Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> (2) At the same time, those who had university education and yet
> were not part of the elite -- middle strata? -- in the then socialist
> nations envied their capitalist counterparts who seemed to have more
> consumer goods with better quality than they did (those middle-strata
> socialist citizens were not paying attention to the miserable
> conditions of struggling artists with temp jobs, overworked teachers
> in urban public schools, adjunct gypsy scholars with no job security,
> etc.). No socialist nation could offer its doctors, lawyers,
> scientists, etc. the kind of wage premiums that would make their
> conditions even remotely comparable to those enjoyed by many of their
> counterparts in rich capitalist nations. Therefore a good number of
> them became liberal "dissidents" eventually (if they couldn't
> emigrate, that is).
One of these dissidents, Valdas Anelauskas, published a book a couple of years ago in which he expresses regret. In a weird way, it's like the genre of disillusioned ex-communist writings from the thirties and forties. It's called DISCOVERING AMERICA AS IT IS, and describes life in the USA in unrelievedly gloomy terms. It also cites the dismal situation of some of those ex-dissidents now that they have no usefulness. Anelauskas says "Many of them suffer a great deal from having been thrown into the dust-bin of history." Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema