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Originally Posted by Wojtek
Yes. These were cool discussions. I remember you were also very interested in linguistic matters.
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That hasn't changed one bit. I'm a bit more wise to the ways of Slavic linguistics (though some of them still leave me a bit confused -- a matter we can discuss when we both have leisure).
And then there was the popping of Dance on a Volcano for the local Football squad before a game...
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Originally Posted by Wojtek
My answer was probably same as I would respond today. No doubt it was good to get rid of communists and socialism. But the spectre of the past is still present today.. I mean..of course there is completely different, better reality now but within decade and a half we didn't manage to repair what had been done during 50 years. Health care still is in fatal condition, roads are poor, some aspects of mentality are echoes from the bad times.
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Something that I've noticed in observing the emergence of many countries from under the thumb of Lenin's Great Social Experiment is that some are doing better than others. It's a complete and total reversal of mindset from Communism to a Capitalist state of affairs. This isn't going to happen overnight. Countries are having to redesign their entire government/populace interaction. And, people being what they are, the spectre of the NKVD/KGB/Stasi/Whatever being greatly diminished if not outright eliminated, people are going to start looking out much more for themselves without giving any thought to what it might do to anyone else (or, in many cases, knowing and not caring). We in the west have been very fortunate to have most of these kinks worked out years ago. Many places in Eastern Europe and Asia are not so fortunate.
Additionally, most of the former communist nations' citizens were under communist influence for their entire life. They had no clue as to what life was without it, due to the information constraints in place under the Soviets. Thus, they have the taste for freedom, but no inklings of the responsibilities that go along with those freedoms. One that I've noticed that seems to have taken many, especially from the former CIS states (I've seen this in people from Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan personally) is that the right to succeed in what you want to do also comes with the unspoken right to fail. During communism, failure wasn't an option, so by definition, one succeeded regardless of the success of the project (see Chornobyl for a perfect example of this at an infrastructure level -- that's a report that'll age you very quickly -- almost as quickly as the event did at the citizens of Pripyat'). With the fall of Communism, people got to see failure for what it really was. Unfortunately, a lot of them weren't able to adjust.
The Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) are, of course, exceptions. But then, they've always been exceptions that have annoyed the Russians to no end.
Whee. I haven't had a brain dump like that in a long time.
Roger -Dot- Lee, Political Science and Prog -- a nice way of spending a balmy summer weekend.