Posted on 11/15/2017 11:01:55 AM PST by GoldenState_Rose
Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, is not so much an oral history as a lament. The work is multi-vocal, like a chorus, pierced in places by the solo of an anguished voice. Readers are swept on by a cadence that can ebb and swell with tidal force. The tone induces something close to a trance, demanding a complete surrender to its message of despair. This is no dry account of politics, no tasteful essay on the ending of the Soviet dream. Like any true lament, it comes from a primeval place of loss, the sort that goes with rending your clothes and clawing at your flesh until it bleeds.
All of these voices belong to people from the old USSR. As Soviet citizens, they were survivors of a long experiment whose purpose was to reprogram the human soul. For almost 70 years, entire populations were schooled, cajoled and corralled behind moral fences. The ideological project required them to rewrite their history and redefine each of their lives. Through songs and festivals, leader cults, perverted science and the ubiquitous red flag, Soviet messages saturated everyone’s imagination, reaching into the most sceptical of minds. The system was so effective for so long that even after December 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, citizens wandered amid its wreckage like the recently bereft, haunted by the only set of values they had ever known.
(Excerpt) Read more at newstatesman.com ...
Thanks GoldenState_Rose.
Hey Millennials: Communism Sucks, I Lived It
PJ Media ^ | 11/15/2017 | Ewa Ryzsard
Posted on 11/15/2017 10:25:45 AM PST by SeekAndFind
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3605039/posts
Links not there. Pity, it seemed an interesting read.
SunkenCiv, can you share this link. Hopefully it works:
Blessings!
Try this, my apologies:
Moskva slezam ne verit.
But in secret...
The second paragraph of the review you posted is chilling enough and sets the tone:
"As Soviet citizens, they were survivors of a long experiment whose purpose was to reprogram the human soul. For almost 70 years, entire populations were schooled, cajoled and corralled behind moral fences. The ideological project required them to rewrite their history and redefine each of their lives. Through songs and festivals, leader cults, perverted science and the ubiquitous red flag, Soviet messages saturated everyone’s imagination, reaching into the most sceptical of minds. The system was so effective for so long that even after December 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, citizens wandered amid its wreckage like the recently bereft, haunted by the only set of values they had ever known."
Related: I just watched the Polish movie "Katyn" the past two nights. It's a about the Katyn massacre in WW II starting from the day the Germans invaded Poland to the immediate aftermath of WW II. It is a grim and somber picture of the Soviets controlling Poland post WW II and their coverup of their horrific war crime. It shows how the Soviets crushed the Poles and their desperate yearning (once again) for the return of freedom.
There's no published English language translation of the book above but an English language .pdf of it can be found on line if you dig a bit. The crowd who think their totalitarian utopia would be any different need to read it and never will but a lot of the people who know how bad Communism was need to read it as well to see exactly how the machine went through a series of target groups in order to get the people most likely to resist first.
It wasn't the loudmouths who put them in power who were targeted first, it was Christians who more often than not weren't even politically activist. You can see that approach starting to take shape in the US but no one minds, it's all about sticking to the secular standards of the Constitution, right? It's not anything to worry about, just keep snoozing and looking at the squeaky wheels and hoping they get theirs soon.
Oh, and don't forget to fight amongst yourselves, Christians, because believing that Salvation is through Christ and there's no other path to Salvation isn't enough. There's no shortage of other things to fight one another over so fiddle while Rome burns, what difference does it make?
Looking at the US right now strengthens my belief that most people will take the mark of the beast without even realizing it because they'll already be under the strong delusion the Bible speaks of. A delusion that will divorce the mark of the beast from the reality it represents and present it as just another little brick in the yellow brick road that leads to the good, democratic, peaceful, society we all want.
Wow! Thank you! I will be sure to watch it.
“entire populations were schooled, cajoled and corralled behind moral fences. The ideological project required them to rewrite their history and redefine each of their lives. Through songs and festivals, leader cults, perverted science and the ubiquitous red flag, Soviet messages saturated everyone’s imagination”
Hmmm... that’s beginning to sound rather familiar.
Oh, but Trump’s election put much of that inevitable road into pitch black darkness to a screeching halt. It’s going to take a LOT of time to steer the ship a new direction, but it’s happening. Even just seeing the House of Cards fall in Hollywood (no pun intended) is already a sign of God at work!
It’s important, Rashputin not to give into despair or worse: to overestimate the enemy! (Like some overestimate Putin’s power in Russia.)
Developments in the past few weeks alone:
* Donna Brazile added one more final nail to the Clinton Machine political coffin with her revelations.
* The GOP needs to clean house too as painful as it is, including among the supposed MAGA crowd. Bad apples be gone!
Rebekkah Heinrichs offers lovely perspective:
“Christianity has a long legacy of great minds who toiled to understand the Holy Scriptures and Christian orthodoxy and applied them in ways to navigate matters of politics and international relations. However, today there is great confusion, partly due to the lack of proper catechesis, which works as a bulwark against bad doctrine and progressivism in general. But during this age of Trump-championed American nationalism, we have seen a strange reaction from Christian leaders.”
“God has given Americans an enormous gift in the United States of America. Our nation was founded by men and women who recognized that God gives human beings rights, that the government is only here to protect those rights—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—and that this experiment of self-government relies not on the whims of thugs but the rule of law.
Our history is one we can be proud of. The people with power looked upon their enslaved brethren and ended the scourge of slavery, though it was and is a global institution, always has been, and persists in faraway lands even today.
Or, as famed brilliant economist Thomas Sowell said: “While slavery was common to all civilizations, as well as to peoples considered uncivilized, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it.” That is, Western civilization. And that Americans fought a bloody civil war to end it.
Our country is one in which we all, including men who first held power, looked upon American women with dignity and respect, image-bearers of God, equal in value and in dignity and worth. To this day, we encourage and extol the virtues and unique contributions of American women and are committed that they—we—have equal protection under the law.
And, perhaps most precious to the Christian, our nation is committed to ensuring that, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently said, the government does not come between God and man.
All of these blessed, remarkable phenomena exist because of generations of American Christians’ heroic intellectual heavy-lifting, heartfelt convictions, physical work, and real blood and toil sacrifice.
We have much to be thankful for as American Christians.
Now this independent, spirited president and his administration have come at a time when these concepts are being rediscovered and debated. What is America? How do we preserve her culturally? How do we rediscover, appreciate, and protect her?”
no doubt! It can happen anywhere!
no doubt! It can happen anywhere!
Yes, highly recommended. It’s in Polish, so you have to read subtitles. The dialog seems to have been lengthier and richer than the subtitles convey (a common problem).
It is a somewhat depressing film. 24,000 families had no word about their loved ones until their bodies were exhumed and a few documents recovered. Most families just never heard from them again. The murdered included not only military officers and enlisted men, but engineers, doctors, professors as well. The Soviets set out to totally destroy the old Polish identity and culture. They exterminated HALF of Polish military officers to prevent them from rising up against the Soviets post-WW II.
You’ll enjoy it!
Have you seen “Ida” ? About the life of a young nun. It’s the first Polish film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film (2015) Poland has a very promising filmmaking scene.
Thank you for the description. I will be sure to watch it as it is sure to strike a chord with me - after living in Russia, where a whole new generation is struggling to forge a proper identity and make sense of the Soviet past also. Public discussion of Soviet atrocities has been largely muted (or edited/censored) under Vladimir Putin. For every monument erected even to Russian victims, dozens of portraits and busts of Stalin, Lenin, and Dzehrzinsky are in increasing public view.
I experienced “Victory Day” two years in a row while there and the desperation to claim the “hero” mantle in the World War II narrative (while also embracing Stalin’s role and Soviet glory) is palpable.
Here is an article about how the Russian officials responded to the Polish govt’s intentions to decommunize further and remove Soviet statues:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-poland-sanctions-idUSKBN1A41VB
"Russia says the Polish move spits in the faces of the more than 600,000 Soviet troops who lost their lives liberating Poland from the Nazis." -- that's rich! The Germans and Soviets partitioned Poland before the non-aggression pact collapsed and Germany invaded Poland. Not to mention the decades of occupation of Poland by the Soviets.
I have a personal interest because my Dad came from Danzig (now Gdansk). My German grandfather had left in 1927 to start a new life in the US, but his parents stayed behind. They lived only a couple of miles from where WW II started in Danzig. In 1945, the Soviets forced them out with a few hours notice and they had to walk to Cologne, Germany. They were in their 60s at the time. Their factories, house, and all assets were all confiscated by the Soviets. They died in poverty six years after the war ended. In the 60s, my father and grandfather tried to press claims against the Soviets and Poles for the lost assets but that went nowhere.
You might enjoy The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's Killing Field by Benjamin B. Fischer who is on the History Staff of CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. It discusses monuments to Katyn in Poland.
The "Katyn" movie features a young woman who lost her brother at the massacre. She has a gravestone monument made that she hopes to put at the church and then at the cemetery. The Soviets arrest her because she refuses to sign a statement saying the Germans killed her brother and she is thrown into prison. Very chilling.
I haven't seen "Ida." Thanks for the tip. I just put it at #1 in my Netflix DVD queue.
Have you seen "The Lives of Others"? It's the 2006 film about the Stasi in East Germany. Also highly recommended.
Thanks!
Unfortunately, a couple of good bubbles, a few distractions from Hollywood that aren't obviously anti-Christian and anti-American, two or three bones thrown to the Middle Class by Congress, and bingo, the vast majority of the same American public who elected Reagan rolled over and went back to sleep.
Never underestimate the ability of average Americans turn into deaf, dumb, and blind, mutes by a thriving economy.
Once the Globalist money crowd admit to themselves that the aggressive approach they've used for the past fifteen to twenty years won't work anymore, they'll go back to the approach of making average folks economically fat and happy for a while as they go quietly about their business in the shadows.
Then we'll see if Trump exposing the Uniparty scam leaves that successful approach dead in a ditch and leads to a bit of a retreat by the Globalist cabal or whether the tried and true "rising tide" approach will work yet again.
JMHo
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