i cant with this people, they are the real spoiled ones taking everything they got in socialist states for granted and complain how hard they had it: “uh it was so hard, we did not have oranges? Can you believe that??? how can a society possibly function without oranges, literally 1984” I give you the choice:
A: live in a society where human rights like housing, food and clothing are treated as such and the vast majority of peoples needs are met (no oranges)
or
B: live in a society where you need to pay for your human rights and where only the rich can carefree finance their lives without sinking in unpayable debt while homeless people roam the streets and get beaten by the police for being poor (with oranges)
one of the great baffling issues of the later soviet union was how little people appreciated things like safety nets, housing, security in old age. And how much people would really like the new phone
The section in Blackshirts and Reds where he details what it was like for people in former Soviet countries when they realized they had been duped by capitalist propaganda and lost all those things they took for granted was really fucking sad
well the fall of the soviet union was really sad
Hot take: I agree
i mean you had all of capitalism pumping out propaganda for decades.
I’ve got the second one now and I still can’t afford fresh oranges usually smh
Apparently the “2/3 society” was a hotly discussed topic in the late GDR, because liberals went that “if only 2/3 of the society lives well at the expense of getting everything to run well, then it’s worth pursuing.”
They got what they wanted.
A nationalistic “the state was supposed to take care of me, but I am unhappy. This is the lazy people’s fault” was very popular in the 80s - east AND west.
Not to mention you will literally have oranges in choice A after the capitalist hegemony is defeated
Guessing by the pfp this guy was in high school when DDR was annexed. Not quite as absurd as the 25 year old who has “lived experience of the horrors of communism” in the eastern bloc, but still not the full picture.
It’s weird my mother and her siblings all lived in the GDR. The GDR was disbanded when they were in their early to late twenties. My mother who was the oldest sibling has quite fond memories of the GDR (even though she was annoyed at some aspects so much that she considered putting forth an exit application. My uncles who where in their early twenties when the GDR fell don’t think that way. They have adopted the Soviet Union bad, America good mindset.
A lot of men profited more from the fall of the wall, than women did. Also there was a lot of propaganda targeted towards younger men by fascists.
I work very closely with two people from the DDR who were in uni when it was annexed. I don’t think I’ve heard them say a good word about the east in the three years I’ve known them. Even normal everyday things that we also deal with in the capitalist west are said in a tone or phrasing that implies the east was a particularly bad place. The company also has factories in the former east and I regularly hear things that have totally banal explanations but which are presented as DDR was a horrendous oppressive dictatorship. Meanwhile the one guy praises the business acumen of robber barons like Musk and Bezos constantly.
I lived in West Bengal (India ) where Communist party ruled from 1977-2011 non stop , I grew up there and did my Engineering . As it is a federal state it was not socialist at all but the civic governance and policies were definitely far better than now. I had good repo with old commie people who persuaded people to vote (vote for any party for democracy) and whatnot. But if you hear from people who were born in post 90s you will nothing hear good about the government , here it is partly because liberal MSM always hated CPIM government and partly because CPIM disenfranchised clan type influence in the society . Nowadays , it is the worst lumpen government ruling my state but people won’t say much about it .
I think in the former socialist societies there was this lack of abundance of consumer goods that annoyed the middle class. I mean yeah you can have have social securities but without having an abundance of goods and snacks 😜 , it’s kinda boring. Take for example in China, there is abundance of consumer goods, products and snacks…
Ohh definitely. While there where good reasons for the high focus on heavy industry, the lack of consumer goods was a reason for the fall of the GDR.
Egon Krenz, the last leader of the GDR, has gone on record saying he admires China’s model, and that adopting reforms modeled after Deng Xiaoping’s would have saved the country.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201910/10/WS5d9e8ceda310cf3e3556f9c6.html
https://www.politico.eu/article/last-east-german-egon-krenz-communism-berlin-wall-anniversary/
Stasi also forced you to do this
Knowing
cultists, the thought of women enjoying sex outside of transactional obligations is intimidating to them and makes them uneasy.The feminist part of our party (we’re all feminist, just this part is run by women focussing on women specifically) is focussing on sex under socialism now and it gets some people’s panties in a twist for sure.
They were also consistently ahead of the “BRD” regarding LGBT rights. The reason gay sex was finally completely legalised in all of Germany was that it would be bad press for the “BRD” regime to take away rights from east German LGBT people when they made a new criminal code to go with the annexation of the GDR.
Literally clicked into this thread to say, ‘the world’s largest prison but the greatest sex on earth and a dope flag.’
Hey speaking of apartments, this bozo leaves out what happened to GDR citizens immediately after reunification. Anyone in the FRG could make a claim on property in the East that was “taken” from them or their ancestors in the process of Germany being divided. At one point, over half of all residential dwellings in the East were claimed by leeches in the West. Even though a lot of claims didn’t end in evictions, so many GDR citizens had to live under the threat of being made homeless (and many were).
You had to wait for a car but it’s not like in the US where a car is a mandatory (and incredibly expensive) requirement to live. They had public transport. And part of the reason they had to wait so long (and also why bananas et al were hard to come by) is that the capitalist world tried to strangle the economies of the Eastern Bloc as much as possible.
Also, the Stasi didn’t come after you just for complaining about the government. Lots of people complained. They came after you if they suspected you were on CIA or BRD payroll, or were a capitalist wrecker, or a fash, etc. Good faith complaints were fine. The book I cite in the source below has an opinion poll that was made shortly after reunification. Former GDR citizens responded to what they liked the least about life in the GDR, and the Stasi were pretty low on the list. Travel limitations were clearly #1 IIRC, but that can’t be blamed entirely on the GDR as the capitalist west also placed restrictions on the travel of GDR citizens.
Source: Stasi State or Socialist Paradise. Haven’t read any Victor Grossman but he’s pretty great on this subject, too.
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The process also happened in Poland. I even have a distant, now deceased relative that made big bucks on landlordism in the 90s. Lots of stuff about old aristocrats coming over and getting “their” land back, the church, etc. Anecdotal evidence and all, but both my parents and grandparents claim that homelessness only started showing up around the time of Balcerowicz’s market reforms, roughly at the same time the unemployment offices were created.
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Public transportation was overcrowded, but it was very well built up even in smaller towns. Besides, the wait for the car is a luxury that imperial citizens of the west take for granted, as well as tropical fruit (a German lib classic). Sure, you had Bananas, and they came from a plantation in Guatemala where pro-American militaries were killing guerrilleros in fights over land in an extremely poor countryside. For the Eastern Bloc, where could they even get those? Cuba and various civil-war ridden republics in Africa. Gee, I wonder why there was so little tropical agrarian produce there - even ignoring the environmental cost.
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Also the influence of censorship, authoritarianism, etc. is greatly overstated. Yes, the secret police etc. were overzealous (insert Michael Parenti talking about Nicaragua, 1990) but western music was freely available on the radio, contact with the west was allowed - even in stuff like shortwave radio communications etc., western goods were advertised freely (even including a competition to win these computers). Alas, the already wealthier people were dreaming of Paris (also paraphrasing Parenti) - the “we want FREEEEEDOM” was basically a constant in all media of that time (at least in Poland), and it almost always was expressed with “They’re telling us what to do, this is 1984”, a juvenile yet reactionary and incredibly popular position.
Victor Grossman
I actually saw him IRL once. I didn’t talk to him since he was busy talking to someone else and frankly I don’t know what about.
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You had to wait for a car but it’s not like in the US where a car is a mandatory (and incredibly expensive) requirement to live
In capitalist Singapore right now there is a $10,000 tax on owning a car and not many people do for this reason (on the grounds that Singapore’s infrastructure couldn’t work if it had to accomodate everyone in the city having a car)
…waited 10–12 years for a car and it wasn’t cheap…
Meanwhile, in capitalism, cars are so cheap that so many car ‘owners’ get into a debt that lasts longer than the car. Some of them even find out that after weeks or months of payments, their credit application can be refused and the car can still be taken off them.
Yeah that part confused the hell out of me. Cars over here can cost more than a small house.
Dance Dance Revolution was pretty nice to give apartments out like that.
“Communism bad because no oranges and bananas!”
man, screw bananas. if we can’t have bananas without absolutely screwing over Guatemala or Colombia or whoever, we just shouldn’t have them.
Unless I’m missing something, I don’t see why there has to be a dichotomy. In a communist world, no reason we couldn’t fairly compensate workers and manage the environment for growing bananas.
That’s what the bananas want you to think. But they’re working with the dolphins and elephants to bring us all down.
shit fruit anyway, fuck exploitation sugar penises give me blueberries all day
That’s literally the pop-history definition here why the gdr failed because of muh bananas, jeans and coffee.
How long does something have to exist before it’s not considered a failure? Or is everything a failure and always was if it collapsed eventually?
Only socialism. Anything else isn’t.
It’s the history written by the labor aristocrats and petite bourgeoisie who thought they’d make out better under capitalism than socialism. It ignores the many millions of working class individuals who suffered and died and who would gladly take security and safety over fucking oranges. But we never hear their stories in the west. We only hear from businessmen, journalists, academics etc who decry “no oranges” and ignore the suffering of the masses.
Keep in mind, about that line where he says they made DDR the largest prison on Earth, just to keep in perspective: the USA, since 1970, has quintupled its incarcerated population, currently making up about 1/5 of the world’s prison population.
Not to mention the Indian residential fake schools from 1859s to 1998 that imprisoned all aboriginal first nation children and where all the brutal practices of Nazi Holocaust originated. They is also the forced imprisonment of indigenous people in Western European diaspora countries in federal reserves where the European immigrant dump all their toxic chemical wastes under the threat of land confiscation, violation of rent correcting rights, and confiscation of reparation for 150 years of child enslavement, unethical experimentations, and massacre in fake schools for aboriginals who tried to fled imprisonment for survival.
The wall was only in Berlin, not the whole country like this guy suggests
Yeah, reading it made me believe that the wall split the entirety of Germany in half.
I was in high school before I realized (my father, an historian, told me) that the wall was only in Berlin. Every textbook I’d read up until that point implied it was all across Germany.
US textbooks intentionally conflate the Berlin Wall with the “Iron Curtain”.
Every time I see the term “Iron Curtain” I can’t help visualizing an actual metal curtain lol
They draw it as an actual graphic on a map of Europe lmao
terminal car-brained loser
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard some alleged former citizen of an Eastern Bloc country bring up the lack of imported fruits, and I always found it odd that they choose to blame the communist government instead of, idk, the fact banana republics were controlled by imperialists and probably insanely hard to come by? Regardless, it also feels like a petty caveat to throw onto a weak argument about why I should feel bad for them having grown up in a country with free housing, low unemployment, free education, and free healthcare (or damn near free, anyway). Because they didn’t get Star Wars or oranges often?
Having fruit is more important than healthcare, housing and safety. It’s the freedom of the fruit
I worked at a hospice (I guess you could call it that?) here in the States, and this nurse was from Romania. I’ve noticed a trend with “former communist citizens” randomly working in “I was from communist country” into interactions for some kind of sympathy, I guess? There was no rhyme or reason for it, but while talking to her, she brought up she hadn’t had bananas when growing up in Romania because they were a communist country. When I suggested it might have been because a lot of bananas were grown in American-controlled regions and the US probably refused to trade them to communist countries, she looked really confused at me, like she hadn’t expected me to actually give a sensible reason for it. I’ve also talked to a comrade who worked as a psych student and had to deal with an Eastern European entrepreneur who would do the same thing: work in something about how he didn’t have access to (X), blame it on communism, laugh, and wait for some kind of positive affirmation about it, then get uncomfortable or confused if whoever they’re talking to doesn’t care.
I sense a pattern, especially when I read articles from other wealthy or well-off immigrants from socialist countries. A sort of exaggeration of hardship that, in a vacuum, looks bad, but with context undermines its severity. But I only know a few cases, so maybe it’s just coincidence. Then again, if I were to move and live comfortably in a socialist country, I’d probably tell the citizens how much shit was wrong here in the States, even unprompted.
The DDR was German, unlike Hitler’s Reich and unlike modern Germany, which is a colony of the United States. Also unlike Ukraine, which is similarly a colony.
German, unlike Hitler’s Reich
Third Reich was an attempt to remake Germany in the image of the British Empire
we have country a normal human being shouldn’t be forced to live in at home
As a liberal, I’m Joe Biden and I approve this message.
I KNEW bananas were counterrevolutionary
Bananas in the GDR were from Cuba lol
