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a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear Not any less than the Cold War culture did here. From my experience, citizens of the Soviet Union were a lot more c
by andreyf 17y ago
a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear
Not any less than the Cold War culture did here. From my experience, citizens of the Soviet Union were a lot more cynical and jaded regarding their governments' fear mongering than their American counterparts.
...all this made mathematicians suspect
Math, suspect? Because it challenged Stalinism? This is nonsense.
- lucifer 17y agoThe irony rings clear even today.
- bonaldi 17y agoNot math, mathematicians. And the reasons didn't have to make a lick of sense for Stalin to want to purge you and your entire field.
- mnemonicsloth 17y agoNot any less than the Cold War culture did here. My family name is Polish, which was as good as Russian to the average American in the early 1950s. I grew up hearing stories about Cold War discrimination from my grandparents. That sort of paranoia is un-American. It shouldn't happen here. But there were deeper reasons for the paranoia that settled over the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and pretending that some kind of parity exists between the two is the height of college-campus solipsism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago