Comment by tasubotadas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tasubotadas | Hacker News Reader

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A modern westerner doesn't really get how it was in the Soviet block.

"Wasn't much better than USSR" is such bullshit on so many levels that it's hard to even to begin. In the US:

- you didn't have quotas to write "correct literature"

- you wouldn't disappear in a gulag for 10 years

- you didn't have to worry about standing in a queue for 1-2h to get fresh bread and sausage (it's easier to contemplate stupid shit when you don't have to worry about food)

- you didn't get assigned to a specific workplace where you HAD to work

- the books you read didn't have ideological crap (due to quotas) like "and children stopped starving because country X is a part of a friendly USSR"

I skipped not relevant bits but probably I still missed quite a few because I can only relay what my parents and others told me (I was born in the late 80s so I didn't get to experience the full glory of USSR).

EDIT: I forgot to mention a well-known practice of labelling people physically ill[1], getting them into physical wards, and pumping them with drugs until they are no longer "a thread". There is no need for a trial, and you can be held there indefinitely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...

All true, and yet a lot of people in USSR and many other East block countries miss those times nowadays, as there were also good things about it, mainly a sense of financial and social security and also "equality" between people (yes, equality in being poor compared to West, but still very little differences in life styles for 99% of people - all kids in your school would wear the same kind of shoes and same kind of cloths, living in the same kind of apartments - there was no rich kids singling out poor ones and all that shit that you have now)

Let's not forget "stukach". Your friend or relative might be the one who meets a curator from KGB and reporting everything "interesting" you have said. Each big enough organization had a permanent curator assigned to monitor sentiments. And repercussions were real enough.

I wasn't expecting to find such a nice summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_repression_in_the_So... . It deserves to be here.

For the record, I very much disagree with Chomsky, but he was writing when the events you are writing about were contemporary, and he knew about them. I do think you may have an overly rosy view of Cold War USA. Lots of people didn't have a choice of where to work, there was and still is some hunger and malnutrition, there was a lot of jingoistic ideological propaganda, involuntary commitment and even lobotomy was used against dissidents (especially feminists and gay men), and for example the Comics Code explicitly required the jingoistic propaganda, as did the DoD for films made with their cooperation (which included almost anything touching on military topics).

There was a lot more freedom than in the USSR, but the same shitty phenomena occurred, just less so.

>"Wasn't much better than USSR" is such bullshit on so many levels that it's hard to even to begin. In the US:

- you wouldn't disappear in a gulag for 10 years

I totally agree. The US is much more better. There's no doubt that an Ecuadorian embassy or a Guantanamo are much better places than a gulag.

By your estimate, how many millions of Americans have disappeared in Guantanamo?

Difference of several orders of magnitude, right?

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