jools posted:b/c for some reason the USSR thought the USA was as serious as them about the cold war
Does this really explain what happened in Warsaw or Kosovo or Bucharest (or Baku or Dushanbe............or perhaps even Beijing) around the same time?
Ironicwarcriminal posted:jools posted:b/c for some reason the USSR thought the USA was as serious as them about the cold war
Does this really explain what happened in Warsaw or Kosovo or Bucharest (or Baku or Dushanbe............or perhaps even Beijing) around the same time?
are you going to try to explain them all at once
jools posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
jools posted:
b/c for some reason the USSR thought the USA was as serious as them about the cold war
Does this really explain what happened in Warsaw or Kosovo or Bucharest (or Baku or Dushanbe............or perhaps even Beijing) around the same time?
are you going to try to explain them all at once
Of course not, but in the wake of Soviet decolonization it seems that intense, atavistic nationalist movements were a rather common phenomenon on the periphery of the Eastern Bloc....makes u think
Edited by diamond_galas ()
Lykourgos posted:The collapse was caused by a fatal lack of Classical wisdom in the communist leadership.
i'm pretty sure eastern bloc countries studied classicism much more than western countries, my mother and everyone in my grandparents generation had to learn classic greek and latin.
elemennop posted:Lykourgos posted:The collapse was caused by a fatal lack of Classical wisdom in the communist leadership.
i'm pretty sure eastern bloc countries studied classicism much more than western countries, my mother and everyone in my grandparents generation had to learn classic greek and latin.
Communist party leadership and members had to read and follow a whole lot more communist material. In my experience, too, easterners are more likely to use latin or greek to study christian nonsense. If they had actually burnt their copies of karl barx and focused on Classical philosophy and history the collapse could have been avoided.
Hard truths in this thread.
Lykourgos posted:elemennop posted:Lykourgos posted:The collapse was caused by a fatal lack of Classical wisdom in the communist leadership.
i'm pretty sure eastern bloc countries studied classicism much more than western countries, my mother and everyone in my grandparents generation had to learn classic greek and latin.
Communist party leadership and members had to read and follow a whole lot more communist material. In my experience, too, easterners are more likely to use latin or greek to study christian nonsense. If they had actually burnt their copies of karl barx and focused on Classical philosophy and history the collapse could have been avoided.
Hard truths in this thread.
uh, what? nobody in the eastern bloc used latin to study christian shit? greek occasionally, but the primary language of the orthodox church is church slavonic. not to mention, during the communist period, pretty much nobody was fucking studying the bible, it was purely for a classical education which was upheld in the gymnasiums. everyone had to study classical hellenic and roman history in schools.
elemennop posted:Lykourgos posted:elemennop posted:Lykourgos posted:The collapse was caused by a fatal lack of Classical wisdom in the communist leadership.
i'm pretty sure eastern bloc countries studied classicism much more than western countries, my mother and everyone in my grandparents generation had to learn classic greek and latin.
Communist party leadership and members had to read and follow a whole lot more communist material. In my experience, too, easterners are more likely to use latin or greek to study christian nonsense. If they had actually burnt their copies of karl barx and focused on Classical philosophy and history the collapse could have been avoided.
Hard truths in this thread.uh, what? nobody in the eastern bloc used latin to study christian shit? greek occasionally, but the primary language of the orthodox church is church slavonic. not to mention, during the communist period, pretty much nobody was fucking studying the bible, it was purely for a classical education which was upheld in the gymnasiums. everyone had to study classical hellenic and roman history in schools.
If youre honestly trying to tell me that communist party leaders and members were studying and following Classical philosophy and history, rather than communist texts and revisionism, then it's a lost cause. The collapse happened because of false beliefs, if only they had picked up aristotle and banished barxism.
Ironicwarcriminal posted:and why did these societies so readily and seemingly inevitably revert to nationalism upon it's collapse?
becausee they elected Ronaldo Voit Reagan as thier 40th El Presidente
Groulxsmith posted:
i think that's what i read here, anyway
Our second example from the late-socialist context comes from commu- nist Yugoslavia. Also in 1987, a group of artists known as Novi Kolektivizem (New Collectivism), part of the Slovenian art movement NSK (Neue Slowenis- che Kunst), participated in a large national poster competition to commemorate May 25th—The Day of the Communist Yugoslav Youth and the birthday of Pres- ident Tito. The NSK poster won the competition and was distributed for display throughout Yugoslavia. It was also printed in the central Yugoslav daily Politika (see Figure 2).
A few days later, however, an engineer from Belgrade informed the news- paper that an identical poster was included in an album of Nazi propaganda art. The newspaper found the original and printed it side by side with the winning poster. The exposure caused a national crisis. Copies of the NSK posters were promptly taken down, a different winner was announced, and a criminal investi- gation began. The NSK poster indeed turned out to be a replica of the 1937 poster by Hitler’s favorite propaganda artist Richard Klein called “The Third Reich” (see Figure 3).
The prize-winning Novi Kolektivizem poster. FIGURE 3.
The Nazi images upon which the Novi Kolektivizem poster was based. The NSK artists had changed only a few symbols: the original swastika in the center of the flag was replaced by the Yugoslav red star; the Nazi eagle on the flagpole was replaced by a dove; and a mountain in the German Alps was replaced by Mount Triglav in the Slovene Alps.
The NSK artists admitted that they had seen the original poster, but claimed that they were unaware of its fascist roots; they were simply inspired by the heroic appeal of its imagery. The general prosecutor of Slovenia eventually concluded that there was not enough evidence to suggest criminal wrongdoing, and the case was dropped. In fact, many Slovenians speculated that state officials were trying to avoid attracting more attention to the fact that the party appointed jury could not distinguish a fascist poster from a communist one.
On May 17, 1991, the host of an extremely popular TV program about culture and history, “The Fifth Wheel” (Piatoe koleso), that had a national audience of several million viewers, 15 introduced his guest as a famous political figure, historian and movie actor. The guest was Sergei Kuryokhin, whom we encountered in our first example above but who was then still unknown to most viewers in the Soviet Union. After the introduction, Kuryokhin conducted a brilliant 1.5-hour lecture in front of the TV cameras about some previously unknown secrets of Lenin’s nature and their role in the Bolshevik revolution. Kuryokhin turned to his favorite style: he spoke in an earnest and serious tone, using the method of overidentification with the dominant discourse, while pushing the meaning of what he was saying to its most extraordinary limits. By that time, Kuryokhin had honed his skills in this genre to such perfection that uninitiated viewers could not discern any signs of a provocation.
Kuryokhin started by saying that he had just returned from Mexico where he studied the influence of hallucinogenic substances on social revolutions. Quoting from published memoirs, scholarly books, and other literary sources (as he pulled books from an impressive library behind him), Kuryokhin explained that Lenin and his revolutionary comrades were great lovers of the wild mushrooms that grow in Russian forests. After that, showing excerpts of previously recorded inter- views with mycologists and botanists about mushrooms, Kuryokhin explained that many Russian mushrooms, such as the fly agaric mushroom affect consciousness as strongly as the famous Mexican hallucinogenic cactus, Lophophora Williamsii. He added his own “research finding”: if an individual regularly consumes these mush- rooms for many years, that individual’s personality becomes gradually displaced by the personality of a mushroom. Kuryokhin then made his famous claim: “I have absolutely irrefutable evidence that the October Revolution was carried out by people who for many years had been consuming certain mushrooms. And in the process of being consumed by these people, the mushrooms displaced their personality. These people were turning into mushrooms. In other words, I simply want to say that Lenin was a mushroom.”
http://www.sjsu.edu/anthropology/docs/coursematerials/marlovits/AmericanStiob.pdf
Edited by babyfinland ()
Groulxsmith posted:Appeals to your heritage and your community's values rather obviously provide a sense of worth that some artificially decreed universalism simply benefitting bureaucrats 2000 km away, sharing neither your faith nor language, could never match
This definitely seems a big part of it, coupled with the fact that the centre of the USSR would fatten itself on the resources of the periphery while giving them little in return; a situation which seemingly happens under both communist and capitalist variants of imperialism.
Squalid posted:I'm reading a book called "Coups and Army Rule in Africa" now and it's chapter on the People's Republic of the Congo is super fascinating. although it's economy was almost identical in structure to western aligned states its political discourse suffered from a kind of runaway overton window, in which politicians adopted increasingly hysterical communist jargon, but behaved as pragmatic conservatives. This resulted in a bizarre state of affairs in which Presidents routinely conducted brutal purges against the "embourgeoisment' of the military and the Congolese Party of Labor, the state communist party, while simultaneously subsidizing French investment.
This gap between rhetoric and deed isn't just confined to African communism: it's pretty startling how quickly communists in say, the Balkans, simply became Democrats or Nationalists overnight.