Love the downvotes on this. Perfect propaganda so well funded. But now it’s not commies it’s ‘tankies’
Communism is okay, as long as its the purely theoretical version of it that suburban Westerners invent in their mind
My partner family lived in communist Romania. They almost starved when the communists stole their fields to collectivize them and then they misused them. Not only that but the “securitate” (Romanian KGB) created real fear between everyone. This was the real problem of communist Romania, not the foreign intervention. Eventually people got tired of leaving in a state of terror and they overthrew the government.
There’s a Spanish book about Communism and the Spanish civil war. In Spanish is “Dime quien soy” something like “Tell me who I am”. It talks a lot about people that really believed in the communist idea but that got killed because of Stalin being a dictator.
Edit: To all of you downvoting me. None of you have addressed the trust issues that the “securitate” created in the Romanian society. Many pro-comunists were killed by Stalin’s delusion. I’m not saying that communism is completely evil but Romania was far from a paradise.
“Communism and collectivization were in the closet making babies, and I saw one of the babies, and then the baby looked at me.”
- this dude’s great-Grandpa in law
Oh look I talk about the terror regime during communism but users are too busy torturing their relatives to even care about the internal issues of communism.
And I’m from Poland. The government reversed the decision to collectivize agricultural land in 1956, lowering the amount of state owned farms from 10000 to 1500 after Bierut died.
By 1996, when the last one was privatized, there were roughly 2000 of them at the start of the campaign in 1992 with a total of about 3750 thousands of hectares of a (current) total of 14630 - a quarter of farmland in the country.
Yet Poland, with its mostly private agriculture, was known for the worst supply situation in the Eastern Bloc. Gotta love the hand of the market, especially since the west imposed high interest rates on loans taken in the 70s (as countries do between each other). The government of the 90s, deciding that it was going to get richer faster with the market rather than a planned economy it was barely wanting to have it (as the “communists” of the PZPR were largely just nationalists), went through market reforms and what happened? Prices shot up, poverty increased to dramatic amounts, unemployment was over 20% for a part of the 90s (not even including those who had given up on looking for a job), organized crime started roaming the streets and doing stuff like killing mom’s childhood friends… and of course the farmlands themselves, since this is the topic, became desolate towns with antisemitic graffiti, a 60+ year old average age and nothing going on for them to this day.
But you probably think this is cool and good. After all, the people there can work their asses off at more than 40h/week at a workplace they have even less say in than in the west, to pay German prices for goods of a quality you’d find in the bargain bin here, a food that will kill you over time, and come back home to froth at the mouth about how the “LGBT Lobby” is trying to turn their kids gay while then going on rants against the oh so free government and opposition because they’re “all thieves” anyway… and against foreigners. After all, they’re only following the logic of the market and doing what the west wants of them (i.e. keep the wages low and profits high).
Dude, I talked about (1) how they stole a small piece of land barely enough to feed a family and (2) the terror regime of the communist era. Then you starter rambling about all the foreign intervention.
In my original post I didn’t say that it wasn’t there. I just talked about the internal issues of communist Romania (and also USSR) which mostly was point 2. The state of constant fear that people lived in.
If you think that it was all good. Why does your country hate Russia so much? Do you think that the Russians sang lullabies to the Romanians and that they loved them so much?
Edit: let me add more context that you avoided on purpose:
While this might be true, a key reason behind these results is an institutionalized amnesia regarding communism in Romania, which has not allowed an adequate society-wide debate able to inform the Romanian public. This is because the current political leadership is to a considerable extent formed of former communists, their relatives and business associates, who have no interest in revealing and punishing the crimes of communism, in which they were, to varying degrees, involved.
I think I’ll take statistics over your propagandistic anecdote
A 2010 poll conducted by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy provided similar results. Of the 1,460 respondents, 54 percent claimed that they had better living standards during communism, while 16 percent said that they were worse. Moreover, 49 percent claimed that Ceausescu was a good leader, 30 percent believed he was neither good nor bad, while 15 said he was bad. The survey has a 2.7 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
According to a recent poll, many Romanians remain nostalgic for communism, over two decades after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown. The INSCOP Research poll revealed that 44.4 percent of the respondents believed that living conditions were better under communism, 15.6 said that they had stayed the same, while only 33.6 claimed that life was worse back then. When asked about dictator Ceausescu, 47.5 of the respondents claimed that he had a relatively positive role in Romania’s recent history, while 46.9 said that his role was rather negative. The recent poll was conducted between November 7 and 14, 2014, on a sample of 1,055 participants, with a 3 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/communist-nostalgia-in-romania/
So, you swap the order of the paragraphs to make your point. Do I look stupid to you. I know how to open the link that you posted.
“I regret the demise of Communism—not for me, but when I see how much my children and grandchildren struggle. We had safe jobs and decent salaries under Communism. We had enough to eat and we had yearly vacations with our children”.
- 68-year-old retired Romanian mechanic, quoted in George Jahn, “In Romania, Turmoil Fuels Nostalgia for Communism,” Washington Post, January 11, 2011.
None of you have addressed the trust issues
Many pro-comunists were killed by Stalin’s delusion.
Sorry, we are not adressing crocodile tears shed in bad faith by anticoms. Reddit is that way ->
Romania was far from a paradise.
okay thats fair but I think everyone knew that was primarily on Mr Palaces, not Comrade Stalin
That’s also true. But in my opinion Mr Palaces used communism as an excuse. To me it looks like that also happened in other places mostly because communism was a change of government and many people tried to profit from that. The book I suggest is full of people that truly believe in communism and that get tossed around by Stalin’s zero trust policies.
In other replies many people mistook me for an anti-comunist. I am not, but I think blaming the failure of communism to only foreign intervention overlooks many points (I know it’s a meme). One of such points is the one I tried to make: “there was an internal feeling of unrest”.
Turned an imperialist monarchy where the majority of the population were illiterate into being the first nation of humans in space and defeating the Nazis within a few decades?
Turning a country fresh from a century of humiliation in to the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity and virtually eliminating poverty?
Seems like it works to me
We’re fully aware that DoTP is a transitory step in the path to full stateless classless communism, I’m just engaging with conceit the meme makes to dispute the point those who make ‘cOmMuNiSm oNlY wOrKs On PaPeR’ arguments think they’re making
I get it. My point is different. Communism has never been realized, therefore there’s nothing to say about it’s functionality.
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
