> Thus I came to realize that all these other memories from Eastern Europe and Communism that pop-up on today’s screens and “populate” the literature, have almost nothing in common with me. And yet I lived under such a regime for thirty years!
There's a reason why in scientific discussion anecdotal evidence is dismissed. There's no singular canonical experience that people in Yugoslavia share. Also, people can live a very oblivious normal life without knowing all the darks secrets of a system.
Yes, but he's not denying the other things happened, but pointing out pretty much exactly what you say: there's no singular canonical experience. But often we are presented a narrative of such a singular experience.
Do we though? We generally consider Iraq under Saddam not to be a good place to have lived in. A terrible place if you're a Kurd and your village gets attacked with nerve gas. And a bad place if you're an ordinary citizen that isn't specifically targeted because of his ethnicity, but there's always the risk of Uday Hussein driving by and just fancying murdering you for no particular reason.
And yet, of course, the upper echelons lived very well. They had palaces, anything they wanted was imported for them from the West, even if not allowed for the average citizen. Certainly, they didn't complain about their villages being gassed, or their sons being tortured to death by the sociopath son of the dictator.
But saying "there's no singular canonical experience" feels very strange in that regard, because there was, but with a few exceptions.
You're making the point for me. You're presenting a narrative that the vast majority of Iraqis would also not have experienced. Most did not live in the regions that were gassed. Most did not have family who got tortured.
That does not mean Saddam wasn't a psychopath and a brutal oppressor. The fact he did those things are enough to condemn him as the evil dictator he was. There's no need to erase other experiences.
Nobody is "erasing" other experiences, they are just very uncommon.
When talking about how "people in a country" live, you look at the average person. You don't say "but the King and his ministers live differently, we shouldn't erase their experiences". The inner circle always lives differently from the masses, but by definition, they are very few. Look at the lives of the many, not the few.
And regarding Iraq: during Saddam's reign about a quarter of a million people were murdered or disappeared. There's a good chance that the majority of Iraqis did have someone in their family affected, though it might not have been their son, but a cousin or nephew.
With respect to Saddam's mass murder the uncommon experience for Iraqis is is having been personally affected. That doesn't mean it wasn't an atrocity, or rather a series. And no, most people are not likely to have had someone affected, as most of them were focused on certain groups and areas. If you belonged to those groups you'd be disproportionately affected. If you did not, you might have gone most of your life without being affected without being any part of the.inner circle.
This need to see suffering as universal to be valid is problematic, because very few atrocities affect a large portion of a population. That most don't does not jvalidate them.
The genocidal attacks on Kurds claimed somewhere between 50k - 180k. Kurds make up 20%-25% of the population, which would have been around 3-4 millions in 1988. If you kill 1-3% of a population, it's very likely that most families will be affected, especially in societies where families are large.
Another ~100k Kurds and Shiite Arabs were killed during the '91 uprisings. Together, they make up more than half of the population.
Unless Saddam was super surgical (#heWasnt), they were affected. Unless of course, by "personally affected", you mean they personally did die. But that would be a very strange idea.
I have no idea how you come to that conclusion. If you kill 4% of the population, you will have lots of people losing a relative. What's that moving of the goal post about?
When you kill a large portion of a specific ethnic group in specific geographic regions in a society that still had major tribal tension, most people outside of those groups and regions will not be affected.
In any case you're the one mong goalposts here - this started with simply making the point that it's unread jable to assume a single experience captures the experience of a people.
Nevertheless you've provided nothing to justify the idea that Saddam's purges affected anywhere close to a majority of the population, even if that is itself a distraction.
By extension of this way of telling a narrative, all Americans should fear for their lives the second a police officer stops their car because of the countless innocent black people murdered by the police. Stories of excessive police violence still make it to the news almost every week.
However, most Americans don't need to fear for their lives by the police, and most Iraqis aren't Kurds. Most Iraqis weren't gassed or tortured either.
You can't twist the narrative to pretend that the situation of the abused minorities are what the majority of the population experienced. Yes, they were living under their dictator's regime and no they were probably none too happy about the atrocities occurring, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a normal life outside that.
You’re really trying hard to draw equivalencies between two very different situations.
In the US police kill less than 1,000 per year. Most are white people, many justifiably. So let’s overestimate and say 25% of those are murder. (Clearly not, but work with me). So 250 per year in a country of 350M.
When the Kurds were gassed, a singular event, 3,000-5,000 people were killed. Random people, shelled by the Iraqi military for no reason other than living in the same place as rebellious Kurds. Iraq had a population of 16M at the time.
Those are clearly two VERY different situation you’re trying to draw a parallel between.
Misses the point which is not to justify or downplay either, but that most people lived a very different reality. That doesn't make the brutal mass murder of Kurds any more acceptable. It just underlines that trying to compress the story of those who lived in a given country in any period into just the atrocities is rarely going to be representative of everyone's lives.
> There's a reason why in scientific discussion anecdotal evidence is dismissed.
Because it doesn't feed the research machine!
One anecdote is dismissed. Ten anecdotes are collected to start grifting for grants. And one hundred anecdotes gives you Empiricism (TM)!
I've come to value anecdotes as a marker of "something is there." To throw them away completely is foolish. Have you read most research papers being pumped out? The methodologies are always flawed (dare I say, biased; ha!) towards favorable results (or atleast I hope. Some of the methodologies I've seen for biological research are so stupid, I refuse to believe someone came up with them in good faith).
There is definitely a replication crisis in academia, we should just have stricter requirements for what we consider science (especially in some fields which are terribly complicated and where you can find studies to prove something and its opposite)
One anecdote should point us in a direction but it's not enough to prove anything.
> I've come to value anecdotes as a marker of "something is there."
AKA "there is a grain of joke in every joke".
Not everything is bigger in Texas but this is a clear marker on some aspects of Texans self-perception. Which was exported so successfully it's now known not only in all other states but in other states too.
I have extended family that grew up in a communist country. And I got to know quite a few of their friends and relatives.
Of course not everyone was thrown into prison, or stood in breadlines. Experiences depended on your relative social standing under the old regime and how that social standing was viewed under the new regime. The revolution for the laborers, but the most successful labors? Blood enemies of the people.
Plenty of people were born into relative privilege under the communist system. Children who quietly got to go to foreign universities, while their parents talked about the need for the lower classes to sacrifice their children for the revolution. Those same children who now run very successful businesses thanks to their family connections.
And there was the flip side, which the author doesn’t like the focus on. The ones who were successful businessmen or even farmers but after the revolution thrown into prison as “dangerous counter revolutionaries”. Or the families of that person who had to pay penance for their bloodlines sins - their children denied an education. Of course the assets stripped from the family were given to the “people”, the the most generous portion reserved for those most loyal to the revolution.
> Children who quietly got to go to foreign universities, while their parents talked about the need for the lower classes to sacrifice their children for the revolution. Those same children who now run very successful businesses thanks to their family connections.
You just described the situation everywhere, Communist or Capitalist or Whateverist system.
Hard disagree. Here in Czechia there is no longer such thing since the revolution. Nobody says someone should sacrifice their children today, and no such thing happens in practice. Children from Czech schools are plenty successful.
I was born in West Germany shortly after reunification and have family both from the East and West. All pretty much working class, on both sides.
I don't think it's fair to characterize the people the author talks about as children raised under privileged circumstances necessarily. Many working class people, mothers who had plenty of support in raising kids, people who enjoyed relatively egalitarian and free education for the first time and so on have legitimately good memories, and are today some of the most dissatisfied with the state of affairs. In particular the role of women seems to have been mostly lost. When the East had already granted reproductive rights, women in the West got abortions in the Netherlands.
This is generally written off as "Ostalgie" (pun on nostalgia) in exactly the same way the author describes.
And I would add that not everybody is targeted for their political opinions, they might disagree but not be vocal enough to be targeted, be lucky, etc. So the lack of voting power might not affect their capacity at having a good life and forming happy memories. In particular for east German women.
Edmund Burke covers this sentiment very well, and yet did not live to see it here:
"They would soon see, that criminal means once tolerated are soon preferred. They present a shorter cut to the object than through the highway of the moral virtues. Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon becomethe pretext, and perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites. Such must be the consequences of losing in the splendour of these triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and right."
In this particular case, the North was in the right. As far as they were concerned, the Americans were just one more occupier in a long line of Western occupiers. And even though the Americans didn't intend to become occupiers, that's ultimately what happened (a theme that's repeated itself many times). The Americans and the Vietnamese were fighting different wars with each other. So the North pushed out the occupiers and liberated their country.
Western or Eastern, Japan occupied Indochina for a few years during WW2, and Ho Chi Minh rose as a big resistance leader opposing them.
However for the rest you're on point. South Vietnam was a fake regime propped up by the French initially and then the US, had no legitimacy, wasn't democratic ( which could have been a saving grace for it) and was in US-backed violation of the Geneva conference. That's not to say there weren't anti-communists in Vietnam, they were just a small minority (Ho Chi Minh had very strong support in the North, which was more populous).
South Vietnam was certainly not “fake”. Not any more “fake” than any other country. It wasn’t a democracy but neither was the north. And the North also violated numerous treaties including the one where the US pulled out all troops and North agreed to stop further infiltration.
The communists certainly had strong support in the North (they had secured power and purged any opposing elements, including within their party). They also had support in the south, but were forced to infiltrate hundreds of thousands over the war to sustain a fighting force as they weren’t able to grow it organically in the South (also shown during the 1968 Tet Offensive where no population center or military unit “flipped” to the communist side).
Curiously enough, the accusation of "whataboutism" itself is more often than not an attempt to redirect the discussion away from facts inconvenient to the accuser.
> South Vietnam was certainly not “fake”. Not any more “fake” than any other country
It kind of was though. It was created temporarily until elections are held by a treaty over fears the communists will have control over all of Vietnam ( they would have), and existed solely due to direct and heavy American support. It wasn't a country based on self-determination or anything of the like.
We’re probably splitting hairs at this point, but there was significant support for an anti-communist government among the Vietnamese. 1M of them migrated South when the French turned the North over to the Communists. Yes I know about the campaign to encourage it, but the land reform purges of the 1950’s certainly helped show who was going to do well in the North and who wouldn’t.
And I suppose you could say the same about the American Rebellion. It never would have succeeded without support from the French. Does that mean the fledgling Continental Congress wasn’t a real country?
What a beautifully deep thought. Looking at it this way, e.g. supporting ideologies as a means to an end, helps understanding a lot of idiosyncracies in the world, past and present.
To really underline this, one should read the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence. Ho Chi Mihn greatly admired many things about the US and so it starts with a quote from the US Declaration of Independence, before it talks about the French revolution, and then attacks the French colonial rule.
They had a bloody war with the US after they sided with their colonial oppressors and lost thousands of people to that war; that might have something to do with it.
The US policy in Vietnam boiled down to one thing: body count. US only real measure of success was how many Vietcong/PAVN they killed; and because they had no way of telling the difference -- nor did they care much -- this effectively meant "kill as many Vietnamese as possible" (they were encouraged to consider any casualty as VC, overrepresenting their numbers). And to top it out, they engaged in massive forced resettlement, pillage, rape, destroyed foliage and the ecosystem, and poisoned the land.
Think about it.
Americans living in Vietnam claim the Vietnamese don't hate them. Even ex veterans visiting the country report this. That's pretty amazing all things considered.
> Wait, what? Because they had a bloody war they couldn’t actually deliver what they promised?
They delivered on independence from colonial powers, and on gaining self determination. No small feat!
I'm not sure what you believe they promised.
Vietnam was devastated as a country. The land itself, and the people. Countless Vietnamese were killed, far more than whatever the US lost in the war. The US did a number on them, the effects of which are still felt. It's a wonder these days they don't hate America (which by all accounts they don't).
Initial admiration for US values naturally fell once the US waged war on them, and within Vietnam leadership the hardliners gained power. Being attacked tends to give voice to the hardliners and sideline the "liberals".
It's a matter of record Ho Chi Minh initially admired the US and expected their support. It's a matter of record the US feared he would win the elections and so they cancelled them. You can argue till you're blue in the face, those two facts will remain.
That’s a pretty impressive rewriting of history! Ho Chi Minh admired the US then shortly after taking power his government exacted brutal land reforms even the hardliners had to call out as “going too far”.
You’re doing an awful lot of hand waving to explain why Vietnam still doesn’t enact the freedom “they admire so much”. Your claim that Ho Chi Minh’s “disappointment from lack of US support” is the reason why Vietnamese still don’t have those rights rings pretty hollow.
> his government exacted brutal land reforms even the hardliners had to call out as “going too far”.
This has nothing to do with anything. Please try not to sidetrack the conversation: the Viet Minh and its successors were fighting a struggle of independence, the US could have been their ally but instead chose to turn against them and trash their country, while propping up a dictator so bad they later gave the greenlight for its removal (and whooopsie, his "accidental" assassination). Not to speak of the appalling Phoenix Program assassination campaign whose subtle tactics included, by the admission of its practitioners, listening to tips about alleged VC, knocking on the door, then wasting whoever answered it.
Doesn't seem so freedom loving to me!
> Your claim that Ho Chi Minh’s “disappointment from lack of US support” is the reason why Vietnamese still don’t have those rights rings pretty hollow.
Who knows what would have happened had the US supported Vietnam's anti colonial struggles instead of siding with their oppressors. It couldn't have been worse than the unmitigated disaster the US conducted.
You’re missing my point entirely. Ho Chi Minh claimed he admired the US’ freedoms. Then once the North was established, his government enacted brutal land reforms that even the communists said went too far.
What I’m saying is words are cheap and Ho Chi Minh never admired the US’ freedoms (maybe theoretically?), they were just empty words to try and get a powerful ally on his side.
That’s clearly a factual statement when you realize the VCP has zero intention, even today, of giving the people of Vietnam the same freedoms you claim Ho Chi Minh so admired, almost 60 years after taking power over all of Vietnam.
And yes, the Phoenix program was effective because it used the same tactics against the communists they used against villages in the South. It's pretty rich seeing the North call out the US and South foe those tactics - truly the pot calling the kettle black.
> It's pretty rich seeing the North call out the US and South foe those tactics - truly the pot calling the kettle black.
Let me correct you: it's not "the North". It's called Vietnam and the US waged a war against it (mostly against South Vietnam).
Also, it's the world -- we -- who is appalled at the way the US behaved in Vietnam, including its assassination campaigns, Agent Orange, Napalm, mass murder, etc.
As for what may have happened, unlike you I'm not a mind reader to know what was false or faked. I do know if the US hadn't waged war on Vietnam, things would have been way better, if only because many thousands more Vietnamese would have lived, the country wouldn't have been destroyed and who knows, an unscathed Vietnam might have turned way more sympathetic to the West.
Americans lost two skyscrapers and still talk every year about how the country was scarred. Yes, it was terrible, but imagine a country literally burned by fire from the sky, and future generations continuing to suffer through birth defects. The sheer magnitude of the suffering perpetuated in the name of "freedom" and proper values is staggering.
If you admire someone and they turn out to be a bully, just maybe you change your mind.
The US has a history of this - Castro wooed the US too. His party didn't even describe itself as socialist until years after the US slammed the door in his face and the Soviets didn't. Once the Soviets had bought him, Castro made concession after concession that he could have made to the US instead.
I didn't claim they'd be freedom loving leaders. You're projecting assumptions onto what I said.
What is a matter of fact is that both attempted to get US support before they turned elsewhere. And that support could have come with strings that might have produced much better outcomes.
Just like it did when Castro turned to the Soviets. He proved he could be bought, but the US was unwilling to buy.
As for Ho, he was more concerned with self determination and anyi-imperialism than the specifics of the resulting regime. US support with strings there too could have avoided millions of dead and gotten a more moderate regime.
The way I heard the story is more like they mostly held back and rebuilt their numbers while the Kuomintang was left doing most of the actual kicking on it's own.
That's unfair to the Chinese communists. They fought a different type of war against the Japanese, a guerrilla one, attacking Japanese supply, isolated locations, etc.
In terms of pure numbers of men they certainly contributed less than the Kuomintang, but in terms of overall impact it's close to impossible to say.
Is Vietnam in any way "more independent" today than if the north had lost? It makes sense if you claim to fight the Americans because they're evil capitalists but Vietnam turned around to adopt chinese-style reforms and is now mostly friendly towards the US.
> The CCP's primary claim to legitimacy is that they kicked out the Japanese.
The CCP is in power because they defeated the KMT, but decades later they adopted capitalism and today justify their rule through nationalism.
What's the point of a civil war if you eventually end up adopting most of the other side's policies?
> Is Vietnam in any way "more independent" today than if the north had lost?
Yes.
> and is now mostly friendly towards the US.
Independence works like that. When you let a country decide instead of forcing by military power, they might even choose to like you -- or at least, not hate you.
The US and Britain are friends and allies in modern times, after all.
In fact all communist revolutions, bar the Russian, were nationalist/liberation revolutions or at least started like that. Then they became oppressive regimes (and that was the point since the beginning, maybe).
I hope that you do not count what happened in most Eastern European countries as communist or liberation revolutions.
There the communists were installed to power by the invading Russian army, even if false revolutionary and liberation histories were made up after the facts.
The few places where there were indeed communists fighting for liberation, i.e. Tito in Yugoslavia or Enver Hoxha in Albania, so they had some legitimacy, were precisely the places which later escaped from being under strict Russian control.
For Yugoslavia and Albania, what you say seems to apply.
This is the story that is told, but one can’t avoid the similarity between the South’s alliance with the US, AUS, NZ, Korea and the North’s with the USSR and China (which had many soldier stationed there). Without material support the USSR and China provided, the North never could have won the war.
There was no “rightful” liberation. It was a civil war in its essence with two opposing groups of Vietnamese fighting for control of a fractured post-colonial state, with plenty of foreign interference/assistance during the whole thing.
In the end the North did a better job (through both smart politics, good PR and internal support/oppression of opposition).
> This is the story that is told, but one can’t avoid the similarity between the South’s alliance with the US, AUS, NZ, Korea and the North’s with the USSR and China (which had many soldier stationed there). Without material support the USSR and China provided, the North never could have won the war
The difference is that with no outside meddling and support, South Vietnam wouldn't have existed or would have existed very briefly until a Communist electoral victory of the whole country. Without the US in Vietnamese affair, there is no North-South war.
I’d have to disagree on the popular vote. By the time of the proposed election, the Communists had complete control of the Northern population. There was no “free” vote for unification - any more than there would be a free vote in Vietnam today.
And the US didn’t get significantly involved (beyond material support for the French) in Vietnam until the early 1960’s with the help of military advisors. The build up didn’t start until around ‘65 when it was apparent the South would collapse (through a combination of communist subversion but also a lot of in fighting) The South existed as an independent state for a few years - barely, I would agree. But it existed.
The South never existed without US backing. It was a made up thing, without popular support, ruled by successive dictatorships (some even had to be toppled with the ok of the US, so terrible they were).
It's not your right to decide whether people have free will or not. It's their call. "Deciding" for them is called colonialism.
Ho Chi Minh had huge popular support; precisely what the US feared.
PS: before the US fucked things up, Ho Chi Minh even looked up to them and fully expected their support against the French. That's how bad the US fucked up.
> And the North would never had existed without USSR and China’s backing.
False. Did you know the Viet Minh initially counted with support from the US? When it was an anti Japanese struggle, of course. Initial US assessments even thought the French should get the fuck out; those sentiments were overruled by others in the US, sadly.
The Vietnamese struggle was a struggle of national liberation. Aided from the outside like all resistance organizations, sure -- like the French resistance against the Nazis was. Didn't make France any less real. Imagine if the Allies had partitioned France in two after the war, claimed the last Nazi held parts were to be ruled by Germany's successors or whatever, and that the ensuing fight to reunify France was "a civil war" and that the free (non German) France was "just as artificial".
> I’m not sure what your point is?
That the US sided with colonial powers and against an independence movement. Not their finest hour.
> How much “free will” do the Vietnamese have today?
More than they would have had had the US backed dictatorship won.
Not that it matters: it's not for you to decide. There's no White Man's Burden to send civilization to other countries. Let them have their self determination and arrange their governments how they like.
Above all, don't murder them by the thousands, destroy the countryside and poison their land when you don't like the government they choose.
One last time: in the struggle against colonialism, the colonial power is always in the wrong and the locals struggling for freedom are always in the right (within the context of their struggle, of course -- they are free to fuck up afterwards as is any nation's right to self determination).
The US sided with a colonial power and was therefore wrong.
They also destroyed the country in their alleged attempt to "save" it. They were savage about it. Brutal.
Please stop it with the sidetracking attempts. We're talking about Vietnam, whether the US was the aggressor, and whether calling it the liberation of Saigon makes sense.
False. They would have rid themselves from the French sooner or later. They had the will, and the French were foreign invaders. The age of colonialism was over by then; it was a mistake of the French that it took them so long to notice.
They ended up getting rid of the mightiest army in the world, after all.
This is the sort of distorting of history the article speaks about. Vietnam was invaded by the French in the 1800 and turned into a colony. That colony was lost, and then semi-regained over the course of WW2 and the years following.
When the French lost and withdrew, America invaded and was subsequently beaten.
This is not a defence of China or Russia, look at how they are invading Tibet and the Ukraine, but the Vietnamese people weren’t invaded by China or the USSR, they were invaded by the US. South-Vietnam was an American fabrication during its invasion following the post French-Indonesian-war, because the Vietnamese people had a government in Hanoi, the US simply didn’t like it.
After the communist victory at Dien Bien Phu, the French negotiated a peace (without much choice) that forced them to give up the North (where the communists were strongest).
The French slowly disengaged from the South over the next decade leaving a fragile Vietnamese government in the South that had no interest in joining the communists in the North (1 million fled during partition).
The US did back a fractured, unstable government in the South in order to contain communism - I’m not arguing that. But to claim that the country, one that lasted 20 years, wasn’t “real” is just silly.
It’s like saying South Korea isn’t real because the UN backs it’s security and the communists had significant support prior to partition.
The US propped up a dictatorship in the South and canceled free elections because they knew Ho Chi Minh would win. This is a matter of recorded fact, not a conspiracy theory.
They had also been supporting the French with materiel and even limited numbers of advisors during the First Indochina War.
There was a war of national liberation against a colonial power, and the US sided with the colonial power.
Of course Ho Chi Minh would win - there were no free elections in the North (100% of votes went for him!) and substantial support in the South. I wouldn’t call that a fair and free election.
Yes, and I agree the US supported the French materially and with advisors.
But South Vietnam was no longer a colonial power. The French were gone and the Vietnamese called the shots (not without foreign influence, I agree, but similar to the USSR and China influence in the North - you pay the bills you get a say).
But none of that infers the South wasn’t a real country.
> Of course Ho Chi Minh would win - there were no free elections in the North (100% of votes went for him!) and substantial support in the South. I wouldn’t call that a fair and free election.
False.
The US own internal documents stated they believed Ho Chi Minh held enormous popular support, especially in the countryside.
They cancelled the elections and instead propped up a bloody dictatorship. Nothing natural about the South, it was completely artificial, incompetent, and repressive.
The original Viet Minh was a anti-colonial organization, fighting against japan and france, in WW2 - ironically with US-Advisors and taking the US- as a example for a successful liberation from european colonial powers. After the war ended, the us- switched sides and dumped them. They then went and picked the next-best set of allies - which was russia/china.
Oh sure, he had a lot of support. But it was entirely clear the North was not going to allow any free vote. They had already purged any opposition long ago.
So are you arguing that South Korea is a “completely artificial, incompetent and repressive” country? It was also a dictatorship after the war for about 20 years. But Vietnam still is today after 50.
No, I'm arguing about Vietnam. Please try not to sidetrack the conversation.
Fact: Ho Chi Minh had huge popular support and would have won general elections, a fact the US didn't like at that stage and so they made sure it didn't happen. Instead, they propped up one of the most brutal dictatorships in the region, one so bad they had to allow its removal and the assassination of their puppet dictator.
They also destroyed South Vietnam, killing villagers, poisoning the land and bombing the hell out of North Vietnam.
And they failed because they were foreign aggressors.
Fact: the US doesn't get to choose the form of government of other countries. When they try to do it by military force, they are invaders and aggressors.
You can argue until you're blue in the face, those are the facts.
Your facts are wrong. And I’m sorry you cant see the similarities between Korea and Vietnam. There was plenty of support for Kim Ill-Sung in South Korea as well, but there was plenty of opposition too.
The North was a brutal dictatorship propped up by China and the USSR.
The South was a brutal dictatorship propped up by the West.
Both had Vietnamese supporters. Again, to dismiss the South as not a real country is just twisting facts. It was a civil war between two Vietnamese factions and the South lost. Those are the facts.
The mythology the North has created around the war (just like every country does) is helped to keep its grip on power but is a gross oversimplification.
And you’re right, the US doesn’t get to choose which government a country has. But neither does Vietnam when it comes to Cambodia or Laos, but hey, they hasn’t stopped them!
> There was plenty of support for Kim Ill-Sung in South Korea as well, but there was plenty of opposition too.
Please stop trying to sidetrack the conversation.
> The North was a brutal dictatorship propped up by China and the USSR.
No, it was a nationalist anti colonial government that aimed at the reunification and independence of Vietnam.
> Both had Vietnamese supporters. Again, to dismiss the South as not a real country is just twisting facts
It was an artificial creation imposed upon the Vietnamese by external parties; hence not a real country.
> The mythology the North has created around the war
Oh, there is a mythology alright! There's a whole myth created about this war, mostly by the foreign country that fought it -- to devastating effect to both Vietnam and the invaders who fought in it -- and who claims to be freedom loving and is still trying to heal from the wounds and the nonsense the war it inflicted caused upon thousands. This mythology is necessary in order to reconcile their aspirations to being a beacon of freedom and the fact they acted on the side of colonial oppressors.
> But neither does Vietnam when it comes to Cambodia or Laos, but hey, they hasn’t stopped them
But we are not talking about that, are we? If we were, we could condemn Vietnam's interference with other countries. Regrettably, this was about Vietnam's own struggle for independence and US interference with said independence.
When the US was fighting for its own independence, that's good. When they were stopping and interfering with another country's, that's bad. The same country can act good and bad at times. This was a case when the US was bad.
English is not my first language so maybe fabrication is the wrong word? I didn’t mean fabrication as in it didn’t exist, but that it wouldn’t have existed without the US.
> It was a civil war in its essence with two opposing groups of Vietnamese fighting for control of a fractured post-colonial state
It wasn't a civil war, not to begin with at least. The US installed a dictatorship in the South (the dictator they propped up was so bad they ended up greenlighting his removal and "accidental" assassination), with the promise of free elections. When predictions showed Ho Chi Minh would have won the elections in the South by a landslide, they simply cancelled the election.
That's not Vietnamese vs Vietnamese, it's Vietnamese vs colonial power.
In any colonial administration, people cozy with the colonial power will defend it and resent a change, of course.
The US never installed a government in the South. That was the French as a part of the ‘54 Treaty.
And your comment about a “free and fair” election makes me laugh. What do you suppose the vote would have been in the North? 100%? Probably.
Clearly a lot of Vietnamese opposed the communist regime. They lost, despite the support of the US. And the North won, with the support of China and the USSR.
Brave words for someone going against the current consensus about the Vietnam war.
Also, please avoid name calling.
The US in effect propped up and backed the dictatorship. They also helped topple it and install successive and increasingly incompetent military dictatorships to replace it. Woo!
> There is not “rightful” winner, just the winner.
Nah, in the case of a national independence movement against colonial oppressors, there's a rightful winner.
Their errors and failures are their own, but they were the right side in that war and the US was the wrong side.
Not sure what consensus you’re talking about? Are my facts incorrect? You’re saying the US installed a dictatorship in the South? Are you aware of the treaty in 1956 that created the partition?
The US propped up a dictatorship in the South, I agree. And the North was a dictatorship propped up by the Chinese and USSR.
The North was fortunate it had purged all opposition long ago so could focus on its insurgency in the South while the South had to deal with a fractured political landscape.
I’m not sure how you could look at the last 60 years of dictatorship in Vietnam and say the “right” side won. I mean, the Vietnamese who risked their lives to flee probably disagree with you?
> The US propped up a dictatorship in the South, I agree.
Good.
> And the North was a dictatorship propped up by the Chinese and USSR
No. The North was formed out of supporters of the anti colonial, nationalist side. Ho Chi Minh was a communist, but he was also a nationalist; he wasn't anybody's puppet. Just looking at Vietnam's difficult relationship with China should let you know it couldn't have been a "propped up by" sort of government.
> I’m not sure how you could look at the last 60 years of dictatorship in Vietnam and say the “right” side won.
Easy: the side fighting for independence against colonial oppressors is the right side. The US should understand this, it's allegedly one of their principles.
Life in Vietnam is not that bad, you know. There are Americans living there, even.
It's not the US right to choose other countries' form of government by force, anyway. I believe I've told you this multiple times already.
> I mean, the Vietnamese who risked their lives to flee probably disagree with you?
So? There were also collaborators with the French colonial rule. As was the case with British India; in every anticolonial struggle some locals have always opposed it.
I cannot argue with some group of nameless Vietnamese anyway, but you seem to speak for them through some kind of magic...
These claims act as if the Vietnamese weren't themselves divided on communism or that the USSR wasn't running propaganda campaigns to convince everybody they were in the moral right.
I grew up in Hungary where the socialist leadership (it is a very interesting fact how much they avoided the word communism and used socialism everywhere but I digress) was hell bent on continuously raising the standard of living because Janos Kadar was afraid of another revolution. (As his deranged last speech in 1989 revealed, he had nightmares for decades of his comrade, Imre Nagy, the prime minister in 1956, whom he betrayed in 1956 and executed in 1957.)
So we didn't have breadlines and politically charged prison sentences were long gone. Even Miklos Haraszti in 1973 only got a suspended eight months sentence for his book -- twenty years before he would've been executed for it, ten years before it would've been a several years non-suspended sentence. And I was a kid in the 80s which was even milder.
But what I do remember is the hopelessness in the shadows of the prefabricated giant concrete buildings. That there's nothing exciting in the future, that we have no choice in our life that no matter what we do, we will live and die in those meagre surroundings. I have, from the age of 10, every afternoon spent a few hours on extra mathematics so that I can get into an elite school so that I can get into a Western university once I am 18. This was not something my parents hammered into me, this was something I wanted to do, desperately so. I remember telling my mother when I was 9 that I wanted to commit suicide which of course she didn't take seriously and then I made this plan to escape.
I did get into the high school I wanted at 14 but my English wasn't good enough to get into MIT when I was 18 but that was not too bad because by 1993 of course that regime was over and there was hope again. Which, for me, was crushed in 2006 and I filed for a Canadian immigration visa and moved there in 2008.
> it is a very interesting fact how much they avoided the word communism and used socialism everywhere but I digress
In Bulgaria the official line is that the country and regime are socialist, which is on the path to communism which everyone should work towards. There were even slogans in factories and other public places about this.
The rest of your story is tragic. I'm sorry you had to live through such times.
Well, if you want hopelessness I suggest you live in contemporary capitalist Hungary - in many ways, the country's fate is similar to the one described in the article, it has turned into a Western vassal, where nothing worth having, no company with meaningful profits is actually owned by Hungarians.
The problems about life you've described in your post are still valid today - we the country has become a nearshore colony of western corporation, nothing you do or think up will as an intellectual will actually end up in the ownership of Hungarians. No interesting R&D will ever be conducted here - all the companies that built high-tech things, and all the research institutes collapsed like a house of cards during the 90s, or were bought up and watered down by the West.
The political situation is somewhat similar to the one under Socialism - boy, I do hope you like the the current party, since any meaningful democratic transfer of power seems unlikely in the near future.
The prices and taxes and salaries being what they are, the necessities of a basic, liveable middle-class life - a house, a car, some reserves for financial stability - is a pipe dream for even the educated upper-middle class - barring financial trickery, help from parents or working abroad.
As for the concrete prefabs - while they were not aesthetic I agree - but the urban planning concept that surrounded them meant that they didn't just go up on their own, but they made sure everything - playgrounds, schools, pharmacies, stores was accessible in walking distance. The blocks were also mostly placed far apart enough, that one could get sunlight and breathing space between them.
This is in stark contrast to modern real estate practices, where the goal of the for-profit developer is to buy a plot of land - oftentimes far away from existing city infrastructure, and turn it into as many sellable m^2 as possible, with no regards for liveability or infrastructure load.
But no matter since these hovels are more often than not are sold at prices that eclipse the lifetime earnings of your average Hungarian.
The only meaningful improvement I can think of is the ease with which one can move to the West.
In summary, I hardly think the situation's unchanged - but your chief complaint - `hopelessness` - is just as valid as ever.
I have spent weeks and months even on and off since 2009 in Hungary. Last visit, albeit just two days long, ended today, actually. I am well versed in the neofeudalism that Orban has wrought. And yet, look at my dates -- Orban is a symptom of much worse.
I do not know where you grew up but the playgrounds were fucking dystopian. Do you remember the ping-pong tables? I do. I remember them all too well. They were raw concrete with a piece of metal for a net, it had holes in , but still. Try to pay ping-pong on a non-at-all smooth surface if you can. I could continue with the slides, the see-saws and all.
Regardless of the particular merits of Socialism/Capitalism, I think we agree on the main point - the replacement of the Soviet system didn't significantly (if at all) improve the lives of it's former citizens - the main advantage seems to be it's easier to emigrate from it.
I vehemently disagree with this. Yes, life still sucks to an extent but not living under the boot, velvet wrapped or not, still matters quite a bit. And there are quite a few comforts of life now available which you couldn't even dream of back then. It's really not even comparable.
I needed to re-learn what sort of foods I like or not because I was eating such crap for the first half of my life. You can buy much higher quality food and in much bigger selection. There are restaurants worth going to. Life really did get better.
You now, I think it's broader than that. It's not western it's giant companies. Even.i' France there's a tiny feeling that as a nation we don't do much for our own. GAFAM organize a lot, China tech sector does the rest.
Saying "Communism is evil" is no different than saying "Capitalism is evil" with nothing to back it up. Contrary to maybe-current opinion, Communism and Democracy are not diametrically opposed: the former is an economic policy, the latter a system of government. You can have both, one or the other, or neither all at once.
Sure, maybe the governments that tried to implement communism failed on the world stage. Some today would say the same thing about the current economic/governmental systems-that-be (the US government of pre-WWII + cold war era was much more socialistic and less democratic than it is today – up to a 90% marginal income tax and no democratic election of US senators, very different than it is today!).
This entire article is about how, at least anecdotally, someone who lived under such a regime doesn't remember it being evil – in fact, quite the opposite! Governments, economic systems, and powers-that-be are always changing. In 20 years do we really think everything will be the same as it is now?
Russia form? Russia already existed, as the Russian socialist federal republic, a part of the Soviet Union. What would have been the alternative to letting Russia inherit the Soviet Union by being the last one remaining?
Distribution of people, industry, resources, agriculture is very uneven in Russia, so i don't see many potential subdivisions working well. Furthermore:
* self-determination of the people - i didn't hear any part of Russia wanted to be separate
* Russians in other countries (there since before the fall of the Soviet Union) are often destabilising and problematic - see Transnistria and Ukraine for good examples
* as we've seen, new Russia doesn't mind getting dirty to claim back land. A ballkanised Russia would be even worse, with frequent wars between the different entities.
> Means the total loss of Russian Army, in the most literal sense
Not really, every part would retain the troops and armaments located there, like how Ukraine inherited all long range strategic missile bombers ( Tu-160) of the Soviet Union, and how Transnistria inherited an army which was one of the main factors of them claiming independence and thus blocking Moldova's potential future as a part of Romania
Give a man a neighbour and he would find a reason to hate him. [0]
> Like the breakup of Yugoslavia
Except even more fighting for the resources and for sure it would spill out to the neighbouring countries too.
Though it would be a nice thought exercise to determine if Kaliningrad would become Königsberg.
[0] The genie offers a wish but says that whatever the peasant gets his neighbor will get doubled. The peasant thinks for a bit and then says “Make me blind in one eye”.
AFAIK there is a variant of that joke in many cultures.
Russia existed. It had nukes. Nobody were in a position to tell Russia it wasn't allowed to exist, and attempting to force it to split would have been a gross violation of international law.
Nobody cares much about international law, but it was in no-ones interest to have a dozen smaller, likely unstable, post-Russian states all armed with nuclear missiles.
Easily. Just to say: split up, or you will not get food. They had weeks of food left in storage and many regions already starved. Plus, everyone in Russia already expected breakup as inevitable. At that point, rejection of everything related to the country - being Soviet Union or Russia - reached the apogee and a well-propagandised, well-funded drive to just restart history from scratch - every switching away from Cyrillic and renouncing Communism and the Orthodox church - could work.
Other post-Soviet countries shrugged off previous Soviet history easily and never looked back. In 1991, Russia was no different and saw previous regime as sort of occupation by "them" (communists), not "us" making some mistakes in governing.
Who do you imagine would say this in your scenario? Most countries had no incentive to see Russia split and risk destabilizing the entire region and have no functioning government in control of the nukes. The split of the Soviet Union was already high risk.
Are you saying there have been less executions under other political systems?
Communism isn't evil, it's the people doing evil that are evil. Evil doesn't exist without evil people to perpetrate it. The problem with everyone being equal is that nobody really wants to be equal. The guy pushing the communist ideals doesn't want to be the rubbish collecting guy instead of the politician, even if the income was the same.
I don't think communism is good, or viable, but if it could ever work the the way it should it would not be evil.
If you bring such qualifications as a measure of 'evilness' of an economic or a government system then you are surely can explain how would you rate England on your scale of evilness.
>Communism and Democracy are not diametrically opposed: the former is an economic policy, the latter a system of government. You can have both, one or the other, or neither all at once.
There are examples of market economy without democracy (Russia, Saudi Arabia, and to a degree, China too) but i can't think of any, present-day, example of democracy without a market economy.
I don't think these can exist, because on one hand, once people have a real say in how they are governed, they will want to enrich themselves and it requires market economy and the rule of law (without rule of law, you can have profit, but can't have capitalisation because ownership is volatile), and on the other hand, people will not want to have a say in how they are governed before they are more or less well-off, because more primary needs will dominate their minds - and without popular pressure, democracy can't form. And without market economy, people are destined to remain poor.
Well of course we live in a dollar-denominated capitalist hegemony today, and with globalization as it is anyone who wants to be a part of the world stage needs to put up or shut up, especially with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 (which itself had market-based reforms toward the end). But that doesn't meet it _has_ to be that way, so much as that's just the current political happenstance.
Cuba is perhaps an interesting case study – and maybe it would be a lot more successful than it is today if it weren't so heavily sanctioned and embargoed by the United States – given that it's in a lot of ways still in its Cold War era. But it's hard to deny that for all the resources they've been stripped of (and attempted US-backed coups, and a non-mutually-agreed-US military base / prison on their land), that they've found some modern degree of success for what they have: very high education rates due to universal education, universal healthcare that is ahead of US-aligned peer-countries in the Caribbean, a respected culture of exporting medical professionals around the world, developed their own (effective) covid vaccine because the US sanctioned them from receiving any significant doses and now have the highest vaccination rate in the world, rising per capita gdp and household wealth... and they are, technically/in-name and more-so since the passing of Castro, a democracy (though the US government would say otherwise, but in my opinion if you'd consider modern-day Turkey, Ukraine, Hungary, or Poland a western democracy then so is Cuba), and yet also communist in most facets.
Communism would be great if people would actually be good. It's hard to not feel enticed by a future where everyone has equal rights, where the plentiful resources of the world are shared among everyone else and where there is no need for class warfare.
Sadly, time and again humanity has proven unable to do good at the scale of a country. The laudable ideals of any political system will need to resist man's evil nature or they're doomed to fail, and the communist regimes have all proven to be to easy to corrupt.
Communism isn't evil, it's foolish. The same way the idea that unrestricted capitalism is foolish if you strive to make everyone's lives better.
This is interesting because it's based on a view of socialism/communism that Marx mocked and ridiculed socialists for holding.
Marx argued that those who wanted to create socialism or communism through altruism were fools - his argument was that socialism was only possible once a society was well developed enough that it was in the self interest of the working class to force distribution of wealth.
He repeatedly criticised attempts to argue for equality for the sake of it rather than redistribution that would benefit those demanding it.
> Communism would be great if people would actually be good.
That's a tautology: Anything would be great if people were actually good[1]. That you need to rely on some external force of good for Communism to look good says more about Communism than any propaganda machine ever could.
[1] Other -isms would work even better than Communism if people were good.
> Communism would be great if people would actually be good.
Communism replaces a multitude of small, localised optimisation problems with a single, centralised, completely intractable optimisation problem, and at the same time destroys the very information required to tackle that problem at all.
Communism cannot work on any but the smallest scale, and is utterly doomed when applied to any modern nation state.
J. B. S. Haldane - himself a socialist - pointed this out as far back as 1928.* Whether communism is inherently evil or not, we know for a fact that it cannot ever work.
> The laudable ideals of any political system will need to resist man's evil nature
The solution to that is not to permit the government the ability to cause great harm to its citizens in the first place.
* See "On Being the Right Size", an essay mostly on scaling in biology, but also touching on related subjects.
That's assuming we want to tackle this "optimization problem"... people under capitalism may be more interested in escaping from the over-optimization of everything.
Everything would be great if people would actually be good; but in any case, lack of possibility to improve your and your posterity's life outcomes vs others, by saving/investing/building capital, which is the case in both socialism and communism, is a depressing thing to think of and i don't think it's "great" in any sense of it.
The problem is not that it's wrong—it's that it's repetitive and tedious, and usually turns nasty. We don't need to go around the same boring merry-go-round for the millionth time here. Please don't post like this to HN.
Here are some additional explanations that may help:
The west can have its opinions, but I don't think that it is nuanced enough when it comes to stuff outside of its boarders. Yugoslavia is not the Warsaw pact, and the Warsaw pact countries were different from each other and from the USSR.
Well, fuck you politely for assuming whatever about my family. As I told elsewhere, the different countries in Easter Europe had different stories to tell and both you and the OP are from Yugoslavia which is an outlier.
Edit: your recent posts to HN have been breaking the guidelines repeatedly and egregiously. We ban accounts that abuse this site that way. I'm not going to ban you right now because you've posted good things in the past, but please review the guidelines and return to that in the future.
You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. Perhaps you don't owe the people you're referring to better, but you owe this community much better if you're participating in it. Comments like this point directly to its destruction—so we don't allow them.
You've been repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. We ban accounts that do that. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Note this one:
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
and this one:
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
We are living in post post modern times, which happen to be hyper globalised, so that the authors' feeling of past times are way past us. He could start to read Francis Fukyama - End Of History[0] to understand what happened in 1989.
It was, in the end, even if it started as direct opposition of imperialism ( to an extent; export of revolution was one of the tenets of Lenin and early Bolshevism, and that might be considered a type of imperialism).
However i think the author is talking more about the smaller Eastern European communist countries in general ( Yugoslavia, East Germany are mentioned), not the Soviet Union.
If you mean the army, it’s not socialist. The workers don’t have democratic control over the means of production. It’s just a planned economy, plenty of those exist in dictatorships of the bourgeoisie (like Amazon).
The most ironic part of the whole capitalism vs communism business was that both had exactly the same structure... In different strata of the society. The all-encompassing planned economy of (mega)corporations vs the state.
Both the preferred habitat of a certain sort of politicking bureaucrat.
Of course, in properly-functioning capitalist systems, you can and should fight and Ally with the megacorps with start-ups. In socialist countries...
Does it really matter, given that it did not behave much differently from USA at that time, sending a lot of money as a foreign aid and intervening if local politics started leaning towards the rival powers?
EDIT: to clarify, this foreign policy was not considered "imperialism" at that time.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and especially please don't take threads on predictable ideological tangents. They're tedious because they're so repetitive, and they usually turn nasty too. Not what this site is for.
I live in China and I feel the same. I can understand the high level corruption, and media uselessness reporting nothing of substance, sure, but that's very far from how life in China seems to be perceived abroad.
I guess like the author it depends also where exactly in China/Yougoslavia you live(d), as Im sure a migrant miner in the north doesnt have the same experience as an electronics trader in the south.
But, I dont think it's that much worse than life in the U.S. even if it's certainly not far better. People who have no stake and a lot of comfort will care a lot about abstractions like freedom of speech on twitter reaching millions with aggressive opinions, but that's not so important: you can already discuss everything you want in private and the trend is sloooowly towards realizing we'll need public feedback in politics.
Just the way the communists reacted to the HK elections is interesting: they watered down the challenge, certainly, but then they sang and sang the praises of elections... well then, does that mean as long as the candidates proclaim their communist purity on the mainland, we could also vote there for the executive or legislative powers?
Mainland China has multiple parties - they don't even need to proclaim "Communist purity". The other parties just won't get more power no matter how many votes they get. The CCP is not afraid of elections, but of opposition politicians allowed to actually speak their minds, and transparent elections.
EDIT: whomever downvoted might want to look up political parties in China
This is very true. China is no longer the old hardline communism of “throw dissidents up against the wall”.
You can criticize the government, as long it’s about something that doesn’t threaten their hold on power. That’s true about most “freedoms” in China. If it doesn’t threaten the CCP, you’ll likely be admonished at most, and if you acquiesce, left alone.
But I’d you cross the line (and you will be warned), you won’t be tolerated.
And for the vast majority this is fine as long as they can put food on the table and their children have a future.
Communist systems are not that different from the standard democratic, US way of things. (I'm Romanian btw so used to be communist, now we're a democracy but the substance hasn't changed much).
1) US: has a two-party system, the "left" and the "right". Most democracies have the political power concentrated in just two parties - the "socialists" and the "conservatives", even though some minor contenders may exist on the scene and the main parties compete in bribing them so they can ensure majority.
The two parties hate each other's guts and compete for resources (how much they will divert to their own pocket) but both know very well that the show must go on, so don't count on anything but a shallow surface-level "competition" between them. If the system really is in danger of changing and they might lose their grip, they won't hesitate to leave aside their differences and unite in their common goal of ensuring long term self-preservation.
2) Communist system has a two-party system: the "party" and the "police". The communist party and the secret police mirror exactly the deep antagony between the two parties of the democratic two-party system and also their just as deep complicity when it comes to long term continuity.
It's just a matter of time until #2 realizes the only thing separating #1 from them is apparent legitimacy. Some level of oppressiveness is required for #2 and that's consuming resources, while #1 has the advantage that it frees those resources since they no longer have to force people in accepting the system but can tell them "you are free to make your own choice". So if and when those freely elected turn out to be the exact copy of the people they "replaced" you are free to f*k off and vote again next time, like that would change anything.
It's a little disheartening to see such a fascinating take on the denuancing of history reduced to "communism is bad/good" in many of the comments here.
By allowing ourselves to be fed a picture of unavoidable grimness behind the iron curtain, we become more susceptible to believing that a lack of such grimness in our own lives means all is well.
I think we need to strive to protect this nuance and preserve memories such as those the author shares. History and the worlds are not cookie cutter fairy tales were everything is either all good or all bad.
I have friends that immigrated from Romania, and I was surprised by their very different stories of living as a teenager in the 80s under communism. One was enjoying vacations abroad, imported goods and generally mostly living a western lifestyle while the other was struggling to survive.
Later learned that the former's father was an informant for Ceausescu's secret police (Securitate) - a butcher by profession but a literal snitch for any "anti-communism" behavior of his acquaintances, while the latter's grandfather was an "intellectual" despised by the regime and punished with forbidding anyone in his family from accessing higher education or good jobs.
It is possible the author's family enjoyed such privileges as well without his knowledge.
Many people could become „wealthy” then, but their conscience prevented them from doing things that would be required from them in exchange.
If you want to draw a comparison - imagine that every single worker in US gets a personal „eject” button that gives them $1M to their bank account, but it requires them to do things that will be unethical and oppressive towards their friends, family and the population in general.
Kind of like joining a mob, but without the dangers that go with it.
You probably have a decent point to make, if only you bothered to hone in on it.
Sure you can say some people won't work for Google because their conscience prevents them, but you can't reasonably compare getting rich by working for Google to getting rich by getting your friend arrested because they read a book or listened to a radio station... If you have a point to make, make it.
Most (almost all) party people back them didn’t get anyone arrested, they just did their jobs in power plants, schools, and cheese factories, just like they would in the west. Same as googlers today.
Sure, some did evil things. Again, just like in the west it’s easy to make money by hurting others.
My point is, the perceived difference between those is really just the narrative, the way they are being described in popular media. West has much better PR.
The USA especially has roughly the same proportion of its people imprisoned as totalitarian regimes, but those people are so dehumanized socially that they are impossible to imagine as even a part of this discussion.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a woman in NYC who migrated from some former USSR country and worked as a domestic servant -- she called working for such low wage in such conditions "communism."
USA has a number of things in common with most totalitarian regimes, from forced labour camps, to the creepy “pledge of allegiance to the state” which all the school kids are forced to recite every day. It’s quite creepy from the European point of view.
You’re unfairly revising the communist history behind the iron curtain in order to make a biased anti American point. People went to jail for reading certain books or attempting to listen to foreign radio stations. Poets would be under watch, threatened and forced to write pro-party poems. People would get picked up by agents for being non denominational Christians, and would “reappear” again weeks later beaten and 20 lbs lighter. There was nothing resembling rule of law; Justice was meaningless. There was no market and services were primarily bribe driven. (They still are; old habits die hard.) If you wanted to fix your abscessed tooth in the “free health care system” you better come up with two cartons of Kent and a box of Nescafé. It was all in plain sight with no pretense of a “system” at work.
Yes the USA has corruption, Justice has inequality problems, free speech is not always free, etc., but the problem with your perspective is that it’s binary instead of looking at the gradient. You’re like “the USA has corruption, and iron curtain had corruption, therefore they’re the same”. That’s dishonest. The USA has a functioning system of Justice that protects substantial individual rights and freedoms. Just because it’s not perfect doesn’t make it equal to the abject lack of Justice and freedoms in iron curtain dictatorships.
Communist countries had a functioning justice system too. You are doing exactly what you’ve accused me of doing: you are assuming that because some things were not perfect in the Soviet bloc, it meant a total lack of justice.
Kind of, but the big difference is getting rich (enough to afford a luxury lifestyle) in the West is more accessible. In the other system, you were either connected or not. If not, you were likely SOL.
Look at Musk. You think a communist country would tolerate a foreigner who became a billionaire and calls out politicians in a public forum? Maybe ask Jack Ma how his moderate comments were received.
I had an acquaintance from a communist country who was allowed to study in the US. One of the first ever. How did he get that privilege? His father was a high ranking party member who had a serious disagreement and was going to be expelled. The deal was “you quietly retire and we’ll let you son go to college in the US”. So he kept his mouth shut. They had total control, so using your family against you was fair game. I have no doubt Musk’s kid won’t face that same challenge.
Sure, both systems cater to the powerful, but one is a relatively open system and the other closed only to the “permanently privileged”.
Quite the opposite - in the west you won’t realistically get really rich unless your family is already rich (see Musk). In communist countries you can just become a party member and then go up the ladder; see most polish leaders from those times.
How do you define “rich”? I’m talking affording those things the elite in communist countries had - consumer goods, foreign vacations, your own house. Those are all accessible by the middle to middle-upper class in the West.
And no, party membership is not guaranteed to make you rich. And membership is not easy to get.
It surely depends on the time and the country, but for late 80s in Poland this stuff was available to regular party people, not “elite”. Party membership essentially meant you had to sign up and then avoid conflicts with the law and not get drunk too often, and that’s pretty much it. The party membership was less about party in a western, political sense, and more like being a good Boy Scout. I believe that’s also what party membership means today in China.
(Disclaimer: my grandpa was a party member, he managed local part of the polish power grid.)
It was mostly about availability of such luxuries. Even if you were "rich", money in a controlled economy was pretty much useless. Everything was rationed (one car per family, 2 breads, 1 bottle of milk per day, etc.) unless you were in the right circle (which meant being actively part of the secret police or a snitch for them). Also, travel abroad and imported goods (unless imported from USSR or a few other select communist countries) was strictly forbidden for the plebs.
I lived in Yugoslavia also. And no, what he described was common, at least how I remember. YU did have secret police, but it wasn't as bad as in countries under Soviets.
Generally life in ex YU from in 70s and on was pretty decent. We have better standards now (Slovenia), but some parts have worse living conditions than when they were in YU. And the gap between haves and have not is ever increasing. So author is not alone in what he is thinking.
Maybe democracy is a luxury belief of rich countries, or at least of states that have gone through all the steps of state-building and there is substantial rule of law. One of the most stupid things in the history of this century was the belief that arbitrarily "imposing" democracy in countries that have never finished their state-building was possible (e.g. arab and middle east countries).
And after 30 years of post-communism there are too few successes to call the end of history a success.
That's due to factors unrelated to the political system, though.
Some recent examples (Iran, Afghanistan) are completely self-made catastrophes, i.e. countries that were democratic, modern, and free and lost that due to foreign (or, let's face it: US-)intervention in the first place.
Same with post-communism. The factors at play here cannot be reduced to "imposing democracy" onto countries. Do you have any idea what 40 years of communism and being an artificial puppet state to a country and its economy? And it's not as if this was after two devastating wars either.
If you take a closer look at Europe you'll soon find out that it's a tad more complex than just the political system. From ethnic tensions to border disputes to geographic complexities there's so much more to it than just whether people are free to vote or not.
By visiting former Eastern Bloc countries and living there for some years after they joined EU, I believe I understand the author. He misses Idealism and Intellectualism and specially: time to pursue it. I miss it too - and I never lived there during that times.
Everything is a trade-off and this is certainly part of the price we pay to have full shelves.
It’s hard to not be bitter about it. Shelves are full, but people can afford less and less every year. And it was done at gunpoint by the western imperialist countries, with wars, coups, propaganda and sanctions.
The author feels their past was lost, but many of us are furious our futures were stolen.
When there was mention how things went in 90s Russia because of 'Neoliberalism'. Well there is truth in it. But things went bad also because USSR lost its colonies. And you can imagine that this part triggered me as I was born in one of those colonies.
But it is hard for me to talk about personal experiences of someone. Like my grandfather was talking about regime during WWII that collaborated with Nazi Germany. How things were suddenly better for them even if they were not actively participating. While father, mother and sister of my other grandfather were killed by the same regime.
My father was an elite worker in a Communist country. He cared about his work(in contrast with most of his colleges), was smart and had an independent mindset. He left because his life was impossible to live there. He went away with some close relatives while it was yet possible(over time it became almost impossible to escape).
In a capitalist society and with very little money he experienced a shock at first but over time he did very well.
Going back for visiting after the Iron Curtain fell he was considered someone like a traitor or something by the people that remained there. Most of them were nostalgic of the communist regime.
It is easy to understand, first the people that loved freedom or autonomy either left or were just exterminated. The people that remained were like sheep with zero personal initiative that needed constantly someone leading them telling them what to do.
Then suddenly the System collapses and they are told to live by their own means. They are old(and old dogs can't learn new tricks) and there is no people around that can show them as they were exterminated, or institutions, or examples to copy.
Countries like the US were created mostly by people that could not stand being told what to do in their original European countries. That makes not only the structures in the US but their genetics as well.
In communist countries people with initiative were exterminated and that not only affected their economic and political structures, but their genetics as well, they did not passed their genes to a new generation.
Probably because of my genes I am entrepreneur today. It is not for everyone as there is not such a thing as "safety".
heh, yeah, right, in the former ussr too there are people who fondly remember a lot of stuff their nomenclature families did have, which the other 99% didnt. and they certainly dont remember any shit the lowly plebs been through
what they are actually missing is the lost great times when they were able to feel being so high above the others
194 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 71.8 ms ] threadThere's a reason why in scientific discussion anecdotal evidence is dismissed. There's no singular canonical experience that people in Yugoslavia share. Also, people can live a very oblivious normal life without knowing all the darks secrets of a system.
And yet, of course, the upper echelons lived very well. They had palaces, anything they wanted was imported for them from the West, even if not allowed for the average citizen. Certainly, they didn't complain about their villages being gassed, or their sons being tortured to death by the sociopath son of the dictator.
But saying "there's no singular canonical experience" feels very strange in that regard, because there was, but with a few exceptions.
That does not mean Saddam wasn't a psychopath and a brutal oppressor. The fact he did those things are enough to condemn him as the evil dictator he was. There's no need to erase other experiences.
When talking about how "people in a country" live, you look at the average person. You don't say "but the King and his ministers live differently, we shouldn't erase their experiences". The inner circle always lives differently from the masses, but by definition, they are very few. Look at the lives of the many, not the few.
And regarding Iraq: during Saddam's reign about a quarter of a million people were murdered or disappeared. There's a good chance that the majority of Iraqis did have someone in their family affected, though it might not have been their son, but a cousin or nephew.
This need to see suffering as universal to be valid is problematic, because very few atrocities affect a large portion of a population. That most don't does not jvalidate them.
Another ~100k Kurds and Shiite Arabs were killed during the '91 uprisings. Together, they make up more than half of the population.
Unless Saddam was super surgical (#heWasnt), they were affected. Unless of course, by "personally affected", you mean they personally did die. But that would be a very strange idea.
In any case you're the one mong goalposts here - this started with simply making the point that it's unread jable to assume a single experience captures the experience of a people.
Nevertheless you've provided nothing to justify the idea that Saddam's purges affected anywhere close to a majority of the population, even if that is itself a distraction.
However, most Americans don't need to fear for their lives by the police, and most Iraqis aren't Kurds. Most Iraqis weren't gassed or tortured either.
You can't twist the narrative to pretend that the situation of the abused minorities are what the majority of the population experienced. Yes, they were living under their dictator's regime and no they were probably none too happy about the atrocities occurring, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a normal life outside that.
In the US police kill less than 1,000 per year. Most are white people, many justifiably. So let’s overestimate and say 25% of those are murder. (Clearly not, but work with me). So 250 per year in a country of 350M.
When the Kurds were gassed, a singular event, 3,000-5,000 people were killed. Random people, shelled by the Iraqi military for no reason other than living in the same place as rebellious Kurds. Iraq had a population of 16M at the time.
Those are clearly two VERY different situation you’re trying to draw a parallel between.
I do agree that these events don’t define the life of the general population.
You just read a blog post of a personal anecdote. What were you expecting? A dissertation?
Because it doesn't feed the research machine!
One anecdote is dismissed. Ten anecdotes are collected to start grifting for grants. And one hundred anecdotes gives you Empiricism (TM)!
I've come to value anecdotes as a marker of "something is there." To throw them away completely is foolish. Have you read most research papers being pumped out? The methodologies are always flawed (dare I say, biased; ha!) towards favorable results (or atleast I hope. Some of the methodologies I've seen for biological research are so stupid, I refuse to believe someone came up with them in good faith).
One anecdote should point us in a direction but it's not enough to prove anything.
AKA "there is a grain of joke in every joke".
Not everything is bigger in Texas but this is a clear marker on some aspects of Texans self-perception. Which was exported so successfully it's now known not only in all other states but in other states too.
Of course not everyone was thrown into prison, or stood in breadlines. Experiences depended on your relative social standing under the old regime and how that social standing was viewed under the new regime. The revolution for the laborers, but the most successful labors? Blood enemies of the people.
Plenty of people were born into relative privilege under the communist system. Children who quietly got to go to foreign universities, while their parents talked about the need for the lower classes to sacrifice their children for the revolution. Those same children who now run very successful businesses thanks to their family connections.
And there was the flip side, which the author doesn’t like the focus on. The ones who were successful businessmen or even farmers but after the revolution thrown into prison as “dangerous counter revolutionaries”. Or the families of that person who had to pay penance for their bloodlines sins - their children denied an education. Of course the assets stripped from the family were given to the “people”, the the most generous portion reserved for those most loyal to the revolution.
You just described the situation everywhere, Communist or Capitalist or Whateverist system.
I don't think it's fair to characterize the people the author talks about as children raised under privileged circumstances necessarily. Many working class people, mothers who had plenty of support in raising kids, people who enjoyed relatively egalitarian and free education for the first time and so on have legitimately good memories, and are today some of the most dissatisfied with the state of affairs. In particular the role of women seems to have been mostly lost. When the East had already granted reproductive rights, women in the West got abortions in the Netherlands.
This is generally written off as "Ostalgie" (pun on nostalgia) in exactly the same way the author describes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Fed...
He still arrested opponents and operated a secret police force who dealt with dissident voices though, so hey.
"They would soon see, that criminal means once tolerated are soon preferred. They present a shorter cut to the object than through the highway of the moral virtues. Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon becomethe pretext, and perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites. Such must be the consequences of losing in the splendour of these triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and right."
That was a jarring phrase that helped underscore the great divide between East and West.
However for the rest you're on point. South Vietnam was a fake regime propped up by the French initially and then the US, had no legitimacy, wasn't democratic ( which could have been a saving grace for it) and was in US-backed violation of the Geneva conference. That's not to say there weren't anti-communists in Vietnam, they were just a small minority (Ho Chi Minh had very strong support in the North, which was more populous).
The communists certainly had strong support in the North (they had secured power and purged any opposing elements, including within their party). They also had support in the south, but were forced to infiltrate hundreds of thousands over the war to sustain a fighting force as they weren’t able to grow it organically in the South (also shown during the 1968 Tet Offensive where no population center or military unit “flipped” to the communist side).
OP said the North was “right” because the South was X,Y,Z.
I countered with “the North also did X,Y,Z.”, thus countering their claims that the North was somehow “more pure or righteous”.
Maybe it is whataboutism, but that seems appropriate when someone is trying to claim superiority to another?
It kind of was though. It was created temporarily until elections are held by a treaty over fears the communists will have control over all of Vietnam ( they would have), and existed solely due to direct and heavy American support. It wasn't a country based on self-determination or anything of the like.
And I suppose you could say the same about the American Rebellion. It never would have succeeded without support from the French. Does that mean the fledgling Continental Congress wasn’t a real country?
Today Vietnam and China having mostly-capitalist economies so what was really the purpose of their revolutions?
The CCP's primary claim to legitimacy is that they kicked out the Japanese. They were a little late to get to kick out the Manchus.
The US policy in Vietnam boiled down to one thing: body count. US only real measure of success was how many Vietcong/PAVN they killed; and because they had no way of telling the difference -- nor did they care much -- this effectively meant "kill as many Vietnamese as possible" (they were encouraged to consider any casualty as VC, overrepresenting their numbers). And to top it out, they engaged in massive forced resettlement, pillage, rape, destroyed foliage and the ecosystem, and poisoned the land.
Think about it.
Americans living in Vietnam claim the Vietnamese don't hate them. Even ex veterans visiting the country report this. That's pretty amazing all things considered.
I mean we’re nearly 50 years past their victory? When are they going to “enact the American rights Ho Chi Minh showed so much admiration for”?
They delivered on independence from colonial powers, and on gaining self determination. No small feat!
I'm not sure what you believe they promised.
Vietnam was devastated as a country. The land itself, and the people. Countless Vietnamese were killed, far more than whatever the US lost in the war. The US did a number on them, the effects of which are still felt. It's a wonder these days they don't hate America (which by all accounts they don't).
Initial admiration for US values naturally fell once the US waged war on them, and within Vietnam leadership the hardliners gained power. Being attacked tends to give voice to the hardliners and sideline the "liberals".
It's a matter of record Ho Chi Minh initially admired the US and expected their support. It's a matter of record the US feared he would win the elections and so they cancelled them. You can argue till you're blue in the face, those two facts will remain.
You’re doing an awful lot of hand waving to explain why Vietnam still doesn’t enact the freedom “they admire so much”. Your claim that Ho Chi Minh’s “disappointment from lack of US support” is the reason why Vietnamese still don’t have those rights rings pretty hollow.
> Ho Chi Minh admired the US
Which is a matter of public record.
> his government exacted brutal land reforms even the hardliners had to call out as “going too far”.
This has nothing to do with anything. Please try not to sidetrack the conversation: the Viet Minh and its successors were fighting a struggle of independence, the US could have been their ally but instead chose to turn against them and trash their country, while propping up a dictator so bad they later gave the greenlight for its removal (and whooopsie, his "accidental" assassination). Not to speak of the appalling Phoenix Program assassination campaign whose subtle tactics included, by the admission of its practitioners, listening to tips about alleged VC, knocking on the door, then wasting whoever answered it.
Doesn't seem so freedom loving to me!
> Your claim that Ho Chi Minh’s “disappointment from lack of US support” is the reason why Vietnamese still don’t have those rights rings pretty hollow.
Who knows what would have happened had the US supported Vietnam's anti colonial struggles instead of siding with their oppressors. It couldn't have been worse than the unmitigated disaster the US conducted.
You’re missing my point entirely. Ho Chi Minh claimed he admired the US’ freedoms. Then once the North was established, his government enacted brutal land reforms that even the communists said went too far.
What I’m saying is words are cheap and Ho Chi Minh never admired the US’ freedoms (maybe theoretically?), they were just empty words to try and get a powerful ally on his side.
That’s clearly a factual statement when you realize the VCP has zero intention, even today, of giving the people of Vietnam the same freedoms you claim Ho Chi Minh so admired, almost 60 years after taking power over all of Vietnam.
And yes, the Phoenix program was effective because it used the same tactics against the communists they used against villages in the South. It's pretty rich seeing the North call out the US and South foe those tactics - truly the pot calling the kettle black.
Let me correct you: it's not "the North". It's called Vietnam and the US waged a war against it (mostly against South Vietnam).
Also, it's the world -- we -- who is appalled at the way the US behaved in Vietnam, including its assassination campaigns, Agent Orange, Napalm, mass murder, etc.
As for what may have happened, unlike you I'm not a mind reader to know what was false or faked. I do know if the US hadn't waged war on Vietnam, things would have been way better, if only because many thousands more Vietnamese would have lived, the country wouldn't have been destroyed and who knows, an unscathed Vietnam might have turned way more sympathetic to the West.
You and people like you are sickening.
The US has a history of this - Castro wooed the US too. His party didn't even describe itself as socialist until years after the US slammed the door in his face and the Soviets didn't. Once the Soviets had bought him, Castro made concession after concession that he could have made to the US instead.
To claim Ho Chi Minh or Castro would have been freedom loving leaders is laughable.
What is a matter of fact is that both attempted to get US support before they turned elsewhere. And that support could have come with strings that might have produced much better outcomes.
Just like it did when Castro turned to the Soviets. He proved he could be bought, but the US was unwilling to buy.
As for Ho, he was more concerned with self determination and anyi-imperialism than the specifics of the resulting regime. US support with strings there too could have avoided millions of dead and gotten a more moderate regime.
In terms of pure numbers of men they certainly contributed less than the Kuomintang, but in terms of overall impact it's close to impossible to say.
Is Vietnam in any way "more independent" today than if the north had lost? It makes sense if you claim to fight the Americans because they're evil capitalists but Vietnam turned around to adopt chinese-style reforms and is now mostly friendly towards the US.
> The CCP's primary claim to legitimacy is that they kicked out the Japanese.
The CCP is in power because they defeated the KMT, but decades later they adopted capitalism and today justify their rule through nationalism.
What's the point of a civil war if you eventually end up adopting most of the other side's policies?
Yes.
> and is now mostly friendly towards the US.
Independence works like that. When you let a country decide instead of forcing by military power, they might even choose to like you -- or at least, not hate you.
The US and Britain are friends and allies in modern times, after all.
There the communists were installed to power by the invading Russian army, even if false revolutionary and liberation histories were made up after the facts.
The few places where there were indeed communists fighting for liberation, i.e. Tito in Yugoslavia or Enver Hoxha in Albania, so they had some legitimacy, were precisely the places which later escaped from being under strict Russian control.
For Yugoslavia and Albania, what you say seems to apply.
There was no “rightful” liberation. It was a civil war in its essence with two opposing groups of Vietnamese fighting for control of a fractured post-colonial state, with plenty of foreign interference/assistance during the whole thing.
In the end the North did a better job (through both smart politics, good PR and internal support/oppression of opposition).
The difference is that with no outside meddling and support, South Vietnam wouldn't have existed or would have existed very briefly until a Communist electoral victory of the whole country. Without the US in Vietnamese affair, there is no North-South war.
And the US didn’t get significantly involved (beyond material support for the French) in Vietnam until the early 1960’s with the help of military advisors. The build up didn’t start until around ‘65 when it was apparent the South would collapse (through a combination of communist subversion but also a lot of in fighting) The South existed as an independent state for a few years - barely, I would agree. But it existed.
It's not your right to decide whether people have free will or not. It's their call. "Deciding" for them is called colonialism.
Ho Chi Minh had huge popular support; precisely what the US feared.
PS: before the US fucked things up, Ho Chi Minh even looked up to them and fully expected their support against the French. That's how bad the US fucked up.
And your comment about “free will” is telling. How much “free will” do the Vietnamese have today?
The only difference is it’s Vietnamese elite that control the masses, not some foreign power.
False. Did you know the Viet Minh initially counted with support from the US? When it was an anti Japanese struggle, of course. Initial US assessments even thought the French should get the fuck out; those sentiments were overruled by others in the US, sadly.
The Vietnamese struggle was a struggle of national liberation. Aided from the outside like all resistance organizations, sure -- like the French resistance against the Nazis was. Didn't make France any less real. Imagine if the Allies had partitioned France in two after the war, claimed the last Nazi held parts were to be ruled by Germany's successors or whatever, and that the ensuing fight to reunify France was "a civil war" and that the free (non German) France was "just as artificial".
> I’m not sure what your point is?
That the US sided with colonial powers and against an independence movement. Not their finest hour.
> How much “free will” do the Vietnamese have today?
More than they would have had had the US backed dictatorship won.
Not that it matters: it's not for you to decide. There's no White Man's Burden to send civilization to other countries. Let them have their self determination and arrange their governments how they like.
Above all, don't murder them by the thousands, destroy the countryside and poison their land when you don't like the government they choose.
The US sided with a colonial power and was therefore wrong.
They also destroyed the country in their alleged attempt to "save" it. They were savage about it. Brutal.
Please stop it with the sidetracking attempts. We're talking about Vietnam, whether the US was the aggressor, and whether calling it the liberation of Saigon makes sense.
The liberated themselves from Japanese and then French control, with limited ( some arms) outside help, so that's just false.
They ended up getting rid of the mightiest army in the world, after all.
When the French lost and withdrew, America invaded and was subsequently beaten.
This is not a defence of China or Russia, look at how they are invading Tibet and the Ukraine, but the Vietnamese people weren’t invaded by China or the USSR, they were invaded by the US. South-Vietnam was an American fabrication during its invasion following the post French-Indonesian-war, because the Vietnamese people had a government in Hanoi, the US simply didn’t like it.
After the communist victory at Dien Bien Phu, the French negotiated a peace (without much choice) that forced them to give up the North (where the communists were strongest).
The French slowly disengaged from the South over the next decade leaving a fragile Vietnamese government in the South that had no interest in joining the communists in the North (1 million fled during partition).
The US did back a fractured, unstable government in the South in order to contain communism - I’m not arguing that. But to claim that the country, one that lasted 20 years, wasn’t “real” is just silly.
It’s like saying South Korea isn’t real because the UN backs it’s security and the communists had significant support prior to partition.
They had also been supporting the French with materiel and even limited numbers of advisors during the First Indochina War.
There was a war of national liberation against a colonial power, and the US sided with the colonial power.
Of course Ho Chi Minh would win - there were no free elections in the North (100% of votes went for him!) and substantial support in the South. I wouldn’t call that a fair and free election.
Yes, and I agree the US supported the French materially and with advisors.
But South Vietnam was no longer a colonial power. The French were gone and the Vietnamese called the shots (not without foreign influence, I agree, but similar to the USSR and China influence in the North - you pay the bills you get a say).
But none of that infers the South wasn’t a real country.
False.
The US own internal documents stated they believed Ho Chi Minh held enormous popular support, especially in the countryside.
They cancelled the elections and instead propped up a bloody dictatorship. Nothing natural about the South, it was completely artificial, incompetent, and repressive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940%E2%80%931946_in_French_In...
So are you arguing that South Korea is a “completely artificial, incompetent and repressive” country? It was also a dictatorship after the war for about 20 years. But Vietnam still is today after 50.
No, I'm arguing about Vietnam. Please try not to sidetrack the conversation.
Fact: Ho Chi Minh had huge popular support and would have won general elections, a fact the US didn't like at that stage and so they made sure it didn't happen. Instead, they propped up one of the most brutal dictatorships in the region, one so bad they had to allow its removal and the assassination of their puppet dictator.
They also destroyed South Vietnam, killing villagers, poisoning the land and bombing the hell out of North Vietnam.
And they failed because they were foreign aggressors.
Fact: the US doesn't get to choose the form of government of other countries. When they try to do it by military force, they are invaders and aggressors.
You can argue until you're blue in the face, those are the facts.
The North was a brutal dictatorship propped up by China and the USSR.
The South was a brutal dictatorship propped up by the West.
Both had Vietnamese supporters. Again, to dismiss the South as not a real country is just twisting facts. It was a civil war between two Vietnamese factions and the South lost. Those are the facts.
The mythology the North has created around the war (just like every country does) is helped to keep its grip on power but is a gross oversimplification.
And you’re right, the US doesn’t get to choose which government a country has. But neither does Vietnam when it comes to Cambodia or Laos, but hey, they hasn’t stopped them!
Please stop trying to sidetrack the conversation.
> The North was a brutal dictatorship propped up by China and the USSR.
No, it was a nationalist anti colonial government that aimed at the reunification and independence of Vietnam.
> Both had Vietnamese supporters. Again, to dismiss the South as not a real country is just twisting facts
It was an artificial creation imposed upon the Vietnamese by external parties; hence not a real country.
> The mythology the North has created around the war
Oh, there is a mythology alright! There's a whole myth created about this war, mostly by the foreign country that fought it -- to devastating effect to both Vietnam and the invaders who fought in it -- and who claims to be freedom loving and is still trying to heal from the wounds and the nonsense the war it inflicted caused upon thousands. This mythology is necessary in order to reconcile their aspirations to being a beacon of freedom and the fact they acted on the side of colonial oppressors.
> But neither does Vietnam when it comes to Cambodia or Laos, but hey, they hasn’t stopped them
But we are not talking about that, are we? If we were, we could condemn Vietnam's interference with other countries. Regrettably, this was about Vietnam's own struggle for independence and US interference with said independence.
When the US was fighting for its own independence, that's good. When they were stopping and interfering with another country's, that's bad. The same country can act good and bad at times. This was a case when the US was bad.
And torrents of blood.
Americans mourn 58,000 dead, but the NVC lost well north of a million.
It wasn't a civil war, not to begin with at least. The US installed a dictatorship in the South (the dictator they propped up was so bad they ended up greenlighting his removal and "accidental" assassination), with the promise of free elections. When predictions showed Ho Chi Minh would have won the elections in the South by a landslide, they simply cancelled the election.
That's not Vietnamese vs Vietnamese, it's Vietnamese vs colonial power.
In any colonial administration, people cozy with the colonial power will defend it and resent a change, of course.
The US never installed a government in the South. That was the French as a part of the ‘54 Treaty.
And your comment about a “free and fair” election makes me laugh. What do you suppose the vote would have been in the North? 100%? Probably.
Clearly a lot of Vietnamese opposed the communist regime. They lost, despite the support of the US. And the North won, with the support of China and the USSR.
There is not “rightful” winner, just the winner.
Brave words for someone going against the current consensus about the Vietnam war.
Also, please avoid name calling.
The US in effect propped up and backed the dictatorship. They also helped topple it and install successive and increasingly incompetent military dictatorships to replace it. Woo!
> There is not “rightful” winner, just the winner.
Nah, in the case of a national independence movement against colonial oppressors, there's a rightful winner.
Their errors and failures are their own, but they were the right side in that war and the US was the wrong side.
The US propped up a dictatorship in the South, I agree. And the North was a dictatorship propped up by the Chinese and USSR.
The North was fortunate it had purged all opposition long ago so could focus on its insurgency in the South while the South had to deal with a fractured political landscape.
I’m not sure how you could look at the last 60 years of dictatorship in Vietnam and say the “right” side won. I mean, the Vietnamese who risked their lives to flee probably disagree with you?
Good.
> And the North was a dictatorship propped up by the Chinese and USSR
No. The North was formed out of supporters of the anti colonial, nationalist side. Ho Chi Minh was a communist, but he was also a nationalist; he wasn't anybody's puppet. Just looking at Vietnam's difficult relationship with China should let you know it couldn't have been a "propped up by" sort of government.
> I’m not sure how you could look at the last 60 years of dictatorship in Vietnam and say the “right” side won.
Easy: the side fighting for independence against colonial oppressors is the right side. The US should understand this, it's allegedly one of their principles.
Life in Vietnam is not that bad, you know. There are Americans living there, even.
It's not the US right to choose other countries' form of government by force, anyway. I believe I've told you this multiple times already.
> I mean, the Vietnamese who risked their lives to flee probably disagree with you?
So? There were also collaborators with the French colonial rule. As was the case with British India; in every anticolonial struggle some locals have always opposed it.
I cannot argue with some group of nameless Vietnamese anyway, but you seem to speak for them through some kind of magic...
So we didn't have breadlines and politically charged prison sentences were long gone. Even Miklos Haraszti in 1973 only got a suspended eight months sentence for his book -- twenty years before he would've been executed for it, ten years before it would've been a several years non-suspended sentence. And I was a kid in the 80s which was even milder.
But what I do remember is the hopelessness in the shadows of the prefabricated giant concrete buildings. That there's nothing exciting in the future, that we have no choice in our life that no matter what we do, we will live and die in those meagre surroundings. I have, from the age of 10, every afternoon spent a few hours on extra mathematics so that I can get into an elite school so that I can get into a Western university once I am 18. This was not something my parents hammered into me, this was something I wanted to do, desperately so. I remember telling my mother when I was 9 that I wanted to commit suicide which of course she didn't take seriously and then I made this plan to escape.
I did get into the high school I wanted at 14 but my English wasn't good enough to get into MIT when I was 18 but that was not too bad because by 1993 of course that regime was over and there was hope again. Which, for me, was crushed in 2006 and I filed for a Canadian immigration visa and moved there in 2008.
In Bulgaria the official line is that the country and regime are socialist, which is on the path to communism which everyone should work towards. There were even slogans in factories and other public places about this.
The rest of your story is tragic. I'm sorry you had to live through such times.
The problems about life you've described in your post are still valid today - we the country has become a nearshore colony of western corporation, nothing you do or think up will as an intellectual will actually end up in the ownership of Hungarians. No interesting R&D will ever be conducted here - all the companies that built high-tech things, and all the research institutes collapsed like a house of cards during the 90s, or were bought up and watered down by the West.
The political situation is somewhat similar to the one under Socialism - boy, I do hope you like the the current party, since any meaningful democratic transfer of power seems unlikely in the near future.
The prices and taxes and salaries being what they are, the necessities of a basic, liveable middle-class life - a house, a car, some reserves for financial stability - is a pipe dream for even the educated upper-middle class - barring financial trickery, help from parents or working abroad.
As for the concrete prefabs - while they were not aesthetic I agree - but the urban planning concept that surrounded them meant that they didn't just go up on their own, but they made sure everything - playgrounds, schools, pharmacies, stores was accessible in walking distance. The blocks were also mostly placed far apart enough, that one could get sunlight and breathing space between them.
This is in stark contrast to modern real estate practices, where the goal of the for-profit developer is to buy a plot of land - oftentimes far away from existing city infrastructure, and turn it into as many sellable m^2 as possible, with no regards for liveability or infrastructure load. But no matter since these hovels are more often than not are sold at prices that eclipse the lifetime earnings of your average Hungarian.
The only meaningful improvement I can think of is the ease with which one can move to the West.
In summary, I hardly think the situation's unchanged - but your chief complaint - `hopelessness` - is just as valid as ever.
I do not know where you grew up but the playgrounds were fucking dystopian. Do you remember the ping-pong tables? I do. I remember them all too well. They were raw concrete with a piece of metal for a net, it had holes in , but still. Try to pay ping-pong on a non-at-all smooth surface if you can. I could continue with the slides, the see-saws and all.
As for the schools do not get me started. If you speak Hungarian I wrote down our education journey at https://www.reddit.com/r/hungary/comments/he9c9s/a_mi_t%C3%B... tl;dr: I financed a micro reform school for five long, long years, 2015-2020.
And the hopelessness is no longer valid because you can leave. Also: you should.
I needed to re-learn what sort of foods I like or not because I was eating such crap for the first half of my life. You can buy much higher quality food and in much bigger selection. There are restaurants worth going to. Life really did get better.
It seems that we're on a sociological plateau.
Sure, maybe the governments that tried to implement communism failed on the world stage. Some today would say the same thing about the current economic/governmental systems-that-be (the US government of pre-WWII + cold war era was much more socialistic and less democratic than it is today – up to a 90% marginal income tax and no democratic election of US senators, very different than it is today!).
This entire article is about how, at least anecdotally, someone who lived under such a regime doesn't remember it being evil – in fact, quite the opposite! Governments, economic systems, and powers-that-be are always changing. In 20 years do we really think everything will be the same as it is now?
Russia form? Russia already existed, as the Russian socialist federal republic, a part of the Soviet Union. What would have been the alternative to letting Russia inherit the Soviet Union by being the last one remaining?
* self-determination of the people - i didn't hear any part of Russia wanted to be separate
* Russians in other countries (there since before the fall of the Soviet Union) are often destabilising and problematic - see Transnistria and Ukraine for good examples
* as we've seen, new Russia doesn't mind getting dirty to claim back land. A ballkanised Russia would be even worse, with frequent wars between the different entities.
Means the total loss of Russian Army, in the most literal sense.
In 1990s there were anecdotes how you could buy a tank from a corrupted Russian Army personnel. With balkanised Russia that would be a hard reality.
Not really, every part would retain the troops and armaments located there, like how Ukraine inherited all long range strategic missile bombers ( Tu-160) of the Soviet Union, and how Transnistria inherited an army which was one of the main factors of them claiming independence and thus blocking Moldova's potential future as a part of Romania
Along with hundreds of T-60/72 and all the infantry and vehicle munitions.
But you can't bring Tu-160 to a local mafia dispute. You can bring a tank there if it's only a couple of hundred dollars and nobody /can/ stop you.
> how Transnistria inherited an army
Now imagine various small unaffiliated armies all the way to Ural.
So a bloodbath? Like the breakup of Yugoslavia, just with almost no ethnical divisions, with nukes and much bigger scale?
Give a man a neighbour and he would find a reason to hate him. [0]
> Like the breakup of Yugoslavia
Except even more fighting for the resources and for sure it would spill out to the neighbouring countries too. Though it would be a nice thought exercise to determine if Kaliningrad would become Königsberg.
[0] The genie offers a wish but says that whatever the peasant gets his neighbor will get doubled. The peasant thinks for a bit and then says “Make me blind in one eye”.
AFAIK there is a variant of that joke in many cultures.
Russia existed. It had nukes. Nobody were in a position to tell Russia it wasn't allowed to exist, and attempting to force it to split would have been a gross violation of international law.
Other post-Soviet countries shrugged off previous Soviet history easily and never looked back. In 1991, Russia was no different and saw previous regime as sort of occupation by "them" (communists), not "us" making some mistakes in governing.
Do the world a favor please.
Communism isn't evil, it's the people doing evil that are evil. Evil doesn't exist without evil people to perpetrate it. The problem with everyone being equal is that nobody really wants to be equal. The guy pushing the communist ideals doesn't want to be the rubbish collecting guy instead of the politician, even if the income was the same.
I don't think communism is good, or viable, but if it could ever work the the way it should it would not be evil.
If you bring such qualifications as a measure of 'evilness' of an economic or a government system then you are surely can explain how would you rate England on your scale of evilness.
Hint: Auspicio Regis et Senatus Angliae
There are examples of market economy without democracy (Russia, Saudi Arabia, and to a degree, China too) but i can't think of any, present-day, example of democracy without a market economy. I don't think these can exist, because on one hand, once people have a real say in how they are governed, they will want to enrich themselves and it requires market economy and the rule of law (without rule of law, you can have profit, but can't have capitalisation because ownership is volatile), and on the other hand, people will not want to have a say in how they are governed before they are more or less well-off, because more primary needs will dominate their minds - and without popular pressure, democracy can't form. And without market economy, people are destined to remain poor.
Cuba is perhaps an interesting case study – and maybe it would be a lot more successful than it is today if it weren't so heavily sanctioned and embargoed by the United States – given that it's in a lot of ways still in its Cold War era. But it's hard to deny that for all the resources they've been stripped of (and attempted US-backed coups, and a non-mutually-agreed-US military base / prison on their land), that they've found some modern degree of success for what they have: very high education rates due to universal education, universal healthcare that is ahead of US-aligned peer-countries in the Caribbean, a respected culture of exporting medical professionals around the world, developed their own (effective) covid vaccine because the US sanctioned them from receiving any significant doses and now have the highest vaccination rate in the world, rising per capita gdp and household wealth... and they are, technically/in-name and more-so since the passing of Castro, a democracy (though the US government would say otherwise, but in my opinion if you'd consider modern-day Turkey, Ukraine, Hungary, or Poland a western democracy then so is Cuba), and yet also communist in most facets.
Sadly, time and again humanity has proven unable to do good at the scale of a country. The laudable ideals of any political system will need to resist man's evil nature or they're doomed to fail, and the communist regimes have all proven to be to easy to corrupt.
Communism isn't evil, it's foolish. The same way the idea that unrestricted capitalism is foolish if you strive to make everyone's lives better.
Marx argued that those who wanted to create socialism or communism through altruism were fools - his argument was that socialism was only possible once a society was well developed enough that it was in the self interest of the working class to force distribution of wealth.
He repeatedly criticised attempts to argue for equality for the sake of it rather than redistribution that would benefit those demanding it.
That's a tautology: Anything would be great if people were actually good[1]. That you need to rely on some external force of good for Communism to look good says more about Communism than any propaganda machine ever could.
[1] Other -isms would work even better than Communism if people were good.
Communism replaces a multitude of small, localised optimisation problems with a single, centralised, completely intractable optimisation problem, and at the same time destroys the very information required to tackle that problem at all.
Communism cannot work on any but the smallest scale, and is utterly doomed when applied to any modern nation state.
J. B. S. Haldane - himself a socialist - pointed this out as far back as 1928.* Whether communism is inherently evil or not, we know for a fact that it cannot ever work.
> The laudable ideals of any political system will need to resist man's evil nature
The solution to that is not to permit the government the ability to cause great harm to its citizens in the first place.
* See "On Being the Right Size", an essay mostly on scaling in biology, but also touching on related subjects.
The problem is not that it's wrong—it's that it's repetitive and tedious, and usually turns nasty. We don't need to go around the same boring merry-go-round for the millionth time here. Please don't post like this to HN.
Here are some additional explanations that may help:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: your recent posts to HN have been breaking the guidelines repeatedly and egregiously. We ban accounts that abuse this site that way. I'm not going to ban you right now because you've posted good things in the past, but please review the guidelines and return to that in the future.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Note this one:
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
and this one:
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184
However i think the author is talking more about the smaller Eastern European communist countries in general ( Yugoslavia, East Germany are mentioned), not the Soviet Union.
I'll also point out that:
- The imperialistic part of the USA is the socialist part of USA (which does exist and gets larger every day).
- Empires are not economically profitable as a whole, only a few people profit.
If you mean the army, it’s not socialist. The workers don’t have democratic control over the means of production. It’s just a planned economy, plenty of those exist in dictatorships of the bourgeoisie (like Amazon).
Of course, in properly-functioning capitalist systems, you can and should fight and Ally with the megacorps with start-ups. In socialist countries...
Interesting to consider, as sort of a tolerance paradox.
EDIT: to clarify, this foreign policy was not considered "imperialism" at that time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I guess like the author it depends also where exactly in China/Yougoslavia you live(d), as Im sure a migrant miner in the north doesnt have the same experience as an electronics trader in the south.
But, I dont think it's that much worse than life in the U.S. even if it's certainly not far better. People who have no stake and a lot of comfort will care a lot about abstractions like freedom of speech on twitter reaching millions with aggressive opinions, but that's not so important: you can already discuss everything you want in private and the trend is sloooowly towards realizing we'll need public feedback in politics.
Just the way the communists reacted to the HK elections is interesting: they watered down the challenge, certainly, but then they sang and sang the praises of elections... well then, does that mean as long as the candidates proclaim their communist purity on the mainland, we could also vote there for the executive or legislative powers?
EDIT: whomever downvoted might want to look up political parties in China
You can criticize the government, as long it’s about something that doesn’t threaten their hold on power. That’s true about most “freedoms” in China. If it doesn’t threaten the CCP, you’ll likely be admonished at most, and if you acquiesce, left alone.
But I’d you cross the line (and you will be warned), you won’t be tolerated.
And for the vast majority this is fine as long as they can put food on the table and their children have a future.
1) US: has a two-party system, the "left" and the "right". Most democracies have the political power concentrated in just two parties - the "socialists" and the "conservatives", even though some minor contenders may exist on the scene and the main parties compete in bribing them so they can ensure majority.
The two parties hate each other's guts and compete for resources (how much they will divert to their own pocket) but both know very well that the show must go on, so don't count on anything but a shallow surface-level "competition" between them. If the system really is in danger of changing and they might lose their grip, they won't hesitate to leave aside their differences and unite in their common goal of ensuring long term self-preservation.
2) Communist system has a two-party system: the "party" and the "police". The communist party and the secret police mirror exactly the deep antagony between the two parties of the democratic two-party system and also their just as deep complicity when it comes to long term continuity.
It's just a matter of time until #2 realizes the only thing separating #1 from them is apparent legitimacy. Some level of oppressiveness is required for #2 and that's consuming resources, while #1 has the advantage that it frees those resources since they no longer have to force people in accepting the system but can tell them "you are free to make your own choice". So if and when those freely elected turn out to be the exact copy of the people they "replaced" you are free to f*k off and vote again next time, like that would change anything.
By allowing ourselves to be fed a picture of unavoidable grimness behind the iron curtain, we become more susceptible to believing that a lack of such grimness in our own lives means all is well.
I think we need to strive to protect this nuance and preserve memories such as those the author shares. History and the worlds are not cookie cutter fairy tales were everything is either all good or all bad.
https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1470492667884851202
So to summarize (leaving Stalin etc out, in order not to complicate matters further) we have the average per capita income in "Euroasia" growing at:
1.6% pa during the last ~30y of Tsarism
2.1% pa during 18y of Brezhnev's "stagnation"
0.8% pa during 30y of "new capitalism".
Later learned that the former's father was an informant for Ceausescu's secret police (Securitate) - a butcher by profession but a literal snitch for any "anti-communism" behavior of his acquaintances, while the latter's grandfather was an "intellectual" despised by the regime and punished with forbidding anyone in his family from accessing higher education or good jobs.
It is possible the author's family enjoyed such privileges as well without his knowledge.
Many people could become „wealthy” then, but their conscience prevented them from doing things that would be required from them in exchange.
If you want to draw a comparison - imagine that every single worker in US gets a personal „eject” button that gives them $1M to their bank account, but it requires them to do things that will be unethical and oppressive towards their friends, family and the population in general.
Kind of like joining a mob, but without the dangers that go with it.
Sure you can say some people won't work for Google because their conscience prevents them, but you can't reasonably compare getting rich by working for Google to getting rich by getting your friend arrested because they read a book or listened to a radio station... If you have a point to make, make it.
Sure, some did evil things. Again, just like in the west it’s easy to make money by hurting others.
My point is, the perceived difference between those is really just the narrative, the way they are being described in popular media. West has much better PR.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a woman in NYC who migrated from some former USSR country and worked as a domestic servant -- she called working for such low wage in such conditions "communism."
Yes the USA has corruption, Justice has inequality problems, free speech is not always free, etc., but the problem with your perspective is that it’s binary instead of looking at the gradient. You’re like “the USA has corruption, and iron curtain had corruption, therefore they’re the same”. That’s dishonest. The USA has a functioning system of Justice that protects substantial individual rights and freedoms. Just because it’s not perfect doesn’t make it equal to the abject lack of Justice and freedoms in iron curtain dictatorships.
Look at Musk. You think a communist country would tolerate a foreigner who became a billionaire and calls out politicians in a public forum? Maybe ask Jack Ma how his moderate comments were received.
I had an acquaintance from a communist country who was allowed to study in the US. One of the first ever. How did he get that privilege? His father was a high ranking party member who had a serious disagreement and was going to be expelled. The deal was “you quietly retire and we’ll let you son go to college in the US”. So he kept his mouth shut. They had total control, so using your family against you was fair game. I have no doubt Musk’s kid won’t face that same challenge.
Sure, both systems cater to the powerful, but one is a relatively open system and the other closed only to the “permanently privileged”.
And no, party membership is not guaranteed to make you rich. And membership is not easy to get.
(Disclaimer: my grandpa was a party member, he managed local part of the polish power grid.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Generally life in ex YU from in 70s and on was pretty decent. We have better standards now (Slovenia), but some parts have worse living conditions than when they were in YU. And the gap between haves and have not is ever increasing. So author is not alone in what he is thinking.
And after 30 years of post-communism there are too few successes to call the end of history a success.
Some recent examples (Iran, Afghanistan) are completely self-made catastrophes, i.e. countries that were democratic, modern, and free and lost that due to foreign (or, let's face it: US-)intervention in the first place.
Same with post-communism. The factors at play here cannot be reduced to "imposing democracy" onto countries. Do you have any idea what 40 years of communism and being an artificial puppet state to a country and its economy? And it's not as if this was after two devastating wars either.
If you take a closer look at Europe you'll soon find out that it's a tad more complex than just the political system. From ethnic tensions to border disputes to geographic complexities there's so much more to it than just whether people are free to vote or not.
their state formation was severely lacking. Just because they had elections doesn't mean they were substantial democracies.
Everything is a trade-off and this is certainly part of the price we pay to have full shelves.
The author feels their past was lost, but many of us are furious our futures were stolen.
But it is hard for me to talk about personal experiences of someone. Like my grandfather was talking about regime during WWII that collaborated with Nazi Germany. How things were suddenly better for them even if they were not actively participating. While father, mother and sister of my other grandfather were killed by the same regime.
In a capitalist society and with very little money he experienced a shock at first but over time he did very well.
Going back for visiting after the Iron Curtain fell he was considered someone like a traitor or something by the people that remained there. Most of them were nostalgic of the communist regime.
It is easy to understand, first the people that loved freedom or autonomy either left or were just exterminated. The people that remained were like sheep with zero personal initiative that needed constantly someone leading them telling them what to do.
Then suddenly the System collapses and they are told to live by their own means. They are old(and old dogs can't learn new tricks) and there is no people around that can show them as they were exterminated, or institutions, or examples to copy.
Countries like the US were created mostly by people that could not stand being told what to do in their original European countries. That makes not only the structures in the US but their genetics as well.
In communist countries people with initiative were exterminated and that not only affected their economic and political structures, but their genetics as well, they did not passed their genes to a new generation.
Probably because of my genes I am entrepreneur today. It is not for everyone as there is not such a thing as "safety".
what they are actually missing is the lost great times when they were able to feel being so high above the others