Hooray for Moldova!

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I know that the reality will never live up to the hype, but in spirit that's a very positive development. If only the practice was as good as the theory.

Can we have a law like this in Britain please? I don't like making more laws in general (we have far, far too many of them as it is) but I think I could make an exception for this.

They, er, also like a drink or two in Moldova. Just one or two Maß full of vodka to start proceedings...

No wonder. There was recently an article about Moldova with the title Life at the bottom, but I cannot find it right now.

Let's celebrate with the Moldovans for fighting censorship and lies:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkmncrAPILw[/youtube]

Moldova is below Albania I think... ruined by economic reforms. Pridnestrovskaya Respublika, the Russian-Ukrainian breakaway republic, is in contrast doing far better under the hammer and sickle.

Good for them, hopefully it will spread.

hooray!
Uruguay is pro liberty too
Dating in these countries must be *awesomeness*
Imagine the flow down to everyday life
knowing your one of the global good guys

You have to be joking?! A country that isn't even recognised, that is run by corrupt gangsters and is a shrine to Soviet Communism is better than a country that has rejected all that?

I wouldn't want to live in either country, but Jesus H. Christ. North Korea must be doing amazingly well, then.

I can't think of any communist country in the world, past or present, that I'd want to live in. Not one. They all descend into brutal authoritarian or totalitarian dictatorships, where the élite live like kings and most of the rest of the population ends up starving.

Honestly, mate - hardline, doctrinaire socialism or communism sounds great on paper but it never works in reality. It always ends up being authoritarian and repressive to a greater or lesser extent, and not the sort of place where most people want to live. In fact, doctrinaire political ideologies of any flavour that don't have concessions to good sense and the prevailing situation are generally a waste of time and do more bad than good.

As for Transnistria - here's the episode on it from Holidays in the Danger Zone: Places That Don't Exist, a 2005 BBC FOUR documentary about unrecognised states:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmrLbTHBV3s[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHZLV8aEtWQ[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6Esw48a4zk[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEXs6YxUUfQ[/youtube]

Last edited by Tequila on 08 Jan 2013, 11:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There are about three countries in South America that I wouldn't particularly mind visiting. Uruguay is one of them.

The standard of living in Pridnestrovskaya Respublika is far superior to that in Moldova. Moldova's most famous export is women...

By the way, Moldova elected a Communist President a couple of times... so they clearly did not reject "that" over there, though they'd been wrecked by neoliberal reforms already. Everything of value was destroyed. Now they're just a source of sex slaves.

^That's sex 'workers' to you. Obviously, poverty has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of prostitutes.

I don't disagree with your larger assertion--Communist states have invariably become authoritarian and repressive.

But starvation is actually unusual. Between 1917 and 1947 (and leaving aside external events such as the Siege of Leningrad), the Soviet Union had two major famines (1921-23 and 1932-33) and a smaller one in 1947, but was able to feed itself (albeit with some reliance on grain imports) until the regime fell. China, predictably, faced famine after the "Great Leap Forward," but has been generally able to feed its population since.

Many European nations faced food shortages after World War II--but in this, communist bloc countries were little different than western european countries. Rationing was still in place in the United Kingdom until 1954, after all. But even with food shortages, there was no widespread famine other than the 1946-47 famine in the Soviet Union. Many nations that relied upon Comecon (in particular Cuba and North Korea) were thrown into recession after the fall of the Soviet Union. But where North Korea fell into famine, Cuba's experience with food shortages was less dramatic (and probably actually had some positive impact on overall health in Cuba).

But even where communists nations have faced famine, generally food supply has been resolved within a handful of years. North Korea really stands as an exceptional case--nowhere else in the Communist world have food shortages been so sustained.

Fair enough, and you're probably right in that starvation is a rarity.

I still think that living in a communist country would be just existing, rather than living.

Part of me knows that this is so--and that has only been reinforced by what I have been told by friends and colleagues who have lived under these regimes before coming here. But it must be noted that these are people who had a reason to leave. They were motivated to leave their homelands and come to Canada.

I think there is a certain relativism in all of this. I consider myself blessed to live in the best country on earth, so I would view any tenure in a totalitarean state to be an intolerable change. But with the fall of communism, many people still living in what was once the Eastern bloc look at the system that has replaced it, and find themselves wishing for "the good old days."

So part of me wonders how skewed my understanding of life in these places is. There is some access to joy, after all--even the most hardened of my Eastern European friends acknowledge this.

The far-left parties do particularly well in places like the former East Germany (the neo-Nazis are not unpopular in parts either), for example, and Ostalgie is a big thing there. I do think that amongst a lot of people it's simply nostalgia, though. It mustn't be easy knowing that the country of your childhood or even that of most of your adult life has totally vanished off the face of the Earth. There will be a lot of things that will be reassuring to them. There are DDR shops in East Germany still that stock old DVDs and East German memorabilia.

I had a Polish friend who came to Britain (understandably, he wasn't keen on my purple fringe but hated the idea of Romanians and Bulgarians being allowed to come to the UK!), and he despised the Law and Justice mob (favouring the Democratic Left Alliance), but he had nothing but hatred and contempt for communism/communists and a dislike for Russia generally.

Poles cannot stand Russia.