20th aniversary of the fall of communist regime in Czechoslovakia
 

Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism in former Czechoslovakia.

I'll have a drink to this honorable moment and to the 20 years of freedom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p7JY...eature=related

Pfft. You aint seen anything yet.

Elaborate?

Probably it's better if I don't.

you can use PM if you want. I'm intersted in your thought on this (in case you're not taking the piss).

It's a pity it didn't fall in Vietnam, eh?

better get drunk for that, but congrats, communism or other kind of political ideology sucks!

Yeah, our ideology is super and your ideology is stupid. :rolleyes:

hoooray. gotta love that Velvet Revolution

he's a commie.

but anyway, congratulations on getting the russian boot off your throats.

I thought you guys still conspired with the Red Chinese?

The UN should've listened to Douglas MacArthur and taken China out when they had the chance during the Korean War. It's too late now as it looks like China is on the verge of taking over the world. :(

^^^ I have no problem with this. beyond liking "the Chinese", it means that I'll be able to smoke in more public places.

the Chinese don't give a fuck about nonsmokers!

During a nuclear arms race, it is generally ill-advised to invade a major ally of your Cold War opponent.

out of the frying pan, into the fire

you could emigrate to north korea today!

yes, i know. it was a silly knee-jerk response. Pay no heed.

When communism will happen for real some secretly dissident voices might start thinking of it as a capitalist system. You know, just because confusion is less boring than giving any form of social organisation the name that their structure rightly suggests.

We all know who to thank for that
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ5rIbnD_P4

The legend has it that Bono is still jealous after all these years.

There are still some kids who think that the communism is cool. I bet you are just bored to death, surrounded by everything you can possibly need/want. It s easy to be smart then...
Thank god we got rid of the soviet oppression.

yeah, plus they couldn't comprehend the atmosphere of fear that the whole society was drowned in before 1989 (and that I could not either because I was too young but I trust my parents enough that all the stories they've been telling me are real).

http://en.internationalism.org/
Really?

what did you mean by posting that link exactly?

communism never equals freedom of speech/belief/self-expression. there've been enough examples in the past.

Clearly because it's not just ''kids'' who currently think communism is ''cool''?

The examples in the past (or in the present according to those who still think of, say, China as being a communist country) would never be deemed as such by any Leninist for obvious historical reasons. Now, I don't know how much you're informed about the subject apart from what your parents told you, but it's very likely to be a distorted version of what communism is all about that was passed on to them from generations of wrong-doing. Anyway, have a drink and enjoy your ''freedom''.

of course i wasn't talking about the fundamental ideas of marxism-leninism and distribution of wealth which might look appealing in theory, but which obviously miserabely failed in most cases - history, prove me wrong.
I'm not trying to play word ping-pong with you here, but obviously, left wing activists in western culture countries have no idea what it means to live under a strict communist regime (soviet model)


yeah, the necessary dose of irony.

i guess the problem we have is the eagerness of leftwingers to disassociate the totalitarian regimes of russia, china, north korea etc from a true embodiment of marx & co's version of communism (which is completely different to any the governments i just mentioned) seems to come off as a trivialisation of the experiences that people had living under those regimes, because it seems to most people (and not without reason) communism is synonymous with poverty, terror and suffering

i would say the problem is that most of you have never had to eat dog food, never had a family member sentenced to death, never seen someone crippled from overworking, never met someone who has been to jail simply because of their race,never had their phone tapped, that's the problem.

go ahead and not celebrate because you liked a lenin book, but don't rain on my parade because the change of regime made it so i could see my father again, otherwise he would be living in exile to this day or been executed for trying to come back. this was defining day in the lives of many millions of people so don't turn yr nose up if you aren't one of them

marx and marxists failed to take into account many fundamental traits of human nature

they wrongly assumed that society can indoctrinate you to be generous and altruistic and to think like the masses despite your own individual instincts. when that fails, you're blamed for it and shipped to the gulag.

which is the same as peole who think they can train the gay out of a gay person

biology >> ideology

Too bad you were quite young back then (for information issues)
Still, did you notice significant changes in everyday life?

oh absolutely. From what I recall, those were the parts of everyday life before 1989:

- stores almost empty - queues in stores whenever they got supplies of meat, toilet paper, fruit and the like
- everyone had just the same stuff - you went to an apartment and EVERY family had the same furniture, the same TV set, the same chairs, kids had the same toys. Absolute uniformity
- closed borders - we could not travel anywhere else than Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia. Even travelling to Yugoslavia was a nightmare back then (because their regime was more laid back, and hence, less trusted).
- any media (TV, newspapers, radio) was about success of friendly socialist countries, and about disasters, diseases and warmongering of the Western world
- every kid had to have a penpal in the Soviet Union, I also had one
- there were agents everywhere - colleagues were reporting other colleagues of any suspicious actions and everything was under strict control of the Communist party

Wow.

What was the penpal for?

for strengthening of the intra-region friendship and learning Russian. anyways, we were taught to look up to all things Russian as something superior, so basically having a penpal in the Soviet Union was an exciting thing.

my brother lived in serbia for a few years and a lot of the people he spoke to out there had fond memories of tito & the communist years (especially in light of what happened in the 90s), ditto a montenegrin girl who posted here a few years back.
yugoslavia had a pretty good music scene in the 80s too.

why? the Vietnamese 'communists' are relatively successful in comparison to other 'communist' nations. In many respects, the Vietnamese are the most socialist of the bunch, they actually include the needs of their populations in their planning. they are more practical, not so much ideologically based, and this flexibility is much more successful than in previous 'communist' regimes which were really just brute totalitarianism with humanist packaging..

in regards to the Czechs, as in most former Soviet states, the question is how much of the 'communist' government has actually been replaced? In most of these countries, the communist govt officials tend to remain the current government officials, even after two decades! That is not really any kind of change or revolution is it? Same shit, different toilet so to speak ;)

my ex was born in eastern germany and still had fond memories of the times she grew up in. there are still 'novelty' shops in her city that are the way they where back in the 80's. by that i mean same bland green/grey decor and some of the old items they would sell etc. she also remembers there being restrictions on so many things like what they could eat, she was allowed only four banana's a year, only one type of coffee, oranges where forbidden etc. when the wall fell her family and many others in the city hid in their cellars beacuse they had been taught that the west was so bad, we where going to invade and take them away.

i gotta say i love the architecture.

a couple years at the bomb-factory will teach you that people are not deserving of the same.

I spend my day screwing in detonator-caps until my fingers bleed while Becha's busy staring out the window.

fascinating. I didn't really stop to think and realize how many different nationalities we had posting in here. We really do have it easy here in the USA. Thanks for enlightening me and teaching me a few things. Fifty-six and I'm still learning....

some folks do, and millions of other Americans might as well be living in Zimbabwe :(

you clearly don't have a very broad knowledge on what it's like in current Vietnam. It's just like a smaller China, only less developed, with not as many skyscrapers and private-ownership companies, and with the same level of press/media censorship. The people are equally as afraid to speak their minds as they used to be back in the days of good old eastern European block so I'd wouldn't be so sure about what you're saying.
it's still a police state after all.

actually my friend is vietnamese and his family travel there three to four times a year..

I didn't say Vietnam was a paradise, I said it was not necessarily a failed state, that it was not necessarily as bad as other historical and current 'communist' states.

Besides, the American govt has equally horrifying statistics about what happens to americans considering false imprisonment, police brutality/killings, corruption, fraud etc etc..

its all about how you frame things my friend ;)