botnona [none/use name]

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Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: September 19th, 2020
  • botnona [none/use name]tomain•Read LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" right now. Link in the description. It is four pages.
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    4 years ago

    The Dispossessed got me where I am today. Its description of Anarres was strangely similar to my home country before the 90s. The lack of comodities, the peace and harmony in life, pursuit of knowledge, strong moral intelligence, organisational beurocracy, communal living and isolation. I'd heard only bad things about it on the news and boomers, I've lived a few years of it and was present during the transition, so Ive seen societal and human values change in real time. But after reading this book i realised why my grandfathers generation, looked upon that time with longing and nostalgia, even tough it was one of the harshest socialist regimes in the world. Some things worked, some didn't and an ambiguous utopia sounds about right, or the way there at least.

  • botnona [none/use name]tomain•how true true is the "can't speak your mind" trope in communist countries?
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    4 years ago

    Well it depends. Like I said Hoxha was repressive In the later years but mostly with ppl of influence, generals, party members, religious leaders. Normal people were not in the same danger. They could get demoted or fired in most cases. So for most ppl the not speaking out was an economical problem kinda like today if you tell you boss you're a commie. At the same time Hoxha was also having severe mental decline and the party had no mechanism to remove him, so keeping members of the party from speaking out was very problematic. As far as I know late Hoxha and Ceaușescu were the worst at this kind of repression. Other socialist countries were much better at having some form of democratic mechanism. China today has 4 cardinal principles that you can't go against if you're a billionaire or someone with influence.

    We must keep to the socialist road We must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat We must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party We must uphold Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought

    Other than that I see criticism over any privatisation, labor conditions, CPC working with capitalist, all over chinese websites even on books that the CPC publishes, criticising themselves basically.

    Then you have countries like boliva and venezuela where and an opposing party can stage coups in collusion with other govt and literally nothing happens to them.