Tag: communism

Is The Guardian a Tabloid?

~ Clarissa ~ 24 Comments

Do I remember correctly that somebody was huffing and puffing on this very blog about how The Guardian is not a tabloid? Today, I have definitive proof for you that it is. Let me give you a little quote from this nasty rag, after which we can hopefully put the matter to rest:

Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

OK? Is that enough for you? Welfare, education, and women’s rights in Eastern Europe. Those existed in the Communist regimes just as much as the Yeti, the flying saucers, and the hobbits exist everywhere else in the world. A newspaper that discusses the Yeti and / or the women’s rights in Communist regimes of Eastern Europe is a tabloid, wouldn’t you agree?

As for the Eastern European Communism “which put the economic needs of the majority first”, I hope that a group of Communist party apparatchiks will roast the nuts of the lying sack of garbage who wrote this vicious lie for all eternity in hell where he undoubtedly will end up. Does this jerkazoid realize that there are millions of people living in the world right now who actually experienced the Communist care about “the economic needs of the majority” on their own skins? How dare he despise us so much as to publish these vicious, cruel lies?

And I’m not even starting on the morality of publishing a collection of insulting prevarications about somebody on the day they die. Like this super enlightening piece of garbage that passes for an article in The Guardian couldn’t have waited for a couple of weeks.

I hope that after this, at least, people will stop quoting this vile rag on my blog as a source of information about anything.

A Weird Defense of Communism

~ Clarissa ~ 41 Comments

I think that any defense of communism is weird but there are really egregious attempts to defend this horrible, inhuman system of beliefs. I encountered one of them in this discussion. To spare you the pain of reading so much utter ridiculousness, here is a pertinent quote:

Yes they were ultimately failures because they aren’t around anymore (Russia free-marketized totally, China is state capitalist, etc.), but that still does not mean these weren’t the greatest moments of human freedom the world has seen: first places where women had equal rights, access to birth control, for example, first place [Soviet Union] where same sex relationships were legal [then removed when it degenerated, but still we’re talking about decades and decades ahead of everything else], not to mention so many other social/economic egalitarian programs that made the capitalist world look utterly backwards.

Women had access to birth control in the Soviet Union? As one of those women, I’m very surprised to hear this piece of news. After abortion stopped being punished by death in the USSR, there was absolutely no access to any means of birth control. Except abortion. I know women who had over 30 (THIRTY!) abortions because there was no other means of contraception available. Instead of birth control, we had forced gynecological exams. We also had no access to any hygienic means that would allow us to preserve some dignity during menstruation.

Oh, it was amazing to be a woman in the USSR. Especially if you were a victim of rape and were subjected to so much shaming and persecution for this horrible failing on your part that you’d try to kill yourself or, at best, choose to keep quite about the crime.

Same sex relationships were legal? Tell that to all those people who were put in jail for practicing gay sex. Homosexuality was only decriminalized in 1993.

Social/economic egalitarian programs? Like what, for example? Paying a pittance that was barely enough to survive to everybody except the party apparatchiks? I can’t come up with any other “egalitarian” social program in the USSR.

Do people even understand how offensive they are being when they spread such egregious lies about other countries? Countries that they never even visited, let alone lived in? A horrifying reality that so many people were trapped in should not be used by some bored pseudo-intellectual who is too lazy to read at least a couple of articles about the Soviet Union.