I say a lot that I miss the Cold War, or that I wish the Soviets had won for some cultural reason, but honestly, I just wish sometimes that the understandings of the world that feel like common sense to me, weren’t something I have to explain over and over and over again to the older family members who are supposed to be teaching me this stuff. I wish I didn’t have to tell people I’m a socialist, it was everyone who isn’t a commie who has to state their position as an outlier and a bias and the default assumption was that everyone’s a Marxist-Leninist.
I don’t even necessarily wish the USSR had won the Cold War, though that’d be a neat way to achieve this goal, I just wish that the Second World still existed and the Anglosphere was part of it. Would mean we’d have our own piles of old commie propaganda and our own well known and respected historical list of socialist writers, at least.
(By the way, comrades, anyone got a favourite old Soviet movie at this time of year? Could use a recommendation. Just found out I’m not invited to my mom’s for New Years’ Eve like usual, she only wants me there Jan 1, and I’ve got the day to kill, festively. Don’t know if that’ll just make me miss the USSR more, but it might make me feel better instead, so.)
—> OK.
—> BOILING BABIES AND THE ERADICATION OF THE BESPECTACLED WILL COMMENCE.
—> 3. 2. 1. GO.
Alright, who made the Communism Button and baked in a Monkey’s Paw!?
Neoliberalism is policy but it’s pretty niche in the general population, because most people hate the current policy. I’d say the dominant paradigm is good old Liberalism, with the taxing of the rich, the timeless
bring civilization to the savagesbring democracy to the authoritarians, the democracy in question being defined by running a spectacle once every few years to decide which bourgeois will be the face of it allEh, neoliberalism, classical liberalism, same difference. It’s all a wretched ideology with no internal consistency that convinces the proletariat to act against our own interests, and I hate both the ideology itself and the power it holds.
(And I’ve never liked the representative democracy system or party campaigning or any of that nonsense. The Soviets had the right idea with local councils and democratic centralism.
USA: “You guys want real democracy?”
Second World: looks at state of USA for ordinary people “Did your form of democracy do that?”
USA: “Yep! Isn’t it great!? Look at all this FREEDOM we have! You guys want some?”
Second World: “Uhhh… We’re good.” Until that idiot Khrushchev said yes, actually, the USSR did want some, but that’s a rant for another day.)
Yep. Totally agree. Super depressing
It is. The wrong people won the Cold War. And it was all of us the ordinary working class people, not just the Soviet state, who lost.
My dad yells all the time that “we” won the Cold War. Well, that’s the biggest lie ever told about the Cold War. I sure as hell don’t feel like we won. I sure as hell feel like I lost, before I was even born, for Christ’s sake.
My dad yells all the time that “we” won the Cold War. Well, that’s the biggest lie ever told about the Cold War. I sure as hell don’t feel like we won. I sure as hell feel like I lost
You did. The Cold War was between capital and labor, and capital won.
Funny how we never hear that side, just “The West won the war against the evil Soviet commies!” LOL.
History is written by the victors, one supposes.
Thats such a good way to put that actually.
I saw something to that effect somewhere, possibly this very website, and I’ve been using it as snappy lines ever since - “the biggest lie ever told about the Cold War, is that the Western people won” and “we the people all lost the Cold War, not just the Soviet people”.
Sounds like a Parrenti quote. Love it.
It does have the same punch his best one liners do, yeah. Pretty sure the “biggest lie you were ever told” phrasing came from something completely apolitical and then I applied it to the Cold War, but the “we the people” line I know I got from a comrade, just can’t remember exactly who and where.
My girlfriend recently showed me “the irony of life” and I found it very fun, especially the first half. Have you watched it?
At least you have us here in Hexbear <3
I’m not old enough to remember anything about the Cold War, but it definitely seems to me that thanks to the Eastern Bloc there was at least some understanding of socialism in the Western world that went away as soon as history ended.
And at the very least, it couldn’t be treated as a punchline or immediately dismissed with a ”lol u lost” comment.
Oh, you’re in good company, I’m not old enough to have actually lived through the Cold War either. I’m mostly being facetious and playing up a tankie stereotype when I say I miss it. I’ve done a lot of research and hyperfixated pretty bad, though. I probably know more about certain elements of the Cold War than folks like my mum ever did, but I’ll never truly know how it felt to be In It as it were. I like to think I’d still have been a Soviet sympathiser and a pro socialism voice of reason even if I was born much earlier than I was, but I can’t know that for certain.
And yeah. You get it. What I miss isn’t the fear or the stalemate or anything most people think of as the Cold War. It’s that socialism was taken seriously as a political ideology that had power and force behind it. Sure, that usually manifested as fear induced anger, but commies were scary and that could make you feel powerful, when you weren’t busy being terrified yourself of what some local government crank would do if they knew you were a “commie”.
For movies, i always recommend July rain. It’s very chill
By the way, comrades, anyone got a favourite old Soviet movie at this time of year?
The movie to watch is Irony of Fate, a romantic comedy from 1975. It’s shown on Soviet television every New Year’s Eve around dinner time and has since become a tradition, even in today’s Russia.
