RE: Egypt - Army seizes power.
July 6, 2013 at 6:14 am
(This post was last modified: July 6, 2013 at 6:44 am by Anomalocaris.)
(July 5, 2013 at 6:13 pm)Rahul Wrote:(July 5, 2013 at 3:57 pm)Chuck Wrote: Did you really imagine scenes analogous to the last two image would not be easy to find in the countries where the first two images were taken?
Huh? North Korea ain't got shit compared to South Korea. It's a nation of starving peasants.
You can compare West and East Germany before the reunification as well.
Communism sucks balls.
The 1st picture is pretty anonymous. It could be anywhere in the agrarian parts of east Or southeast Asia, such as Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, China, even parts of japan. The 2nd picture show Chinese soldiers. The type 95 bullpup assault rifle they are carrying give that away. No other country uses that rifle.
The 3rd picture shows Korean shopping district, probably in south Korea, but could just as well be in Korea town in Los Angeles.
The 4th picture show a bunch of similing people before some signs in Chinese characters. It could be in china, Taiwan, Japan, or even china town somewhere in the US.
If one wishes want to sterotype most people in communist countries as inevitably deprived and miserable, then one needs to explain why the sort of scene depicted in 3rd and 4th picture, presumable being used to represent abundance and happiness, is most certainly easy to find in china. In fact the night life, glitzy shopping, and the overwhelming cacophony of neons in beijing and shanghai is second no nowhere else in the world, not tokyo, not hong kong, not new york, communist party there not withstanding.
Classical communism certainly demonstrated fatal flaws. But the system of rule resulting from that ideology appears to have the capacity to mutate and compensate for its own most dangerous flaws when given the right curcumstances.
The west likes to harp on human rights and real elections. But fundamentally it was the inability of eastern bloc communism to bring about western level of material abundance to its people that doomed it. It seems that having absorbed that lesson, the dominant remaining ruling communist party, that in Beijing, is now doing an very efficient job in providing increased material abundance and avenues of distraction for its people. Communist party can out-capitalist capitalists when it recognizes that such is needed for its own survival.
