Imagine swimming across the river to find a McDonald's, "Aw fuck, we gave up a better life in the GDR for this?" Freedom fries, indeed
Don't read the comments
Unironically the funniest reddit comment i've ever read
"What the Pinochet regime did only sounds bad if you completely ignore the surrounding context that gave rise to it in the first place.
Most people don't realize just how terrified the middle and upper classes were across the West by the rise of communism. Communists were carrying out class-based genocides in the East which killed millions of innocent people, and which also brutally oppressed billions more. And communism was spreading like wildfire among the masses all across the Western world - as evidenced by the November Revolution, which was trying to implement a Soviet-style regime in Germany.
Early fascist leaders and thinkers like Mussolini and Hitler didn't think that the other two major alternative political systems of their era (i.e., monarchy and liberal democracy) were capable of standing up to this extremely militant and revolutionary new movement. And so they created an equally militant and totalitarian revolutionary movement in order to fight fire with fire. And it worked quite well since fascists completely crushed the communists in Italy, Germany, Spain, Chile, et cetera.
And so if communists took over America - whether by armed revolution or via the democratic process - then I'd 100% support the U.S. government going full fash in order to completely annihilate them. Because at least with fascism you get decent economic policies; whereas communist economic policies are pure cancer which completely sabotage your entire economy and ruin your standards of living.
I also highly recommend that people watch this [1][2] documentary in order to better understand why Pinochet did nothing wrong."
...wait
Pinochet.... did nothing wrong???? lmfao
Fuck, that comment is peak Reddit. It should be engraved on the tombstone of the fucking internet.
"Pinochet did nothing wrong, take it from me, 'NotAFascist1488'"
I like how they just have to lie and be stupid for any of their bullshit to make sense or be true. It's the only way to say a rapey zoophile who ruined and terrorized his country for foreign business interests is a-ok.
I would honestly take fascism over communism if I was forced to choose because at least in fascism they at least care for their people.
In communism, nobody is safe.
Big brain over here probably represents the whole lot
probably represents the whole lot
petite bourgeois class traitors mad https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
Most people living under socialism had little understanding of capitalism in practice. Workers interviewed in Poland believed that if their factory were to be closed down in the transition to the free market, "the state will find us some other work" {New Yorker, 11/13/89). They thought they would have it both ways. In the Soviet Union, many who argued for privatization also expected the government to continue providing them with collective benefits and subsidies. One skeptical farmer got it right: "Some people want to be capitalists for themselves, but expect socialism to keep serving them" ( Guardian, 10/23/91). Reality sometimes hit home. In 1990, during the glasnost period, when the Soviet government announced that the price of newsprint would be raised 300 percent to make it commensurate with its actual cost, the new procapitalist publications complained bitterly. They were angry that state socialism would no longer subsidize their denunciations of state socialism. They were being subjected to the same free-market realities they so enthusiastically advocated for everyone else, and they did not like it. Not everyone romanticized capitalism. Many of the Soviet and Eastern European émigrés who had migrated to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s complained about this country's poor social services, crime, harsh work conditions, lack of communitarian spirit, vulgar electoral campaigns, inferior educational standards, and the astonishing ignorance that Americans had about history. They discovered they could no longer leave their jobs during the day to go shopping, that their employers provided no company doctor when they fell ill on the job, that they were subject to severe reprimands when tardy, that they could not walk the streets and parks late at night without fear, that they might not be able to afford medical services for their family or college tuition for their children, and that they had no guarantee of a job and might experience unemployment at any time.
-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds
This always makes me wonder though, how can we keep reminding people how fucking awful capitalism is after a generation is born that has never known it? Are going to have to make some "Free capitalism" zones as museums or something to remind people to never fucking take us back there?
Ah but there's the problem, how do we educate in a way that people actually learn. Since if you live in a socialist state that guarantees you the basics of life it would seem unthinkable to even imagine a country where people would be living in the streets. It just starts to sound like something our current governments say about socialism.
Hopefully, socialism is able to provide an effective education. But I understand your concerns. It would be a learning process.
I worry about this a lot more than I probably should, considering the current World. I'd rather not have millions sacrifice their lives again so we can go back to capitalism after 70 years.
I think something important is that the USSR never seemed to manage to generate a cultural hegemony that effectively silenced dissent while giving an illusion that it was tolerated. In order to get people to remember how bad capitalism was you either need to eradicate it entirely enough worldwide that people don't really think about trying to go back, like how no one talks about going back to feudalism because there are no culturally relevant feudalistic states, or you need to much more effectively manufacture consent. Independent bodies manufacturing consent in parallel is clearly far more effective than a literal state propaganda machine. Even if they're simply choosing to repeat state propaganda.
Someone in the comments talking about their parents fleeing communist Romania in the.....mid 90s? Uhh....wut?
just a heads up that subreddit is fascist as fuck. if you thought regular PublicFreakouts was problematic, ActualPublicFreakouts is worse, it's a straight up fascist propaganda network, regularly doctors videos and headlines about Antifa/BLM
there are a bunch of literal fucking nazis being upvoted in the comments
The video is creepy as fuck. Why would you want to live in a place that hunts its citizens down like escaped prisoners? That fear and tears seems really genuine, why is it propaganda?
it sounds exaggerated, the woman complains they were going to shoot her or disappear her if they catch her, the truth is moreso they were probably racing over to either help them or save them from drowning
they would have just shot her if they wanted to lol, this is just western propaganda
Good ol' Eco's ur-fascism strikes again: our enemies can't value human life enough not to just shoot escapees, but care enough not to shoot, say, anyone else.
This rationale sounds insane. I think it's a very real fear that she would be detained indefinitely or something if she got caught.
did you maybe consider why they're fleeing? could it be because they're criminals, or spies, or general malcontents? if she was an upstanding citizen with nothing to hide, she would be living her best life in GDR
Could it be that they had family in the West? Could it be that they had problems with the leadership of the GDR (socialists had that too, see Sahra Wagenknecht)? Obviously we should not demonize socialist experiments, but we should not completely whitewash them either. And obviously people did get shot at the border.
the only people who got shot at the border were propagandists trying to sneak into the country to peddle their capitalist smut
imagine where the usa would be today if they had abandoned capitalism in favor of communism when the berlin wall fell
but keep polishing reagan's knob and justifying the way they treated the GDR like outsiders
Later she told us: They couldn't just shoot because they could have shot into something else.
So apparently the evil communists refused to kill people because they might accidentally harm some, like, dirt and trees?
Some great comments in that thread. "Lib right" calling "auth/center right" a commie because he sees some flaws in capitalism.
Look I'm not saying it's a great podcast but those ladies bring something new to the table for sure.
