--- Lewis Higgins <wsm_mod at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: [lbo-talk] Anti-communism Lewis Higgins wsm_mod at yahoo.co.uk Tue May 24 12:59:55 PDT 2005
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Chris Doss wrote:
Supporters of Nazi Germany could make many of the same claims: unemployment was virtually non-existent, subsidized health care, free passes, etc. In the regions of the former East Germany, many workers are nostalgic for the Nazi era, not the imposed system of the USSR. However, the choice is probably a national chauvinistic one rather than ideological, since they were both police states. And that, surely, is the issue.
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OK, this is getting really annoying. 1) Comparing Hitler Germany to the Brezhnev-era USSR is ridiculous. You're equating genocidal totalitarianism with light, relatively benevolent dictatorship (people in Russia don't think of B as being a dictator, since he didn't actually do much, but be that as it may). 2) For the last f'n time, I am not trying to say that the Brezhnev-era USSR was some kind of paradise. I am trying to describe it as what it was. 3) My point was that, and only that, people's understandings of life was actually like in that era, in which they seem to think the KGB followed everybody around 24/7, the walls had ears, jazz and rock music were banned, and everybody lived in grinding poverty, are quite mistaken.
Moreover there is a weird culturalist fallacy implicit in this that the average Soviet person had the same value system as a Western leftist intellectual. They didn't, and don't. Most people in Russia (not "Russians," dammit, which is different) are authoritarian paternalistic collectivists, as one might expect of the recent descendents of peasants.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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