Rose-tinted memories and the long-term effects of culture shock.
I lived in West Germany in 1989 when the wall came down. The Ossis thought of the West as some kind of Schlarafenland (think of Big Rock Candy Mountain), and it took awhile for the reality to set in that things in the free world were a bit more complicated than the comfort of a dictatorship.
I worked in Leipzig (in former East Germany) the entire month of December, 1989, and was back many times in the months to come (mostly Dresden and former East Berlin). In a cafe, one kid bemoaned to me the fact that he was earning less money than his western counterparts. I asked him what he paid for rent a month.
90 Marks. That was around fifty bucks at the time.
All utilities included.
I told him that I paid DM600 a month for a two bedroom flat, and that was in a small city. And I paid my own utilities.
He stared at me, unbelieving. Reality, baby.

Good article, and shouldn't surprise anyone.

As the article puts it, stories of victims are easier to tell.

So yes, often you get two distorted stories, the official dictatorship line about how everything is paradise over there, AND the official outsider line that everyone is permanently oppressed and miserable to the point that they are desperately waiting to be rescued (and will kiss your feet for it afterwards) or wanting to risk their lives leaving.

Problem is, people don't realize that the second "victim" narrative is often as distorted as the first "paradise" narrative. Even in the most repressive places, huge numbers of people just know where to keep their heads down and live in the system, and get by having normal family lives. The people who do escape and tell their horrifying (and true, not denying it) stories are a self-selected group of people, not a cross-section.

And therein lies the key to why people don't just "rise up and overthrow the government" as outsiders often expect them to - they DO have actual things to lose. Then after opening/revolution/reunification/whatever, they hear people telling them that they are delusional for missing their old life, because surely there was nothing good about it, and yeah, it stings and feels like the propaganda it is.

FWIW you can find similar people pining the old uncommercialized China, too. Often they are older, from the rural areas, and amazingly enough, some occasionally go on "nostalgia tours" - to North Korea.

This just in:

When people think things are shiatty, they are going to pine for the past regardless of how shiatty the past was.

Well it seems like half of America wants it too...

JimmyCarter'sSecondTerm: Well it seems like half of America wants it too...

LOLREDSCARE!!1!

JimmyCarter'sSecondTerm: Well it seems like half of America wants it too...

You mean the half vying for the current obama-nation?

However, when it comes to the border guards' orders to shoot would-be escapees, he says: "If there is a big sign there, you shouldn't go there. It was completely negligent."

Typical boot-licker line of thinking.

Anyone pining for the days of Soviet-influenced communist society can head directly to Transdniestria in eastern Moldova. It's a Worker's Paradise.

The inverse happens as well. Right now, the state of culture is shiate. The result is that past culture is being diminished. As my generation passes, the current grumbling about "boomers" is becoming a pervasive denial of all that was great, by people who weren't there and have no alternative to offer.

Begin ...

kashyyk muffdiver loves taco sauce Quote 2009-07-04 02:16:10 PM
JimmyCarter'sSecondTerm: Well it seems like half of America wants it too...

You mean the half vying for the current obama-nation?


This is not a repeat of 1929, the Great Depression.
During the Great Depression, there was a segment of the population that leaned towards communism. I think many of them were in Hollywood. This was a factor in the McCarthyism of the 1950's. The American Communist Party still exists today and I would guess that their numbers have grown some considering they have ties to the democratic party in many ways. See for yourself.

Communist Party USA (new window)

I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that socialist Barrack Obama is behind this. Look what you did, Obamabots!

itazurakko: So yes, often you get two distorted stories, the official dictatorship line about how everything is paradise over there, AND the official outsider line that everyone is permanently oppressed and miserable to the point that they are desperately waiting to be rescued (and will kiss your feet for it afterwards) or wanting to risk their lives leaving.

There was also an unofficial story going around about how the West is full of free market unicorns and capitalist rainbows. A lot of people in Eastern Europe got a bit disappointed when the reality didn't match up to their expectations.

Good. They should go back. I have seen enough evidence of East German stupidity...I got more than my fill when I was in the backass end of the world that is Leipzig.

/Inter DaF

Don't you know me? I'm the new Berlin Wall, baby! Try and tear me down!

40oz_A_Knight: However, when it comes to the border guards' orders to shoot would-be escapees, he says: "If there is a big sign there, you shouldn't go there. It was completely negligent."

Typical boot-licker line of thinking.


Makes me think of an abused spouse. May as well be saying "Sure he hits me, but he's a good provider. Next time I'll be more careful not to burn the pot roast."

Well folks,there you have it,slowly and surely the truth is being revealed,capitalism is dying a deserved death,despite colossal efforts are made to continue the charade of endless prosperity and cancerous growth,perpetrated by wall street,the banksters and corporate criminals.

Damnit, atomic-age... I'm too slow.

A lot of people just want to be told what to do and how to think. It's easier that way. This guy sounds like one of them.

Bad_Seed: There was also an unofficial story going around about how the West is full of free market unicorns and capitalist rainbows. A lot of people in Eastern Europe got a bit disappointed when the reality didn't match up to their expectations.

Yep. I guess that's the third big myth.

But even without expecting unicorns, there's a basic question of, is a more or less equal, if bland, guaranteed standard of living better, or total freedom which includes both the chance to get rich AND the chance to starve?

If you're one of the people who ends up worse off (which can definitely happen) after the supposed "liberation," you won't be happy. (Yeah, I realize the people in TFA aren't all those people.)

But in China, there are people who are materially worse off now than they were before all the special economic zones and the skyscrapers and nouveau riche and all of it. Some of the communist programs they relied on have been dismantled or severely cut, but they didn't end up "winners" able to take advantage of the new market systems, so now they get nothing.

You can find people biatching about the opening of Poland, too - lots of the dockworkers who lost their jobs.

There's a "yeah, the government sucked and we had to watch where we stepped, but on the other hand we had a guaranteed 3 square meals a day and a cheap flat and our family was happy" view that's legitimate. For every person languishing in jail for whatever corrupt reason, there's hordes of the "we got by all right, we were smart enough to play the game correctly" people.

Heck, you can see a form of it even in the open free capitalistic countries, when someone complains that the government is stepping on people in whatever minor way, restricting speech or doing unreasonable searches or whatever, there's a chorus that comes up - "well, it's their own damn fault, they should KNOW not to [say whatever] [do whatever]" or "if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't fear the search, dumbass" which all generalizes to "damn hippies!" but it's a similar impulse.

Unfortunately, communist toadies will always be with us. No matter how much historical evidence piles up that communism is a miserable failure, there will always be those who dream of a Just Master rather than personal freedom.

Freedom is hard. Liberty requires of each individual that they make their own decisions and accept the consequences of those decisions. Some prefer slavery.

I read the article and hold these people who are nostalgic about Communism in contempt.

The Berlin Wall came down when he was 10....Most East German citizens had a nice life.

So he was only 10 when the wall came down, yet has a great sense of history of how awesome life was under communism?

Reminds me of young liberals in America. All they know is Bush, so they think Obama and the Democrats are the greatest thing ever. No sense of history.

How do you separate the men from the boys in East Germany?

Communism!

itazurakko: You can find people biatching about the opening of Poland, too - lots of the dockworkers who lost their jobs.

Ironically those dockyard workers where the ones who brought down communism. Be careful what you wish for.

40oz_A_Knight: However, when it comes to the border guards' orders to shoot would-be escapees, he says: "If there is a big sign there, you shouldn't go there. It was completely negligent."

Typical boot-licker line of thinking.

I see these guys in the redlight/automated surveillance threads like every day.

foxo: Well folks,there you have it,slowly and surely the truth is being revealed,capitalism is dying a deserved death,despite colossal efforts are made to continue the charade of endless prosperity and cancerous growth,perpetrated by wall street,the banksters and corporate criminals.

It is not capitalism that is dying. It is our perverted system of cronny capitalism, culture of entitlements, the idea that government intervention can help the economy, and our phony service sector economy. All made possible because we were able to successfully get the reserve currency status, severe it's link to gold, 9Which is how it became accepted as the reserve in the first place.) then abuse it to the point where nobody will want it.

Once this collapses and we let Free Market capitalism come pick up the pieces, then we might see some improvement. Our current path of Government intervention and crony capitalism is not viable. Didn't work, in the long term, under Clinton or Bush and it won't work for Obama.

/You may not like capitalism and say it doesn't work, but you can't deny that the alternatives work even less.

pathouston22: So he was only 10 when the wall came down, yet has a great sense of history of how awesome life was under communism?

Well, that's actually part of it. He remembers his nice home life and his childhood, because he was TEN. But he will get comments implying that he can't possibly have had a happy childhood, because he lived under Communism. After a while, it grates.

But the point is that various depictions of such countries/government systems can be very one-dimensional, from both the inside (which everyone admits) AND the outside critics (which people often don't admit). Places are portrayed as if people are starving and cringing under boots and only wishing for freedom of death every minute of every day, because that too serves a purpose.

When reality is actually more nuanced.

Fano: I see these guys in the redlight/automated surveillance threads like every day.

Exactly. But because we know it was a Communist regime or an otherwise historically acknowledged dictatorship, we're comfortable with laughing at the people in TFA.

Bad_Seed: Ironically those dockyard workers where the ones who brought down communism. Be careful what you wish for.

Yep. Thought about that hearing a radio piece on them.

Crosshair:

/You may not like capitalism and say it doesn't work, but you can't deny that the alternatives work even less.

I agree that some level of free markets must be used not because I think they are the best way to organize a society but because I believe human beings are essentially animals that suck. The only way we seem to be able to motivate and innovate is through the carrot of greed.

However, I would say that some countries who mix free markets with slightly more regulation than the US are doing the best right now. Think Scandinavia (minus Iceland), Canada, Australia and some (but not all) Western European nations.

The current problem in the US was largely due to the Clinton and Bush era push back of the regulations that helped to stabilize the economy from the Post-War period on (until the regs were removed).

We need to unleash a certain amount of greed and selfishness to get people working and innovating. However, it seems when we unleash too much people just go crazy and bring down the whole system as we have just again witnessed. Basically, we just need the right balance, and as things change we will continually have to adjust that balance. The major problem is when people forget to learn from history and repeat the same mistakes we've already made and from which we should have already learned.

itazurakko: Good article, and shouldn't surprise anyone.

As the article puts it, stories of victims are easier to tell.

So yes, often you get two distorted stories, the official dictatorship line about how everything is paradise over there, AND the official outsider line that everyone is permanently oppressed and miserable to the point that they are desperately waiting to be rescued (and will kiss your feet for it afterwards) or wanting to risk their lives leaving.

Problem is, people don't realize that the second "victim" narrative is often as distorted as the first "paradise" narrative. Even in the most repressive places, huge numbers of people just know where to keep their heads down and live in the system, and get by having normal family lives. The people who do escape and tell their horrifying (and true, not denying it) stories are a self-selected group of people, not a cross-section.

And therein lies the key to why people don't just "rise up and overthrow the government" as outsiders often expect them to - they DO have actual things to lose. Then after opening/revolution/reunification/whatever, they hear people telling them that they are delusional for missing their old life, because surely there was nothing good about it, and yeah, it stings and feels like the propaganda it is.

FWIW you can find similar people pining the old uncommercialized China, too. Often they are older, from the rural areas, and amazingly enough, some occasionally go on "nostalgia tours" - to North Korea.

The last part about China isn't true. As a Chinese, I can tell you that those "New Leftists" are disproportionately young people. Some of them are, as we could expect, people who read about how good life was under communist rule in official textbooks, and believed it all. Others are socially conscious people who do believe that communist China was a better society - less crime, less pollution, less corruption, and a much better social welfare and healthcare system. They argue that these are more important than the wealthier society we have today. I don't agree with that statement, but this is a lot more complicated than the simple brainwashed-people-can't-adjust thing.

We are talking about East Germans here. No analogies should be drawn to any other culture.

I think the underlying nostalgia is more a unspoken desire to have Europe look more like it used to, ie, fewer obvious minorities. As the Muslim population of Europe grows, just as the minority population of America grows, more and more threatened members of the old majorities praise the past. When whites are in the solid majority, everything's okay. In the US, the black population was never more than 20%, while the other groups combined were at most 15%. Now that Hispanics have split off from identifying with whites, suddenly they are the largest minority group. The status quo is in jeopardy. Same with Europe. The declining birthrate among white Europeans, and the rising birthrate among minorities, especially the ones that don't assimilate is frightening to the old guard.

"People are whitewashing the dictatorship, as if reproaching the state meant calling their own past into question...Downplaying the dictatorship is seen as the price people pay to preserve their self-respect."

How ironic that an article accusing millions of people of being brainwashed morons is so ridiculously biased. Making a claim - with actual real-life experience - that the "dictatorship" was not as bad as westerners see it does not make the person an "apologist" who downplays the dictatorship just to feel a little bit better about himself.

40oz_A_Knight: However, when it comes to the border guards' orders to shoot would-be escapees, he says: "If there is a big sign there, you shouldn't go there. It was completely negligent."

Typical boot-licker line of thinking.

maybe, but this stuff is by no means specific to communism

There are communists everywhere in the world, many of them participating in elections. Communism is not equal to dictatorship, and capitalism is not equal to liberty. Italy nearly voted the Communist Party into power in the 1980s. The U.S. only managed to stop that by assassinating one of its leaders. Similar cases in South Africa, Congo, Columbia, etc. People who automatically equate communism with Stalinism are stupid.

this is nothing new - the Kaiser 100 years ago despised capitalism, especially the US's. They actually had plans drawn up to strike the Atlantic Seaboard in a series of raids and invasions.

/good luck with that, Bill
//love, the USN

the further away you get from anything, the more you remember only the good things. no one (well there's always exceptions) wants to dwell on the awful parts, so they drop those memories and only hold on to the fond memories

i have caught myself reminiscing sweetly over a failed long-term relationship. only to be brought back to the miserable reality of the relationship within 2 minutes of seeing/talking to her again.

i find the same applies to many of my past jobs. they sucked then and only now can i fool myself into thinking they were not so bad after all.

mpls55412: the further away you get from anything, the more you remember only the good things. no one (well there's always exceptions) wants to dwell on the awful parts, so they drop those memories and only hold on to the fond memories

i have caught myself reminiscing sweetly over a failed long-term relationship. only to be brought back to the miserable reality of the relationship within 2 minutes of seeing/talking to her again.

i find the same applies to many of my past jobs. they sucked then and only now can i fool myself into thinking they were not so bad after all.

Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end, we'd sing and dance, forever and a day. We'd live the life we choose, we'd fight and never lose, for we were young, and sure to have our way

LargeCanine: Unfortunately, communist toadies will always be with us. No matter how much historical evidence piles up that communism is a miserable failure, there will always be those who dream of a Just Master rather than personal freedom.

Freedom is hard. Liberty requires of each individual that they make their own decisions and accept the consequences of those decisions. Some prefer slavery.

I read the article and hold these people who are nostalgic about Communism in contempt.

It always amuses the hell out of me when people stuck in their own little world hold others in contempt for being stuck in theirs.

one of Ripley's Bad Guys: this is nothing new - the Kaiser 100 years ago despised capitalism, especially the US's. They actually had plans drawn up to strike the Atlantic Seaboard in a series of raids and invasions.

/good luck with that, Bill
//love, the USN

That was done in alternative history book form. Read it a year or two ago.

1901 (pops)

WorldCitizen: A lot of people just want to be told what to do and how to think. It's easier that way. This guy sounds like one of them.

You've earned a complimentary 'THIS'. Offer not redeemable in CT, AK and OR.

mpls55412: the further away you get from anything, the more you remember only the good things. no one (well there's always exceptions) wants to dwell on the awful parts, so they drop those memories and only hold on to the fond memories

i have caught myself reminiscing sweetly over a failed long-term relationship. only to be brought back to the miserable reality of the relationship within 2 minutes of seeing/talking to her again.

i find the same applies to many of my past jobs. they sucked then and only now can i fool myself into thinking they were not so bad after all.

This is mostly true. But there 'are' East Germans who are worst off now than in the past. Back then, 'anyone' can have three meals a day at the very least. Now, there are beggars on the streets, alcoholism and people committing suicide because of poverty. The people who believe communist East Germany is better shouldn't be dismissed simply as brainwashed masochists.

Herunar: mpls55412: the further away you get from anything, the more you remember only the good things. no one (well there's always exceptions) wants to dwell on the awful parts, so they drop those memories and only hold on to the fond memories

i have caught myself reminiscing sweetly over a failed long-term relationship. only to be brought back to the miserable reality of the relationship within 2 minutes of seeing/talking to her again.

i find the same applies to many of my past jobs. they sucked then and only now can i fool myself into thinking they were not so bad after all.

This is mostly true. But there 'are' East Germans who are worst off now than in the past. Back then, 'anyone' can have three meals a day at the very least. Now, there are beggars on the streets, alcoholism and people committing suicide because of poverty. The people who believe communist East Germany is better shouldn't be dismissed simply as brainwashed masochists.

Freedom is scary. Freedom includes freedom to fail.

In other words, a cultural case of Stockholm syndrome. Interesting to note, but hardly worth treating as anything more than what it is.

Fano: Freedom is scary. Freedom includes freedom to fail.

This. And it's not like FRG is some sort of ruthless bastion of capitalism. It's not like a lot of countries in South America, where the capital is in the hands of an elite ruling class and a small middle class, while 50%+ of the population lives in squalor.

If anything, I could probably attribute a lot of this to the fact that if you start from a low point in Germany, you're never going to get incredibly rich. The harder you work, the more of it gets taken. Quick! Name three incredibly successful European companies from the last fifty years that started off with basically nothing. Now do the same in the US. Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Wal-Mart, etc. You could name examples all day long.

And that ten year-old kid needs to ask his parents why there were long lines of Trabbies at the Czech border (to travel through to get to Austria). I'm sure he doesn't know.

I was born and grew up in commie East Germany, and now live in Texas, so you better believe I'm getting a kick out of the morons in that article. Although you only have to travel to Boulder, Colo., or Portland, Ore., to find the same kind of delusional people who have no idea what socialism is all about in reality.

Kar98: I was born and grew up in commie East Germany, and now live in Texas, so you better believe I'm getting a kick out of the morons in that article. Although you only have to travel to Boulder, Colo., or Portland, Ore., to find the same kind of delusional people who have no idea what socialism is all about in reality.

Nitpicky,I know, but there is a difference.

Cherryl,

You make an excellent point. I might add that the increasing decadence of Western culture also alienates many people from it. Although I despise communism, I can't deny that they did keep decadent Western influences out of the popular culture (however, they were profoundly immoral in other ways).