4 ms·
Ugh, how I hate this sort of relativization coming from people who never experienced an actual authoritarian system. By the age of 6, I was required to carry a
by inglor_cz 4mo ago
Ugh, how I hate this sort of relativization coming from people who never experienced an actual authoritarian system.
By the age of 6, I was required to carry a standard paper lantern on the November 7th celebration of the Great October* Socialist Revolution, with my parents fully aware that presence and absence lists were maintained by the teachers, who would forward them to the school cadre bureaucrats keeping dossiers on the kids, who could alert the secret police to take a closer look at the repeat offenders, and who would definitely play a big role in allowing you later to enter high school or not.
My grandpa was subject to hearings and threats because his son (my uncle) had bad marks in the compulsory Russian language lessons and the spooks were convinced that he was bad at it on purpose, by being secretly taught animosity against the Soviet Union at home.
I wonder if you ever experienced this sort of paranoia and coercion from your government. In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, this was the norm even during the late 1980s.
* Yeah, the October/November mismatch fits, because in 1917, then-Russia was following the Julian calendar and only later switched to Gregorian. Hence the difference of 18 days which was reflected in the timing of that parade.
- wat10000 4mo agoI think pretty much everyone here knows about the October/November thing if only because of The Hunt for Red October.
- pipes 4mo agoThanks for posting. The other term for it "what aboutism" (which given your background you are probably well aware of, but others here might not be). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism Countering these arguments is exhausting.
- Jgoauh 4mo agoHello, sorry i didn't reply sooner, i searched the original article for quotes and additional context but the website seems to have been updated and i cannot find it, making my original comment useless now. I didn't mean to question or minimize the pressure and domination put on everyday people by authoritarian systems. My comment was meant to question the website's implications that this could all be deduced by the content of the photographs. For the Parade comment specifically, i dislike the idea that the Soviet Union's ideology and tactics and motives can be deduced by the appearance of the parade, all thanks to Manhoff instead of decades of witness accounts, geopolitics and historian work. I generally care more about how opinions are formed than what those opinions are. I also hate the anti-intellectual assumptions that what is bad looks bad, what looks bad is bad, and conversely that what looks good is good. You find this any time people talk about how nice killers were. My point was that if you wait for things to look bad before you question them, you will never question anything. But this last paragraph is just rambling and has nothing to do with your well written reply.