A Western Kid Living in Communist Poland (2014)

It had a ton of hydraulics but I never noticed anything like that. Even so the DS was way ahead of its time and in many ways still is.

Not kidding, genuinely intersted. I think you have answered the question.

The reason for asking is occasionally I read about stories of people who are sad that they no longer live in a communist country. There was a movie made about that storyline as well.

I always thought that - given the mass movements of people after the borders were opened - everyone would have seen it as a gigantic waste of years of their life and would hate the very mention of it. But I've only met a handful of people who lived under communist regimes and usually they don't want to talk about it.

>So you lived through a military dictatorship sponsored by US and UK, and during that time tens of thousands of your countryman died due to the government. So obviously the Soviet system, which under the rule of Stalin killed millions of people (as in close to 50 million) during that same time is much better.

As an aside, the oft quoted “50 million” number is BS. It counts famines, deaths in the war, etc. That said, the regime did execute a million or so directly. OTOH, it was a period of revolution and turmoil (even if it was skewed by the rise of bureacrats, etc). Death toll should be compared to things like the Civil War, not to peacetime statistics.

That said, I never mentioned USSR, and the “soviet system” (or rather “socialism” is not a single thing, nor where the conditions the same in every place. Poland was different, Czechoslovakia was different, East Germany was different etc.

>Yes a job for everyone, even if that job is digging up ice dirt in the Siberian Gulag until you die from exhaustion.

Are you really familiar with the history of those states, or just repeat what you’ve read or seen in movies about very specific periods and very specific countries? Because that reflects a tiny percentage of the Eastern Europe population, and for a specific period of time. If we’re allowed to cherry pick periods, we can say “yeah, land of the free, unless your job is picking cotton under Jim Crow laws”, etc.

>In the Soviet Union they did exactly the same thing to all the right leaning intelligentsia

Actually they did it more to the left leaning intelligentsia there too. Because the problem with USSR wasn’t that it was “too left” and thus despotic, but that it wasn’t left enough (e.g. the revolution turned right into a self-preserving regime). Those who were in the right (mostly wealthy families etc) had mostly immigrated to the west early on. It was the "more leftists" that got the shaft from Stalin and co (of course usually undersevedly labeled as "right").

>At the end of the day, in both cases a ton of people died horrible deaths simply because of what they believed in. How is one system better then the other?

Well, with that metric no system is good. Capitalistic colonial powers, for example, have enslaved 2/3 of the world, hundreds of countries and billions of people, and have caused more deaths than Hitler and Stalin combined (including the genocide of native americans).

>Any system that subverts the rights of an individual under some bullshit pretense that it’s for the “good of the nation” is absolutely wrong!

Well, and what about individuals in other countries, bombed, killed, having dictatorships imposed upon them by the same government?

Just a case (there are countless others, in Latin America and elsewhere): http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits-role...

Or are only citizens “individuals” and foreign people don’t matter? Even so there are a million black people in jail in the US, aren’t they individuals or don’t they have rights? Or its that they are disproportionally criminal to the white population (which again has a disproportionate incarceration rate compared to the rest of the world). I won’t even mention the death penalty, which the civilised Europe has left behind.

Maybe we should chalk that system as “absolutely wrong” too?

Growing up in not-quite-communist-just-socialist India, we had 'ration shops' (they probably still exist in rural India). Similar principle, but most people used it for optimizing their budgets- buy certain things at ration shops and other things at privately owned grocery stores/farmers markets. For poorer people, ration stores were a very useful way of saving money. I think kerosene, which is a fuel used by low-income sections of the population is still rationed in this manner. It is not uncommon to find lines of people at parked trucks towing kerosene tanks with their ration cards and plastic containers for filling up with kerosene.

'Ration cards' were even the main form of government identification till they opened up the economy, streamlined tax, etc. in the 1990s. They still are, for older people and in rural areas.

I only lived through the tail end of it, I was borne in Kiev in 1984 and moved to US in 1996. Politically I am libertarian, very much so. I think every one should do their own thing, marry who they want, smoke what ever they want, and take care of them selves and their family, and not expect the government to do anything for you. Maybe I am wrong, maybe I am just swinging too much in the other direction after communism, but it is what it is. My parents are largely the same, they hate communism, hate Russia, and would never want to come back to communism. My grandfather was a Military Colonel, but on the medical side, he was a Doctor. I guess he could be considered a "party" man, but he hated the party and the government. He loved his work, and cared deeply for the soldiers he was helping, but he couldn't stand the communist party. He was incredibly happy to see the day Ukraine became independent.

My grandma, on the other hand, loved the communist party. She was always well taken care of by the system, and she thinks communism is awesome, or at least that's what she says. In reality what she is missing are the good days, when she was younger, had lot's of friends, and had a generally good life. She never experienced the really horrible side of the Soviet union, so she only has good memories. That said, if I was to ask her if she thinks I would be better of in a communist state, he answer would be "God NO!" She is a realistic woman. She knows intellectually that the Soviet government was evil, but their current situation in Ukraine is very bad as well, and she can't help but be nostalgic.