Don't be afraid to ask, comrade
As I keep using Web Archive
to try to recover old posts of Tommi, I can only find a small number of
pages and none of the best things that I can vaguely remember. It would
be a shame if material like the following post were lost forever.
For some reason, for the past 15 years I have gained more information from magazines from the 1970's than from any present-day newspapers. When today's papers are full of scandals each less relevant than the next one, old papers unintentionally show what was really going on in the world under all bubbling at the surface.
One thing we can't forget is Soviet Union, which vanished about ten years ago, but has left its way of thinking behind the way the Cheshire Cat leaves its grin. My younger readers probably don't understand what was going on, so allow me to clarify that Soviet Union was a superpower which for a few decades threatened the rest of the world with a total nuclear war.
Nobody who had even the minimal knowledge of reality believed that USA could ever launch the first strike (the reasons for this were mainly strategic, but more on these later) but it still had to carry the moral responsibility alone, somewhat like when a group of hostages tries to quiet down their reluctant member so that he wouldn't annoy the terrorist who is holding a grenade inside an airplane.
In the first stage, Soviet Union tried to scare West with nuclear war, but when this schtick got old, it tried to ruin the Western standard of living by supporting terrorists who blew up buildings and kidnapped, tortured and killed people. The best-known of these groups must have been the "Red Army Faction" that terrorized West Germany. After terrorism failed, Soviet Union mobilized the left into a "peace" movement that organized marches and other propaganda. The ideology of peace marchers was pure anti-Americanism, but somehow, despite its transparency, it was the most effective of the three world domination efforts of Soviet Union and it succeeded in mobilizing vast masses of people everywhere in the West. Soviet Union finally died of its own misery and impossibility, but the peace movement as the front of its hegemony continued to exist and spread hatred of America all over the world.
Most of the peace marchers were, using the expression coined by Lenin, "useful idiots" who only thought emotionally and never needed any justification for their acts to advance world domination for Soviet Union. In fact, they didn't even need to know anything about the basic idea behind the whole hassle. It is interesting to analyze why this aggressive tyranny succeeded in enlisting the most intelligent people, and especially why it succeeded in keeping them in its grip after the total rottenness of the Soviet system became too obvious to deny. I once discussed this with a friend of mine, a former stalinist, and from these discussions I learned three main themes and techniques that I believe help understanding why Soviet propaganda and similar ideologies tend to attract especially liberal arts intellectuals.
Even though to the outside world Soviet Union was inerrant, inside it there were chosen classes of people who were allowed to hear something else than the propaganda for the idiot masses, and criticism was possible within these classes. Yes, things sure were bad in many ways and the past history didn't look good. There was tyranny, bureaucracy and many other things. But now we will fix it and things will turn around! Soviet Union personified all errors to its past leaders, who all turned out to have made various "mistakes" after leaving their posts. The faults of the system were due to bad leaders, evil people, human weaknesses such as laziness, envy and drunkenness, or simply American imperialism. The system itself was faultless, and at each moment it was proclaimed how the mistakes of the past will be fixed and the communist ideology will shine as clear and innocent as it really is.
The content of the ideology was quite flexible. If and when there were contradictions and stupidities in socialism itself as ideology, they were just bad interpretation of the text. If the text itself was undeniably erroneous, that text had been added there by some revisionist or a Jew (which were the same thing, as antisemitism was always popular with Russkies). In the core ideology, all faults were Engels' additions to the pure thinking of Marx. And if, after all these defenses, Marx himself was ever criticized --- believe it or not, this is true --- you had to specify whether the criticism was about young, middle-aged or old Marx, and then come to the conclusion that Marx was right in some other period of his. The last end-all argument was that The Capital is an incomplete book, and everything that was missing from it belongs to the missing part that Marx of course would have written if he had just had the time and energy.
The second main pillar of the internal form of Soviet propaganda was that in Soviet Union all politics were politics of the will. Of course everything was wrong in the nation, but this nation aims for the future and does not get stuck with everything that is wrong today. In Soviet Union a massive number of projects, each more ambitious and meant to solve more problems than the previous ones, was always going on. It's true that not everything worked, but right now we have this project that will fix it. Of course, only a small portion of all projects ever actually realized and those that did turned out very different from the original plans. Most of the projects were simply forgotten and replaced with new, much more impressive projects. No matter what the problem was, someone asking about it could be told that it is already being fixed, but this project just happened to still be incomplete.
The third pillar was innumeracy. In a massive nation like Soviet Union there were so many kolkhozes, sovkhozes and factories that it would have been statistically impossible for at least a few of them not to work. These best examples were then touted as general examples of Soviet economy and directly compared to the worst and most embarrassing efforts of the West. Usually the official figures and results of Soviet Union were blatant lies, but there was no way to check this from outside the secretive state. The enormous growth numbers of the Khrushchev era still remain as folklore among our enlightened classes, as I learned to my surprise a few years ago.
Of course Soviet Union was dirt poor, the size of its economic activity about 1/30 of that in USA, and even this was due to massive natural resources rather than the political system. Despite this, both nations spent about the same amount to the arms race, which meant a pretty huge sacrifice for the Eastern Miracle Nation. They simply trusted that Western idealists are so stupid that they'll ignore the actual numbers when they are shown emotional and uplifting images of a demonstration sovkhoz which is compared to an ugly American sweatshop that runs with dirt-poor Mexican immigrants.
If anybody ever raised any doubts about how these examples were chosen, the explanation was that the elite units of Soviet industry represented communism the way it really is, that is, when it is not encumbered with bad leaders, lazy workers who keep throwing sand into gears and general American sabotage, but it demonstrated the purity of socialist ideology the way anything possibly can in this fallen world. On the other hand, an American slum street represented capitalism the way it really is, that is, when it is not covered with money and propaganda that tries to put a smoke screen in front of the real misery of everyday American life. Hmmm, I have to wonder if anything has actually changed since the days of the Soviets?
Your finnish audience would probably appreciate links to the original texts. A lot of the style is lost in translation.
Posted by KTM | 8:11 PM