Some are more equal than others!

Recall those series of posts here in which I had quoted the Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich?  Those followed my summer reading in 2016.  Among other things,, Alexievich made possible for me to understand why putin continued to be in power in Russia.

Alexievich commented in an interview:

 “In the West, people demonize Putin,” Ms. Alexievich, who turns 68 later this month, said in a recent interview here, speaking Russian through a translator after a conference on her work at the University of Gothenburg. “They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West, ” she added. “There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.”

The "humiliation."  The emotion that putin has tapped into, in order to Make Russia Great Again!

Source

After having read Alexievich, it does not surprise me that millions of Russians and Eastern Europeans believe that they were better off under communism.

As governments dismantled social safety nets and poverty spread throughout the region, ordinary citizens grew increasingly less critical of their state socialist pasts.
A 2009 poll in eight east European countries asked if the economic situation for ordinary people was ‘better, worse or about the same as it was under communism’. The results stunned observers: 72 per cent of Hungarians, and 62 per cent of both Ukrainians and Bulgarians believed that most people were worse off after 1989. In no country did more than 47 per cent of those surveyed agree that their lives improved after the advent of free markets. Subsequent polls and qualitative research across Russia and eastern Europe confirm the persistence of these sentiments as popular discontent with the failed promises of free-market prosperity has grown, especially among older people.

The surprise, if at all, is that we are surprised when, for instance, the Hungarian Prime Minister, viktor orban, systematically assaults the country's democratic institutions.

Alexievich remarked about that right in the introductory pages of her book:

I recently saw some young men in T-shirts with hammers and sickles and portraits of Lenin on them.  Do they know what communism is?

It is doubtful that a great majority of the people there are rooting for communism's return:

Ethnographic research on the persistence of red nostalgia shows that it has less to do with a wistfulness for lost youth than with a deep disillusionment with free markets. Communism looks better today because, for many, capitalism looks worse

The political economic system--loosely referred to as capitalism--in the US and the UK was not noble by any means.

The US, a country based on a free-market capitalist ideology, has done many horrible things: the enslavement of millions of Africans, the genocidal eradication of the Native Americans, the brutal military actions taken to support pro-Western dictatorships, just to name a few. The British Empire likewise had a great deal of blood on its hands: we might merely mention the internment camps during the second Boer War and the Bengal famine.

So, where do we go from here?

We should all embrace Geertz’s idea of an anti-anti-communism in hopes that critical engagement with the lessons of the 20th century might help us to find a new path that navigates between, or rises above, the many crimes of both communism and capitalism.

Easier said than done in these days of the scumbag, er, president of the US, tweeting hate!