16 ms·

I Lost My Past (2017)

141 points by kome 5y ago

oldsecondhand 5y ago
> 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.
- vidarh 5y ago
  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.
  - luckylion 5y ago
    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.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      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.
      - luckylion 5y ago
        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.
        vidarh 5y ago
        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.
        luckylion 5y ago
        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.
    - jeroenhd 5y ago
      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.
      - refurb 5y ago
        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.
        vidarh 5y ago
        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.
        refurb 5y ago
        Ok, I see your point now. I do agree that these events don’t define the life of the general population.
- stareblinkstare 5y ago
  >There's a reason why in scientific discussion anecdotal evidence is dismissed. You just read a blog post of a personal anecdote. What were you expecting? A dissertation?
- throwaway2331 5y ago
  > 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).
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    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.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    > 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.
refurb 5y ago
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.
- stareblinkstare 5y ago
  > 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.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    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.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- 5y ago
bencollier49 5y ago
Tito's model for Yugoslavia was rather different to the Soviet one. The Illyrian model employed cooperativism and market socialism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Federal_Republic_of_Yugoslavia 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.
schoen 5y ago
(2017)
jmercouris 5y ago
stareblinkstare 5y ago
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."
ARandomerDude 5y ago
> the liberation of Saigon That was a jarring phrase that helped underscore the great divide between East and West.
- kstenerud 5y ago
  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.
  - elurg 5y ago
    Defending a communist regime purely on nationalist grounds ignores the whole point of communism. Today Vietnam and China having mostly-capitalist economies so what was really the purpose of their revolutions?
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      Self rule, just like you'd think. 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.
      - donquichotte 5y ago
        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.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        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.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
[flagged]
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Milanović is a he.
tyZYIEYLE9YDH 5y ago
_ugfj 5y ago
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.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > 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.
  - _ugfj 5y ago
    Yes, that was the line. So everything was called socialist this and socialist that.
anovikov 5y ago
[flagged]
- thebradbain 5y ago
  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?
  - longtrousers 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - bener 5y ago
      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.
      - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
        So Communism is evil by the transitive property? Your whole argument is just that the idea isn't evil but implementing it, due to human nature, is.
elurg 5y ago
[flagged]
- dang 5y ago
  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 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."
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gostsamo 5y ago
[flagged]
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  In West Curtain is popularly understood as “Stettin to Trieste”
  - gostsamo 5y ago
    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.
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      Yes later in maps YU is usually drawn as outside Iron Curtain and Albania inside but this was after Tito-Stalin split
- fraktl 5y ago
  - gostsamo 5y ago
    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.
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. It only takes us further into hell. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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.
unixhero 5y ago
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. [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184
Findeton 5y ago
Well the Soviet Union was imperialism, wasn't it?
- sofixa 5y ago
  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.
  - Findeton 5y ago
    I mention it because at the end of his blogpost he says: "there will be no wars in Europe in my lifetime, and imperialism has been defeated. " 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.
    - lucian1900 5y ago
      Which part of the US is socialist? There is none. 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).
      - inawarminister 5y ago
        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...
xwolfi 5y ago
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?
- vidarh 5y ago
  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
  - refurb 5y ago
    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.
- jowdones 5y ago
shkkmo 5y ago
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.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Interesting thread by him about the economic growth in post-soviet republics: https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1470492667884851202 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".
- PixyMisa 5y ago
  Three sets of thieves in different clothes.
gigel82 5y ago
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.
- trasz 5y ago
  - PixyMisa 5y ago
    I think you rather missed the point.
  - kolinko 5y ago
    It’s not even in the same scale. 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.
    - trasz 5y ago
      - shrimpx 5y ago
        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.
cblconfederate 5y ago
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.
- qayxc 5y ago
  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.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    > i.e. countries that were democratic, modern, and free and lost that due to foreign their state formation was severely lacking. Just because they had elections doesn't mean they were substantial democracies.
galfarragem 5y ago
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.
- lucian1900 5y ago
  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.
timeon 5y ago
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.
bidivia 5y ago
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".
0ld 5y ago
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
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

141 points by kome 5y ago

> 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.

vidarh 5y ago
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.
- luckylion 5y ago
  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.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    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.
    - luckylion 5y ago
      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.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        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.
        luckylion 5y ago
        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.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    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.
    - refurb 5y ago
      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.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        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.
        refurb 5y ago
        Ok, I see your point now. I do agree that these events don’t define the life of the general population.
stareblinkstare 5y ago
>There's a reason why in scientific discussion anecdotal evidence is dismissed. You just read a blog post of a personal anecdote. What were you expecting? A dissertation?
throwaway2331 5y ago
> 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).
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  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.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  > 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.

refurb 5y ago

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.

stareblinkstare 5y ago
> 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.
- emteycz 5y ago
  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.
  - deleted 5y ago
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5y ago

bencollier49 5y ago

Tito's model for Yugoslavia was rather different to the Soviet one. The Illyrian model employed cooperativism and market socialism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Federal_Republic_of_Yugoslavia 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.

schoen 5y ago

(2017)

jmercouris 5y ago

stareblinkstare 5y ago

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."

ARandomerDude 5y ago

> the liberation of Saigon That was a jarring phrase that helped underscore the great divide between East and West.

kstenerud 5y ago
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.
- elurg 5y ago
  Defending a communist regime purely on nationalist grounds ignores the whole point of communism. Today Vietnam and China having mostly-capitalist economies so what was really the purpose of their revolutions?
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Self rule, just like you'd think. 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.
    - donquichotte 5y ago
      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.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      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.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

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selimthegrim 5y ago
Milanović is a he.

tyZYIEYLE9YDH 5y ago

_ugfj 5y ago

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.

sofixa 5y ago
> 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.
- _ugfj 5y ago
  Yes, that was the line. So everything was called socialist this and socialist that.

anovikov 5y ago

[flagged]

thebradbain 5y ago
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?
- longtrousers 5y ago
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  - bener 5y ago
    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.
    - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
      So Communism is evil by the transitive property? Your whole argument is just that the idea isn't evil but implementing it, due to human nature, is.

elurg 5y ago

[flagged]

dang 5y ago
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 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."

deleted 5y ago

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gostsamo 5y ago

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selimthegrim 5y ago
In West Curtain is popularly understood as “Stettin to Trieste”
- gostsamo 5y ago
  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.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    Yes later in maps YU is usually drawn as outside Iron Curtain and Albania inside but this was after Tito-Stalin split
fraktl 5y ago
- gostsamo 5y ago
  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.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. It only takes us further into hell. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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.

unixhero 5y ago

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. [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184

Findeton 5y ago

Well the Soviet Union was imperialism, wasn't it?

sofixa 5y ago
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.
- Findeton 5y ago
  I mention it because at the end of his blogpost he says: "there will be no wars in Europe in my lifetime, and imperialism has been defeated. " 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.
  - lucian1900 5y ago
    Which part of the US is socialist? There is none. 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).
    - inawarminister 5y ago
      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...

xwolfi 5y ago

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?

vidarh 5y ago
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
- refurb 5y ago
  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.
jowdones 5y ago

shkkmo 5y ago

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.

cblconfederate 5y ago

Interesting thread by him about the economic growth in post-soviet republics: https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1470492667884851202 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".

PixyMisa 5y ago
Three sets of thieves in different clothes.

gigel82 5y ago

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.

trasz 5y ago
- PixyMisa 5y ago
  I think you rather missed the point.
- kolinko 5y ago
  It’s not even in the same scale. 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.
  - trasz 5y ago
    - shrimpx 5y ago
      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.

cblconfederate 5y ago

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.

qayxc 5y ago
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.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  > i.e. countries that were democratic, modern, and free and lost that due to foreign their state formation was severely lacking. Just because they had elections doesn't mean they were substantial democracies.

galfarragem 5y ago

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.

lucian1900 5y ago
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.

timeon 5y ago

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.

bidivia 5y ago

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".

0ld 5y ago

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

deleted 5y ago

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