Wednesday 7 November 2007

Communist Nostalgia

It's the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution and the BBC's James Rodgers looks at the hard time Russia's Communists have today:

These were people who toiled all their lives to build a Communist utopia, only to find that their reward was a penance of a pension doled out in the harsh, new, capitalist Russia of the 1990s.
Actually, Mr. Rodgers, they toiled all their lives in the service of a totalitarian regime that was bent on turning the entire planet into a prison camp and murdered 100 million people trying and in a just world their "reward" would have been something more appropriate than a pension. But such an oversight isn't surprising. Mr. Rodgers spends gallons of ink writing about Russia's Communists' idealism, nostalgia and hopes for the future, but spares not a drop for the victims of their brutish, tyrannical ideology.

I wonder if the BBC will follow this up with a similar puff piece about Neo-Nazis in Germany.
I also wonder if the Moon is made of cheese.

2 comments:

jayessell said...

David?
Is that one of those 'before and after' photos where former party members are "photoshopped"?

Anonymous said...

Oh, yeh. I think Comrade Trotsky himself used to grace the bottom of the podium on this one. Before he became, you know, an unperson.

I would take exception with the "appropriate reward" for old USSRian people. My family was in the USSR until it could get out in the mid 70s, and I can say that we were neither "building a bright commie-flavored future for everyone", nor working diligently in the Department of Enslaving Everybody Else. More like, doing our best to stay fed and un-disappeared until the opportunity to emmigrate presented itself.

Happily loyal US citizens now.