Your regular reminder that I personally loathe Noam Chomsky for the reprehensible things he said in apologia for the Khmer Rouge - and has never really taken back. He was no friend to the Cambodian people.
(Not to mention his stance on Ukraine).
It's a bit funny because how quick the left usually is to cut people loose for failing purity tests, but there's always the few who manage to get into the state of grace where the test must be wrong.
Tbh the left is pretty fucking awful at enforcing the “supporting Russia/genocides committed by vaguely leftist seeming countries” purity test nowadays
I really, really winds me up with folks valorize the USSR. I really do not think most folks understand the sheer scale of horror and baseline violence society operated under, how totally pervasive the kleptocracy was, how incompetent it was, how vicious it was, or how nationalistic and expansionist.
So much of ignorant baby leftist belief these days boils down to a baseline of “America always bad,” which then logically leads to “anyone opposing America always good,” which is how you get AnTi-iMpErIaLiStS supporting Russian imperialism.
I know so many guys who did study abroad in St. Petersburg in the mid-00s and after mainlining propaganda for a year came home to teach us all about how Stalin was good actually and the crushing of the Hungarian uprising was necessary and moral.
The "baby" part should be thoroughly emphasized as many of them don't even want to use critical thinking to come up with more nuanced solutions or answers.
"oh, you just absorbed the propaganda of your day"
no, I've known Russians. I spent three years in a relationship with a Romanian. I went to Germany a couple years after the wall fell and saw the difference still even in east Berlin
It was weird realising in East Berlin in 1993, there were still houses with bullet holes from machine gun fire. The one I saw on Rigaer Strasse in Friedrichshein looked in every way untouched since 1945. Plus the large bullet holes.
Oh, hell, you could still see the difference in 2004, when I was there. Mitte was very exciting, all kinds of new buildings and enterprises going on, but there were still a couple of ruined buildings from before the war that hadn't come down yet (although I'm sure they're all gone now).
Yeah I lived around Eastern European immigrants. My friends had family who had stories. I listened when they talked. I really listened when they thought I was asleep. Wasn't so hard, really.
They are *extremely* close to one another. Horseshoe taken to the extreme. I've been surprised to find acquaintances who were nostalgic for the old communist regime, switching to the far-right.
I was cute decades ago when people called themselves Maoist as an excuse for stealing labor in my grad school's polisci bookstore
Not so much when they think he's a legit model because they've read millions of pages of theory and no history
my advisor grew up in the soviet union, he was in the science world so he played by a laxer set of rules (his beatles album that he bought on the black market with a month's salary would be confiscated but he wouldn't be thrown into prison for it, for instance), and it still sounded horrible
My aunt visiting from the Baltics to the USA in the 70s/80s broke down and cried when she saw American grocery stores, she couldn't believe it. An uncle was tortured by Soviets, and lived in paranoid fear in the USA thereafter. Just two small examples of many in my family. Really gets to me.
Yeah a friend's grandmother came over after friend's father from the former Soviet bloc. She made him spend literally days driving all over to grocery stores because she just couldn't believe the stores were real, and not state showpieces. I heard LOTS of these stories growing up in the 90s.
I visited my cousin in West Germany in the late 1980s and not only couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the 20 flavours in the ice cream parlour in her tiny Bavarian town, but also was amazed she could ask her teacher critical questions abt the material and not fear her parents would be fired
After the wall fell, my grandfather, who was a professor of chemistry--literally just chemistry, no defense contracts, nothing particularly special--and was approached by a middle-aged man who confessed that this man's whole job for years had been to spy on my grandfather. His whole job. For years.
That’s the thing that ppl today can’t really understand—the USSR wasn’t just oppressive, it was also just insanely deprived of all manner of goods that Americans took for granted. Everything was old, broken, and dirty.
My grandfather had a story: he helped a lady he knew pick up her aunt who had gotten to the US from Hungary in the 50s - they drove in a car - they went to the store to pick up some stuff - and when the new arrival saw what was in the store, saw my grandpa had a car, asked the lady: "COMMISSAR???"
