Quote (balrog66 @ Oct 11 2019 05:07pm)
Idk man. Ask around in what used to be the Soviet Union and there are plenty of folks who lived in it who yearn to be back in a communist society. And it's not out of some type of Stockholm Syndrome, and they weren't bigshots in the political system either. Life was actually better for them.
It ain't even close to being as black and white as you paint it out to be.
Stalin, Mao and his ilk have done atrocious things. But I don't see anyone here ever mentioning Churchill starving the entirety of the Bengal province of India (2.1m to 3m dead). Dude's widely acknowledged as one of Britain's greatest leaders. When he's actually a mass-murdering cunt on the same magnitude as Pol Pot. Similarly, the US-supported purges of communists in Indonesia by Suharto and his buddies, half a million to 3 million alone in that incident.
There is no need to make this a pissing contest, as capitalism has been around for longer than communism and will without question pee the farthest, even if you take the ludicrous numbers from the Black Book of Communism.
Not Stockholm syndrome, but a mix of nostalgia and patriotic revisionism, along with despair at rampant corruption in an otherwise declining society.
You see a bit of that in American nostalgia for the 50s. People yearn for simpler times where the rules were clear-cut, forgetting how complex the situation was.
The Soviet economy was in decline well before the collapse of the USSR. Highly dependent on oil/gas revenue, with overmatched central planners increasingly irrelevant to a burgeoning secondary economy.
It's not wrong to pine for those days when you had to suffer through the corrupt morass of the 90s that followed, but the underpinning of social collapse in the Soviet Union was the result of communism. Even with almost unparalleled natural resources, Russian communism never had any shot of long term success.