First, your post incites me to run to a bar and buy a martini.
More seriously:
Your comments suggest that you despised the Soviet System, and maybe Russia itself, but I have the distinct impression that even if you harbor antipathy for Russia and the USSR, it did not harm your psyche. You seem like a confident, happy man, who had a hefty measure of rowdy, raucous,
fun in your youth, who is fully capable of enjoying life.
In the U.S,. we are told that communism induces a) deference, b) obedience, c) slavishness, and d) lack of initiative. However, most of the russians I have met are loud, boisterous, confident and bold -- and often happy and friendly. So your allegedly terrible old country must be doing something right.
Yes, being ordered around by a commissar can crush an independent spirit. But in America we have commissars too. It is called the violence of the market, of one' s boos calling you up at 3 AM to make absurd demands.
Let me come clean about who I am: I am a descendent of Polish Jews, living in Tzarist occupied Poland, who had tried to overthrow the Tzar in the 1906 revolution. My family got information that our Uncle Morris was slated to go to Siberia. Then the family fled.
When the Red Army finally delivered its glorious offensive against Hitler, I am told that my
GrandFather sang Volga Boat Men.
Maybe I should can the sentimental shit in this comment and try to communicate a rational idea about East and West and Left and Right:. So I will say this: The essence of capitalism is taking something worth 20 dollars and convincing some poor fool that it is worth 50 dollars. Capitalism is theft which has been sanitized and perfumed by the public relations of its shabby lying politics.
So the most malevolent men make the most money.
I know the capitalistic world supposedly gives us the opportunity to enjoy peace and make money.
But I'll let you in on a little secret:
Many people don't want peace. I have news for the idiot liberal social workers of the new world order: PEOPLE ARE NOT DOGS AND CATS,. THEY DON'T WANT TO BE SPAYED, A.LTERED PETS. THEY DON'T WANT TO BEHAVE LIKE RICH OLD LADIES LUXURIATING IN PEAR,LS AND JEWELS. People want to believe in something, to adore something, to love something and if they can't find a cause to love by G-d, they will exuberantly, joyously hate something.
I was 10 years old in 1968. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people were being killed with antipersonnel weapons (the US was the inspiration of the cluster bombs alleged used by russia today), napalm, etc. That, and my Jewish ideology, has made me enamored of the Left all through my life
I knew a Soviet Jewish emigrant to America. She wanted career advice from me. I asked her what she wanted to be. With all the aplomb and sneering conceit of an arch feminist, she said, "I want to be a financer." And then I had an epiphany: Her idea of being a Jew was culled from anti Semitic rhetoric. She had heard that Jews are all rapacious, lying thieves who are great at making money, and now she was hunting for a life of condos and keeping other people in slums
Let me tell you what my Jewish "ego ideal" is. It is culled from the Book of Exodus: Nothing is more beautiful than freeing the enslaved and the miserable from their bondage. It is theistic Marxism.
By the way, I live not far from where you used to live. I live on 34th Street.
First, your post incites me to run to a bar and buy a martini.
More seriously:
Your comments suggest that you despised the Soviet System, and maybe Russia itself, but I have the distinct impression that even if you harbor antipathy for Russia and the USSR, it did not harm your psyche. You seem like a confident, happy man, who had a hefty measure of rowdy, raucous,
fun in your youth, who is fully capable of enjoying life.
In the U.S,. we are told that communism induces a) deference, b) obedience, c) slavishness, and d) lack of initiative. However, most of the russians I have met are loud, boisterous, confident and bold -- and often happy and friendly. So your allegedly terrible old country must be doing something right.
Yes, being ordered around by a commissar can crush an independent spirit. But in America we have commissars too. It is called the violence of the market, of one' s boos calling you up at 3 AM to make absurd demands.
Let me come clean about who I am: I am a descendent of Polish Jews, living in Tzarist occupied Poland, who had tried to overthrow the Tzar in the 1906 revolution. My family got information that our Uncle Morris was slated to go to Siberia. Then the family fled.
When the Red Army finally delivered its glorious offensive against Hitler, I am told that my
GrandFather sang Volga Boat Men.
Maybe I should can the sentimental shit in this comment and try to communicate a rational idea about East and West and Left and Right:. So I will say this: The essence of capitalism is taking something worth 20 dollars and convincing some poor fool that it is worth 50 dollars. Capitalism is theft which has been sanitized and perfumed by the public relations of its shabby lying politics.
So the most malevolent men make the most money.
I know the capitalistic world supposedly gives us the opportunity to enjoy peace and make money.
But I'll let you in on a little secret:
Many people don't want peace. I have news for the idiot liberal social workers of the new world order: PEOPLE ARE NOT DOGS AND CATS,. THEY DON'T WANT TO BE SPAYED, A.LTERED PETS. THEY DON'T WANT TO BEHAVE LIKE RICH OLD LADIES LUXURIATING IN PEAR,LS AND JEWELS. People want to believe in something, to adore something, to love something and if they can't find a cause to love by G-d, they will exuberantly, joyously hate something.
I was 10 years old in 1968. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people were being killed with antipersonnel weapons (the US was the inspiration of the cluster bombs alleged used by russia today), napalm, etc. That, and my Jewish ideology, has made me enamored of the Left all through my life
I knew a Soviet Jewish emigrant to America. She wanted career advice from me. I asked her what she wanted to be. With all the aplomb and sneering conceit of an arch feminist, she said, "I want to be a financer." And then I had an epiphany: Her idea of being a Jew was culled from anti Semitic rhetoric. She had heard that Jews are all rapacious, lying thieves who are great at making money, and now she was hunting for a life of condos and keeping other people in slums
Let me tell you what my Jewish "ego ideal" is. It is culled from the Book of Exodus: Nothing is more beautiful than freeing the enslaved and the miserable from their bondage. It is theistic Marxism.
By the way, I live not far from where you used to live. I live on 34th Street.