Text 1915, 74 rader
Skriven 2007-07-24 23:56:34 av Ardith Hinton (1:153/716.0)
   Kommentar till text 1903 av Alexander Koryagin (alexko)
Ärende: JUNE-22-2007
====================
Hi, Alexander!  Recently you wrote in a message to Peter Coggon:

AK>  Now many unpopular people of Russia who cannot be elected
AK>  in big cities make their political carriers
     |Wrong word, perhaps?  I think you meant "careers"....  :-)

AK>  by going to the wild regions of Russia. It is very easy
AK>  for them to win elections there; after that they get
AK>  a real status of a state man
     |the status of real statesmen  (?)

AK>  and they have immunity against a criminal persecution.
     |and I think you meant "prosecution" here....  :-)



AK>  It sounds funny but the USSR made present day democracy
AK>  in the US and the West in general. ;-)


          Perhaps it made many people value democracy more highly.  But just as
human beings tend to think in terms of opposites, they tend to become what they
fear.  Thus some may use coercion to enforce their idea of democracy... (sigh).



PC>  I do not care if you are a communist or whatever other
PC>  party you support.  Not my business to know.


          I feel much the same way.  It is a basic principle of democracy, as I
understand it, that whoever a person votes for is their own business & they may
share the information or not as they wish.  In any case, I find your perception
of what has been occurring in Russia & in North America very interesting.

          You said something about "perestroika" awhile ago, for example... and
as it happens we have some biscuits made by a local company called "Perestroika
Products".  The brand name is "Red Square"... that was what caught my attention
initially, because of our modem buddies in Moscow.  Then I began to wonder what
the term "perestroika" signifies to the folks who make these things.  It may be
that Grandma has devised a way to earn some money by baking biscuits for others
... just as, or so I have been told, my grandmother did by baking bread for the
unmarried men who were homesteading in the same area almost a century ago!  She
was a recent immigrant to Canada then & I imagine these folks probably are too.
But I understand that things might look different from the perspective of folks
who stayed in the Old Country.  Maybe you see it as an economic upheaval, where
they see it as an opportunity?  I don't know.  For two pins I'd ask them.  :-))



AK>  If in every mass media people hear constantly a certain
AK>  idea, most of them will think that it is true.


          Uh-huh.  IIRC Adolf Hitler said something to the same effect.



AK>  So many people on the West really sure that the essence
AK>  of communism is executions, tortures and prisons.


          If they are it's a holdover from the "Cold War" era, I think.  Now we
can speak freely with people from the ex-USSR & see that we're not so different
after all!  IMHO democracy, as it was originally conceived, is a great ideal...
and so is communism.  In practice, though, great ideals often change with time.
And JFTR, not everything we heard years ago was bad.  I heard you guys had full
employment, for example, when unemployment was around 10-11% in Canada....  :-)




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
 * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)