Markets in Everything: Polish Board Game Recreates Communist Shopping Hell
BBC -- "Poles have been queuing to buy a new board game called "Kolejka" (The Queue), which recreates the tedious shopping experience of communist-era Poland. Crowds of people, including those who remember standing for days in queues and teenagers who were not even born in the 1980s, lined up at the state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) to buy the game.
MP: Interesting that the Poles are lining up in queues today to buy a board game called "The Queue" about the queues of the past.
HT: Colin Grabow
6 Comments:
Institute of National Remembrance. I like that. I can only suppose that the Poles, recognizing that without an institution that chronicles the crimes of socialism, realized that within a generation or two the left will have indoctrinated their children into believing that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Much like the American and Western European left is doing in the academy and media today.
Have you ever wondered why, after the fall of communism, the western media wasn't the least bit interested in what was behind the "Iron Curtain"? Why they decided to hide the glories of "socialist achievement" from the western public? Could it have been that the real world horror show didn't fit the narrative that they had adopted through the Cold War? Just asking.
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i think you hit it spot on.
a kid graduating from college today's has no idea how bad things were under communism.
they know nothing of bread lines and shoe lines and toilet paper lines and endless shortages and hoarding.
i recently watched "moscow on the hudson" again on nexflix. great little movie that foregrounds the AMAZING differences of the 2 systems in the 80's, but all it really takes are two generations to completely erase a memory like that.
my parents remember growing up with depression era parents, but it means virtually nothing to me and my kids will never have had any direct experience with anyone who lived through it.
this is why societies tend to move in cycles and make the same mistakes again and again - first hand memory of how badly something works is always disappearing.
There will always be an element of society that will look back with nostalgia at those times. And their kids will retain a sense of good feeling towards that system, even if they masquerade it with "green" or with "Obama craze" or some other stupidity. You see these kinds of kids of former communists all over Eastern Europe today, and they're typically involved with the nauseating amount of NGOs promoting "social justice" that exists all over the place (not to sound Glenn Beck-ish or anything, but a lot of those NGOs are sponsored by Soros)
I don't think the danger is in the kids who have not experienced communism. Communism ended 20-21 years ago, and by now even those who are 35 didn't REALLY experience communism.
The danger is with the kids of the former communists, who still have essentially the same philosophy.
Of course, this varies from country to country in Eastern Europe very widely, but its a particularly big problem, imo, in the South East. Especially because market reforms have not been so successful there, and communism was more of "their own brand" rather than being associated with Russia for north-eastern Europe (plus they never had a market culture, or a legacy of democracy).
Collective memory does not disappear so quickly I think, but that may be the problem for some.
Where I'm from, sons and daughters of generals and Politburo members and "well respected" communists, armed with BS degrees from the west (typically in political science or some other useless junk), are being presented as the "new political class". They run NGOs, and hold readings of Barack Obama's biography, and hold protests for 350.org. They don't win elections yet, but the main political sides all present these kinds of kids, as their "future".
And that is the sad part, that they don't actually forget. That there is no young people whose parents were workers and farmers and waited in bread lines, who are becoming politically active in some of these countries. Its the same old political class reproducing itself, and reproducing as a traditional typical Euro-greenie crazies.
This probably doesn't apply to Poland at all, but in some countries, hope is gone. And thats one of the main reasons I'm gone from there.
"They run NGOs, and hold readings of Barack Obama's biography, and hold protests for 350.org. They don't win elections yet, but the main political sides all present these kinds of kids, as their "future"."
Interesting: It seems that as oppressive regimes world wide have fallen over the years, and as people have gained political and economic freedom, the US and Europe have preserved the progressive agenda so that it can be reacquired by those who have lost it.
"the US and Europe have preserved the progressive agenda so that it can be reacquired by those who have lost it."
I wouldn't go that far. It has more to do with the internal nature of the societies in question. They are only using (primarily) Western European political rhetoric and dance as a masquerade for the "same old sh**". Ie, communism in spirit never really died in some of these places. (and again i want to say that this probably doesn't apply to anything above Hungary. Its below it, that the problems persist)
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