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!

Photo of the day: the Hungarian toxic sludge

A few months ago, I met a visiting Hungarian environmental attorney, who might have a lot to say about this straight-out-of-Hollywood environmental news.

The caption for the photo here:
"Hungary declared a state of emergency after toxic mud spilled from a reservoir, dumping deadly chemicals on several towns. Here, a dog is covered with the toxic mud."

More here

Where is this place?

I wish the friendly news folks had labeled the neighboring countries :)
And I was too lazy to find a better map!
Slovakia is to the north, Austria on the NW ...

The other 9/11s

In talking about the latest wave of globalization, Thomas Friedman has often remarked that 9/11 was an important date, and this was before the events of 2001.
It was on September 11, 1989 that Hungary opened its border to the free world, and created a channel that eventually brought down the USSR itself.
And then, in even more coincidence, on November 9th, written as 9/11 in most of the rest of the world, the Berlin Wall fell.

This opinion piece in the LA Times tells the story, and it is worth reading in full:

[In Hungary] a new generation of reform-minded communists had taken charge. Almost overnight, they wrote a U.S.-style constitution and began speaking openly of a free press, free markets and free elections. Emboldened, a small group of local Sopron activists decided to celebrate the new spirit. Their modest aim: put up some tents, hire a brass band and let the beer and good vibes flow. One of the organizers came up with an especially inspired idea -- to briefly open a gate through the barbed-wire frontier to Austria, allowing people to casually stroll back and forth across the border for the first time in four decades. They called it the Pan-European Picnic.

Because anything involving the border was a matter of extreme sensitivity, their request for a permit came to the attention of Hungary's young prime minister, Miklos Nemeth, the man behind so many of the Gorbachev-like changes taking place. Immediately, a light bulb went off in his head.

Every summer, tourists from East Germany descended on Hungary, where "goulash economics," mixing Marxist industrial planning with a measure of free enterprise, provided things unavailable elsewhere in the grit-gray Soviet sphere: nice restaurants, ample food, good wine. But this year would be different. This year, Nemeth decided to use Hungary's visitors as pawns in a great geopolitical chess game.

Since 1988, Hungarian citizens had been allowed to travel relatively freely. But East Germans were still not allowed by their government to cross into Western Europe. Although they could vacation in Hungary, there was a mutual treaty in force obliging the Hungarians to ensure that East Germans did not escape to the West.

Earlier in 1989, before the seasonal onslaught of East German tourists, Nemeth had very publicly ordered the electricity in the barbed-wire border with the West turned off. Border guards began ceremoniously cutting down large swathes of the barrier -- filmed by Western TV crews summoned for the occasion. Nemeth intended this as a clear message to Hungary's East German guests. Look folks, he declared in effect, a hole in the Iron Curtain. There's nothing to prevent you from "escaping" through it to freedom.

Nemeth hoped to unleash a flood. He believed that a mass escape of East Germans from Hungary would pose an existential threat to the regime of Erich Honecker, the dictatorial boss of the German Democratic Republic. He also believed that if Honecker fell, it would bring down the Berlin Wall -- and with it the entire communist bloc. Amid the chaos, he could realize his true goal. Hungary too would gain its freedom.

The rest, as they say, is history.