Hey Comrades, Hungary has just been punished by the EU (by withholding funds) just after Orban won the elections in supermajority. While he undoubtedly is an ultranationalist, anticommunist, homophobic, transphobic, racist far right crackpot, i think we should very critically support him against the EU, since hes the only EU leader that is neutral in the Ukraine War, open to having good relations with Russia and criticizes Zelenski for what he is, a neonazi. What do you think comrades? Should we offer very critical support to Orban or not?
my old lady is the same, bragging all about how bad communism was and how pis is good. shes also a big believer and tends to annoy her neighbors way too much with her moods and preaching. your typical polish babcia.
in her youth she was married to a cop (milicjant), and despite many slip ups like making jokes of local officials, she never lost her position as a office clerc. did she live in luxury? not really, she had a hard life from childhood and survived the nazi occupation, and i am not going to delude anyone that PRL was at any point some utopia, but she didnt exactly suffer and made do like most people who weren’t against the government. and i assure it was a more stable life than now, where she needs to be supported by her family to buy coal and food. she wont deny that at least, but she will eventually go back to ranting about bad russians again.
can’t say anything about tortures. i don’t know anyone who experienced them, beyond interrogations which were common at the time.
soviets “stealing” from poland, well again you have to keep in mind a lot of our history is heavily, and i mean heavily propagandized so dont believe what you read or hear. even if they were “stealing” resources, keep in mind that they rebuilt the nation and we were in a trade block after all - and the entire block had it hard.
one of my more controversial opinions, even in the leftist space, is that i am not that fond of USSR when it comes to the relations with PRL. i recognize their leader position and nature of being such a nation (a leader needs sometimes to step in hard and intervene to steer the course) but in my opinion they didn’t want us to become too influential. for example, we had a nuclear program going on but the mind behind it “suddenly” died in a car crash, and for some reason no one continued it. just like most of our history that is actually interesting, its largely fallen to obscurity. our politics were also pegged to whatever was happening in the kremlin (cough khruschev/destalinization/gomulka - how convinient), with few exceptions. my dream version of PRL would be a confidently socialist state, but just like TItos Yugoslavia outside the iron courtain. although i would have not been opposed with tight cooperation with the soviet bloc, unlike our southern non-alligned friend. unfortunately, we just werent in a position to pull that off after ww2, and after the fall of 1989 both the PZPR and solidarnosc scum sold us out to the west, bringing forth the horrors of the 90s and balcerowicz’s shock therapy. i am not sure how this community looks at the rare breed such as titoists but thats just where i stand.
Oh no thank god, the old polish lady i know hates PiS, shes a proEU liberal, which sucks but its a bit less bad i guess. Shes catholic but not too much (for polish standards, for spanish standards, where i live, shes a nun ahahaha). She was from a former small-middle bourgeois family. An uncle of hers owned several companies in Australia and in fact illegally left PRL in the 1950s to continue his bourgeois life in Australia. She claims they were watched closely by the police for their family history. She also claims she wanted to study medicine at university but wasnt allowed again for her family history. She worked as a worker in a butter factory, which she says was very mismanaged, with most people spending half of their workday doing nothing. After PRL fell her living standards went up a lot, mainly because her son became a successful scientist working in the west.
In regards to titoism, i think he was revisionist (he sabotaged Cominform, was too friendly with the west and his economic policies were trash and led to the tragic demise of SFRY). However, i still believe that revisionist socialist states are better than capitalist states and thus one should have friendly relations with them and try to steer them back on the right track with aid and diplomacy. I agree that Warsaw Pact had a lot of control on certain member states. I think it should followed a Romania or Hungary like model, allowing freedom of policies as long as it isnt restoring capitalism or allying with the west. I think the problems PRL faced were due to its incompetent leaders. From what ive read, its seems that everyone after Boleslaw Bierut was either an opportunist revisionist or an incompetent. I also heard that after Bierut was deposed agriculture was decollectivized, which didnt help the production of food. Is this true? Do you agree with this?