10-26-2018, 09:23 AM
(10-26-2018, 02:40 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(10-25-2018, 11:43 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: On the other side -- the two countries that had the earliest escapes from Commie government (Poland and Hungary) have radical-right regimes.
Poland has had strong nationalistic and tribal sentiments for long. Solidarity, so beloved by Reagan, was a nationalistic-clerical movement. Even earlier, in the 19th century, various nationalistic uprisings against the tzar's universal monarchy.
In general, Reagan has supported national liberation movements that struggled against the Soviets, maybe it was the right decision back in the 80s, but it created further trouble.
Revolution and restoration can serve their purposes, but both have their limits. Knowing when to stop is always tricky because there is always some innovative way to reshape society and culture as one wants to see it go. The American "Tea party" has never seen any good place to stop in transforming America into a clerico-fascist state. Real democracy is a good check on such tendencies, and democracy will eventually stop Donald Trump.
Russophobia has been a consistent thread in Polish culture. I once read in Wikipedia that despite the domination of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union that the Polish language has very few words of Russian origin, and those relate to Russian or Soviet practices and institutions that have always seemed 'foreign'. Polish has more words of Italian origin than of Russian origin even if the Italians never ruled Poland. A Polish version of "Josephine" was a very common given female name in Poland in the 19th century, honoring a wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, a man honored in the Polish national anthem. Note how hated Napoleon is in Germany and Russia; Napoleon set up the nearly-independent Duchy of Warsaw that was much more independent than the Russian-dominated Kingdom of Poland that simply had the Russian tsar as King or the Communist-dominated People's Republic. French words are common in Polish.
It is not enough to say that democracy had no chance to fully entrench itself in Hungary or Poland. Communist rule has been extinct in those countries for nearly thirty years.
Donald Trump has done much to gut the American political heritage to reshape America to fit his despotic personality. The last phase of this Crisis era will likely be undoing his damage.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.