I'm the proud descendant of a family which is 3/4 from UkSSR and 1/4 from MSSR. My parents, having moved to Canada as toddlers, are basically brainwashed by Canadian schooling and are completely anti-communist, but my grandparents and their generation actually got to live a greater part of their lives in Brezhnev times and tell me that they were rather happy with their lives.
My grandmother, subject to anti-semitic hatred in an Odessa market, once chucked a tomato in some Ukrainian bitches' face for disrespecting her.
ITT, talk about coming from a socialist country or descending from those who did.
Not sure it counts but my Arabic teacher is a Sunni from Syria, he fled the civil war and hates the rebels for taking his cousins away but he doesn't like the Ba'athists either.
Jacob Reyes
You can't be an ex Socialist
Liam Rivera
Hi Haliana
Chase Ward
Not a descendant but I live in an area with a huge Eastern European diaspora that flooded in after 89/91.
Some are doing quite well for themselves. But mostly there's two big camps: the reactionaries who worship "muh free market" despite the fact that it destroyed their countries and they're barely surviving now. The others are the ones who miss socialism but aren't super vocal about it due to bullying from the former group + general attitudes in this country. A lot of their kids were my peers growing up and were based AF. All the talk about "the good old days" is what got me interested in socialism.
Easton Thomas
My grandfather, who is still alive, used to be a member of our main communist party (before it turned into a revisionist shithole). He also met Allende and Fidel. He's still leftwing, but more of a socdem who's still somewhat sympathetic to communism.
Carter Martinez
Russian here, not sure what to say tbh. I'll just go through my relatives and their opinions on socialism
Brody Reyes
forgot to add the great-grandpa was 17 when he joined the partisans, he will forever make me feel inadequate and strive to at least be more productive
Noah Cox
I guarantee your great grandpa wouldn't want you to have to join a partisan group as a teen
Caleb Nelson
From Romania here. I've been born after the (counter-)revolution. Here's the main narative being sold vs stories from my grandparents and some other older people.
Main narrative
Actual narative
Essentially socialism can't be imposed top down and tankies deserve the bullet.
Carter Ross
Do you think another round of revolution from the bottom is possible? Or is any kind of class conscious enlightenment doomed to be shrugged away?
So you are implying city dwelling serfs were subject to tighter control?
Mason Reyes
That's not what tankies want…
Gavin Taylor
Yeah, that's quite obvious. But that's what the imperialist USSR did. Eastern European agrarian societies weren't ready to socialism of any kind.
In regards to revolution in don't think it's possible in Europe unless it happens in France, Germany or Russia. The US needs to fall.
In regards to "city control" no, it's just that peasants could afford to have a few animals which they weren't supposed to have. City dwellers just didn't have the land and time for that.
Also I might have given a bit of a too dark impression. For the average citizen it wasn't that bad, especially before this later period. If you didn't shit talk the party it was alright. Also having animals was "alright", people even in cities had them if they had a large garden. You weren't supposed to have them, but noone really bothered with that, except if they wanted a quick bribe.
Tyler Campbell
What, rationed food and electricity for 40 years straight?
Owen Brooks
Can't you read? The rationing was in the later years, before it came down.
Austin Ross
To add on this, from what I remember: Under Ceaușescu ther was unsustainable economic growth. This was due to using credits from the West, after he gained favourable views due to his denouncing of the Soviet invasion of Cehoslovacia. At this point the west was already shitting itself with neoliberalism. Under Ceaușescu, with this credit money, the main industrial sector being developed was heavy industry, while ignoring consumer goods. When he wanted to pay back these credits, rations were introduced.
This lack of consumer goods and rationing were contributing factors to the fail of the SRS.
Jayden Peterson
A lot of people have made that claim, "He was only saying stuff and got put away by the guvment". There are numerous examples of this being untrue when investigated, with the imprisoned people getting imprisoned for more than just that. People are unlikely to shit-talk their relatives and say they deserved it. Rationing didn't exist after WW-2. If you're talking about lines for food or some shit, that only began during the late 80s, and was tied to the idiocies of Gorbachev and his panderers in the Warsaw Pact. You do realize that for a very long time the USA didn't have more than 4 or 5 channels per region right? And the same went for the rest of Europe right? And that the CIA monitored and restricted all press right? Your point is moot. Never heard of that shit ever. It might have happened in some rural undeveloped areas but never in cities or suburbs. LOL, clearly you've never lived in a US apartment. The 'commie blocks' at the very least had thick insulated walls. Walls in the west are fucking plaster that you can quite literally kick through without much effort. Considering the number of reactionaries in Romania that's not unexpected. Shit happened all over the world. People weren't entirely aware of the environmental effects for a long while. There was no fucking experimentation on prisoners. That's fucking bullshit. As for being shitty… All prisons are shitty.
Romania was the butt-end of the Warsaw Pact mostly because it was one of those countries that had been a primary supporter of the Nazis and thus retained large numbers of reactionaries that made shit difficult and who were only interested in infiltrating and moving up the system. It's hardly a text-book example of socialism or 'tankie' ideology.
Austin Smith
No it didn't Sure it was. To make such an open statement is to ignore the industrialization and advancement of Eastern Europe. Every positive modern part of Eastern Europe is due to socialism, and just because it relapsed into capitalism doesn't mean that it was a failure. Otherwise capitalism would also be a failure since it relapsed into feudalism and monarchism several times prior to establishing itself.
So then what the hell do tankies have to do with it?
Adam Myers
...
Kayden Smith
You have no idea what you're talking about and uncritically defending a shitty regime for no other reason than that you think you're defending the honour of socialism. Ceausescu was a massive faggot who acted out against Soviet and Warsaw Pact policy, aligned himself with the west and sucked up to the americans and british to get credit and when it came time to pay off his loans he imposed ridiculously harsh austerity on the Romanian people pretty much destroying the socialist system in romania, reducing it to a skeleton state and impoverishing everyone. Then when the loans were paid off he chose not to end austerity but decided to keep at it to build up his personal wealth with the budget surplus. He was an absolute scumbag with inept if not maliciously anti-socialist and anti-soviet policies.
Caleb Ramirez
considering that my friends and family lived in the USSR and traveled most of it and the Warsaw Pact not to mention studied the conditions and life there in actual statistical data, I'd say I have an idea of what I'm talking about. No-one says Ceausescu was some brilliant benevolent man, far from it. But to demonize the RSR like you are with shaky anecdotes is laughable. Romania had plenty of problems but what you've described is a word for word repeat of right-wing rubbish. Hardly. I think Romania and the rest of the market-socialist countries were rather rubbish, but objective critisism and some laughably exaggerated anecdotes are idiotic. Yes I know. But then you drop some dumb line about tankies and anecdotes that do not have a lot of backing. That critisisms in the post I am responding to are far better and more constructive than the questionable anecdotes your posted
Now chill out.
Luke Bennett
Eastern Europe here. What is fascinating to me is how readily people scapegoated their personal shit onto communism. Two examples. My grandmother was a bastard child his biological father leaving his mom after her conception. When she realized that daddy was a local party representative it tainted "communism" in her eyes for the rest of her life. Everything evil stems from communism, and so on.
If you kept your distance from the party life the natural effect was that the significance of your peripheral interactions with it got enlarged in your own eyes. If someone was a cunt towards you, he was a cunt. But if that person was a party member, that was the 'obvious' reason for him being a cunt…
There are also several cases of ignorant superstition becoming widely accepted urban legends, finally entering right wing historiography as facts. When meetings were held in rural areas with party representatives arriving from the cities the general populace was invited to participate. After the open session was concluded a second session began with only party members being invited. The fools interpreted this as "that's when the money gets distributed", as some kind of feudal ritualistic scene where the evil Jews shared the spoils or some shit.
Similarly, millions of people were elevated from abject poverty through the housing projects (le commie blocks), meaning that a significant % of the population saw central heating, electricity, radios, tvs, showers, toilets, etc. for the first time. The superstitious fucks had of course a different angle. Noticing how easily the voices of the neighbors, etc. penetrated the walls (not an observable phenomenon in their previous peasant settings) they concluded that these 'cages' were constructed as such so that they could be easily spied upon and monitored.
I'm not the Romanian poster who you responded to but I do object to your claims about how the points they made about Ceausescu's Romania were western propaganda or whatever. Austerity was utterly brutal and horrific for Romanian people, life became really bad, there was rationing of food and pretty much all commodities because of the massive amount of exports necessary to pay off debts to the west and heating and electricity were turned off, including in the winter and even in hospital's intensive care units. Stop defending a fucking right-wing, pro-western scumbag because user said 'fuck tankies' which made you immediately shit your pants in rage.
Thank you. This is the kind of nuanced replies we need; not "CHOWCHESKU COMMUNISM KILLED MY GRANDMA, FUCK TANKS", and not "ENTIRE EASTERN BLOC DINDU NUFFIN WRONG".
Brayden Gonzalez
I come from a largely conservative (in an apolitical), petit-bourgeois Amerikan family descended from German Protestant immigrants. Anyways there are no socialists in my background but my grandfather was in one of those mobile anti-aircraft units in Europe in World War II that rolled along with the infantry to protect them from air attacks – although as the Nazi airforce had been largely destroyed by the Normandy invasion his unit was largely deployed for fire support during river crossings and to take out snipers by blasting them with these quad .50 caliber machine guns mounted on half tracks positioned a half-mile away. Peace through superior firepower as they say.
Anyways, his unit was one that made contact with the Red Army at the Elbe and he traded belt buckles with a Soviet troop, which I still have. So who knows, my grandfather might've fist-bumped your grandfather back in '45.
You do know what "exaggeration for humor" is, right? I'm not making an argument, I'm poking fun. Get over yourself.
Jaxson Thompson
This simply cannot be. Everyone who's lived experiences you have listened to are all fascist liberal reactionary liars. Everybody who reacted to the positives and negatives of their country different than the leftpol posters with historical hindsight is a fascist liberal reactionary liar.
Hudson Jackson
the majority of sane people who hate baathists hate them for the fact that the assad family just used baathism as their platform because it was popular but once they took control they basically ignored most of the Baathist policies and continued with pure pragmatism for the goal of securing their place. first military was divided and secret police was expanded and divided to avoid coups then factories were either given to the assad family or their owners aligned themselves with the state then they kept very corrupt politicians because they were useful to them. on the good side workers owned the agricultural sector, there are state owned bread bakeries and super markets that are dirt cheap (you can basically buy a month's food with the cost of a one day wage) and compared to other 3rd world countries we had free education, free healthcare and no child labor or foreign corps controlling the economy.
Andrew Cox
That's not what I said at all, stop strawmanning Deng-hat.
Jaxson Sanchez
I'm not you strawmanning faggot My entire post was alughing at the claims, where is the rage you assblasted projector?
Did I deny Romania was worse than the rest of the Eastern Bloc? No, I only pointed out how stupid some of the anecdotal shit was. IF you're going to shit on that idiot leader of Romania, do it with actual evidence and actual reasons.
Jaxon Nelson
What does this mean?
Luis Reed
Muh Nazi Romania they deserved it
Carson Martinez
more examples like these?
Adam Nguyen
My dad believes that the country is in ruins and he has to hop from shit job to shit job not because of capitalism, but because soviet mentality is preventing it from working like it supposed to and we need to decommunize the whole thing, whatever that's supposed to be. From what I understand it's a pretty common thought pattern among liberals here, they voluntarily bend their mind in pretzels to keep believing american dream is real.
