a buffer zone between the east and west and so a lot of freedoms were available to citizens there that weren’t in the full on communist countries. E.g when he was younger he did some work trips to Germany and on top of earning deutschmarks had a side hustle smuggling back jeans and records to sell.

Oh yeah and my folks gave me the impression growing up that Albania was scary as hell back then.

> Oh yeah and my folks gave me the impression growing up that Albania was scary as hell back then.

My best friend for a while in elementary school was a girl from an Albanian refugee family. Even she, an eight-year old, had only scary things to tell about Albania, mostly told to her by her parents and grandparents I guess.

The passport, as Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country, allowed its holders to travel very widely, not just to the West. That, combined with Yugoslavia’s brief economic prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s, is why Yugoslavs were one of the European nationalities embarking on the Istanbul–Kathmandu trail, and in discovering Bali as a mass-tourist destination alongside Germans and Nordics.

That everything went to shit around the time that Tito declined and died (though correlation is not necessarily causation), does much to explain the nostalgia that you will still occasionally meet. However, that nostalgia has been challenged in recent decades through the wars and their aftermath. Serbian, Croatian, and Kosovar nationalism regard, for different reasons, Tito’s pan-Yugoslav project as inimical to their respective national interests, and nationalist rhetoric has a firm grip on many sectors of local media.

>The passport, as Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country, allowed its holders to travel very widely, not just to the West.

Why does “A Guide to the Serbian Mentality by Momo Kapor” say that they were not permitted to travel internationally?

Things weren’t set in stone - Yugoslavia in the 1950s (agrarian reforms, Goli Otok, and similar events) was quite different from the Yugoslavia of the 1980s. In the 1950s, many people escaped to Italy in small boats on stormy nights. Ten to fifteen years later, a significant number of people emigrated legally to Germany as unemployment was high, and the state realized it was better to receive hard currency from gastarbeiters than to deal with their discontent at home.

And Tito was no ordinary dictator, it would be interesting to see how he would navigate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

They were different. My parents (form former soviet commie bloc) tried in vain to get approval from secret service to travel to Yugoslavia, you literally had to have special stamp in the passport on the border or ciao or worse.

Traveling of whole family with small child was seemed risky due to possibility of family escaping to the west. Heck, we couldn't travel easily even within bloc itself.

That is correct. Tito is very loved and respected even now, and not just by older generations but rather pretty much even younger folks think he was a great guy. He's considered great because he managed to unify the whole balkan slavic block (despite religious differences), and there were even talks to bring Bulgaria into Yugoslavia, however Stalin objected and that never happened. People love him because he wasnt a shitty dictator, he didnt abuse his power, and he fought off both the nazis and the fascists. After Tito died, Yugoslavia went on a downfall, both economically and socially. There was also ofcourse a lot of foreign meddling.

We used to live next to a tank division base in USSR. Once a conscript soldier was assigned with maintenance work on a tank. Trying to be helpful he attempted to remove laser rangefinder while the officer was away. But it being a two-person job he inevitably dropped and damaged it. He was court-martialed, got three years of prison and had the cost of the instrument withheld from his future income. The rangefinder cost was about 24000 rubles while the average Soviet monthly salary was ~160 at the time.

Now this was not Balkans but it is always startling how fundamentally inhumane and atomized all Communist societies are, in very much the same way. Am convinced one could transplant a Cuban to Romania or a Bulgarian to North Korea and save for the language and cuisine they'd instinctively know how the things work. How you should get hold of your groceries, when it's a good idea to bribe, who is important in informal way, what you shouldn't say and just how much effort you should put into your work. This was truly global, Borg-like culture like nothing before.

And yet to this day we have many Westerners who idealise communism :|

That is wild. Enver was a piece of work for sure.

So was everyone who followed his directives...

That's simply not true. That example should tell you that, if anything, a good part of their motivation was a healthy sense of self preservation. This is by the way what we're literally seeing play out in the US right now. Tim Cook, Zuck, all the other rich guys chipped in for the inauguration to signal their deference. Because they know Trump and Musk would remember if they didn't.

If you're interested in why this happens, try reading some of The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If the choice is comply or die, fine upstanding morals don't really come into play except in very rare cases. And even then, what good does getting shot for a minor detail do in the grand scheme of things? You're not going to spur a revolution to overthrow a dictator because you were shot for not following an order to the letter in a Siberian concentration camp.

Vaclav Havel has a few things to say about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless

I haven't read that, but I imagine I'd agree with most of it having read the precis. My beef was really with the idea that everyone who follows orders in that kind of a system is a "piece of work". I think that's holding everyone to an incredible high - and unrealistic - standard.

I have read it, and much more.

That's why I wrote what I did: passive acceptance of a Führer's insanity leads to the kind of Stalinist nightmare that the Soviets experienced last century. (Yeah, I'm blending dictators: this scenario seems to be common to them all, throughout history.)

Such behavior needs to be put down immediately, with a bullet to the head. I guarantee those soldiers were better armed than that POS dictator.

Do I sound angry? Why, yes, I am. We need more individuals, not slaves.

Interesting that you'd read that and much more (like me) and had a very different reaction. I came out of it feeling understanding for people caught up in such a cruel system. To be clear, not the stoolies or collaborators, but the vast majority of people who were swept up in a system that they had no control over. I just think it's human nature. Slightly hand-wavy figures here, but I feel like you have 10% of people who are bullies and will absolutely buy into the system, 10% of people who are brave and will try to fight somehow, and 80% of people who aren't either. And as much as I'd like to think you could tip the balance significantly in favour of the brave, I just don't think that's human nature, so I don't really feel like I can blame those people for just wanting to keep their heads down and survive. If you don't have it in you, you don't have it in you. My reading also taught me that when push comes to shove, many people aren't nearly as brave as they think they are. The Gulag Archipelago in particular was instructive about what happens to people when they're starved and worked to the bone. Any notion of humanity goes out of the window, and it's the airy-fairy "we should all share" people who die almost immediately.

Coincidentally, a comment from a Ukrainian woman in Odesa, just yesterday:

"I remember in the 11th grade during an English lesson, we discussed how Freud’s student saved him and literally bought him out from the Nazis. At that time, my teacher (she was a child of the war) said one strange phrase: “War divides people into humans and non-humans.” Thirty years later, I can say how right you were." (https://x.com/tatyanaodesssa/status/1880920634978386335)

In a communist country, never under any circumstances should you stand out. There are no rewards, only punishments.

In any kind of authoritarian country, sadly this is coming back all over the place as fashion, in many countries where many folks voting are still old enough to remember how it used to be, unfortunately a minority.

I say this as first child out of revolution days that ended a dictorship, and sees the rise of such parties.

I'm sorry, the tone of your comment makes it sound like it comes from a place of personal knowledge. Can you elaborate?

I'm from a former European communist country.

“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” - Beria

If you get noticed the future might not turn out well for you.

This is the most terrifying part about China: they’re competent Communists. Until now, these authoritarian states have always ruined their best. The communists of old could never abide the exceptional[0]. Nowadays they’ve integrated the lessons of the West’s market economy.

0: the other side of the Kolmogorov option is that you want your geniuses silent

Thats the story they tell the world. They are just as inept, just as incompetent, but they had a free market engine that would pedal on, not because they enabled them but not handicapped them enough. Its more a incredible powerful horse (the Chinese people) saddled with a impossible useless drunk( the party) winning the race so far, while the drunk in the saddle brags loudly about what that horse can do. And now he decided to trade the horse in for booze.

Economists say China needs to move to a consumer economy. The export model has run out of steam. But turning to a consumer economy is diametrically opposed to the communist party. Just like the soviets, their model works for a while but the inability to switch gears or relinquish any amount of control will be their doom.

Doom in which way? Russia is not going anywhere, population is in complete acceptance of current state (despite everybody complaining, but thats nothing new). Chinese seem the same, don't take some isolated protests from time to time in 1.5 billion population as sign of things breaking apart. They will be probably fine, whether we like it or not.

You are equating the soviet union with Russia. Their economic model was quite different and caused mass famines and eventual collapse.

As for going away, the demographic picture for both countries is horrific. China is in a recession and the one thing they need to do is the one thing Xi is diametrically opposed to and he calls all the shots.

Sovjet union was a donut empire- all value generated was produced in the ring around the empire core and then exported to russia.

There were no famines in the USSR from 1947 to 1991.

Xi has been publicly touting how China needs to convert to more of a consumer economy for its next phase of development.

https://www.chinabankingnews.com/p/xi-wants-to-create-a-nati...

This article just says what some economist thinks should happen. Not what Xi plans to do.

> The Central Economic Work Conference held in December called for “vigorously spurring consumption,” to deal with weak domestic demand and over reliance on exports.

The Central Economic Work Conference is a CCP event where they announce the current direction of the Chinese economy for the year, and is headed by Xi.

Yes but the entire content of the article was taken from what that economist thinks should happen. Not what the actual plans are. The communist party has done no course correction at all so far and the actual decision what to do can only come from Xi.

The statements at the CEWC are endorsements from Xi. He literally talked about boosting consumption at his keynote there.

And that's a key piece of the current 5 year plan. The CCP is actively executing on converting the Chinese economy to more of a consumption based economy.

Talk is cheap. China shifting their economic model would be a geopolitical event of the decade. Nothing other than talk has happened.

What would be evidence for you?

Because the party is actually only reacting way to late to events. Want to know how they plan economically in reality? Look at the botched covid pandemic- that was a pulse (the pandemic) and the party reacting to it. Now you know about capabilities and reaction speeds of the CCP in the most dire of emergencies.

Frankly, looking at pictures and videos from China, it looks nothing like the Soviet Union- it looks modern, rich, technologically advanced, full of people looking and acting like westerners. They might need to expand their internal markets and consume more, but any comparison with soviet Russia is absurd.

Classic westerners mistake. Thinking economic development means adoption of western values and rationality. Ignoring the parallels with the soviet union is ignorance. Xi has publicly said the collapse of the soviet union is the biggest tragedy of the 20th century. Xi has studied the soviet union extensively and thinks the state must never relinquish any control whatsoever to avoid their fate.

Isn't China "state capitalism"? There is no "self governance of workers" in China.

AFAIK we aren't sure what is going on in China. If anyone is wandering HN with a sourced rundown of how their system is structured I haven't seen it. Given how critical China is to the global economy and political situation it seems a bit weird how little information seems to leak out into the general discussion.

So, the most terrifying part about China is that it's not really that terrifying.

Authoritarians are always terrifying to me. But I understand if those less likely to fall afoul are unafraid.

> This is the most terrifying part about China: they’re competent Communists.

What year are you living in!

China hasn't been a communist state since before I grew pubes.

They are an authoritarian state certainly; one that encourages capitalism to grow its economy.

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