W-T-F?
(Wanders away from thread shaking his head in utter bewilderment…)
Wanders back to say - we europeans have colour TV, the internet and yes, even peanut butter. Where on earth would you come up with such a bizarre idea let alone state it as fact?
(Wanders away muttering under his breath).
Chill mate, she’s Spanish. On the Continent a good number of American food products are in fact fairly rarely seen (such a peanut butter) in say France or Spain. Due to lack of interest of course. She should have written “most Spanish” or perhaps Continental Euros, of course.
I don’t remember finding peanut butter to be readily available when I was France in the mid 90s. I also remember getting strange looks when I described a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Yeah, in my experience, peanut butter, especially used in the sweet manner on sandwiches with jelly, was considered quite odd in most places I traveled in Europe. That said, by the time I left Budapest in '03, it was quite common enough to find, although hardly a ubiquitous item. Hell, I’m amazed at what you can find these days out there. Specialty stores actually will stock items like huitlacoche and masa harina (which can be hard enough to find in non-Mexican areas of the US), something that definitely was not available when I lived out there.
Just wanted to comment that this was a brilliant documentary!
There’s plenty of it in Britain and Ireland.
I can’t find the other 2 parts, though! 
PM me…
I actually thought the first episode was the best looking at East Germany. The Czech and Romanian episodes were quite good though. It really reinforces a lot of the observations that folks have made in this thread.
There’s no reason for that to change, several other EU members (Spain and Italy for example) have similar requirements.
There’s plenty of it in many places nowadays, but there wasn’t any around in many of those places 30, 40, 60… years ago. When we’re talking about the situation in a country X years ago, it has to be compared with the situation in other countries at the same time. Missing cereal and peanut butter in Hungary in the 80s? Would’a missed them in maybe 180 of the world’s less-than-200 countries… it’s got nothing to do with Hungary being a Eastern Bloc country at the time.
I visited the Soviet Union in January 1981, so that’s pretty close to the 1980 period requested in the OP. It was a college trip, and we went to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Jaroslavl, Vilnius, and Tallinn. A great experience, actually.
One thing that struck me was simply the normality of it all. That’s not to undercut any of the criticisms of the Soviet system. But, in spite of the overwhelming state control, people still lived their lives. People would stroll in the parks, meet with their lovers, go to parties. There were museums, stores, restaurants, nightclubs. People generally seemed reasonably happy, if a bit envious of the West.
I had expected to see long lines at the stores, but there were fewer than I expected. I walked through GUM, the world’s largest department store (though really, it felt more like a mall). Only in the food section were there lines. Quality and selection were not always great, of course. We did most of our souvenir shopping in beriozkas, special stores that accepted only hard currencies and in which ordinary Russians couldn’t shop. Those had luxury goods like caviar, furs, and Stolichnaya.
The local people were very friendly and interested in us. Relations were not good between the U.S. and the USSR at the time, and Russians frequently expressed the hope that the next time we met, it would not be on the battlefield.
The perception was that there was much less risk of violent crime than in the U.S., and this was often cited as a trade-off between Soviet law enforcement and American civil liberties. I don’t know if the Soviet Union actually was safer, of course. There was a lot of public drunkenness, so I have to assume that there must have been a fair amount of alcohol-related violence.
The system generally was pretty inefficient, which we understood to go with full employment. The Moscow and St. Petersburg subways, however, were fantastically efficient (and beautiful, too). Big clocks would show the time since the last train’s departure, and it usually took no more than 3 minutes until the next train. The trains were quite noisy, though - you couldn’t talk on the train, because people couldn’t hear you.
Cereal was around in Britain 30, 40, 60 years ago. See here, for example, for a brief history of Kellogg’s presence in Britain.
Well, maybe, but you dismissed it as being purely “American” along the lines of peanut butter, and that simply isn’t true.
Define jingoism.
I suppose you have a cite for that last sentence. Absent that, speaking for myself, I expected they would figure out what they wanted for themselves, and we’d help where we could. Sorry if that doesn’t fit in with your preconceptions.
Thanks for revealing your motivation in this discussion.
So even if racist behavior occurred in the USSR, they’re still better because it wasn’t law. Right. And I’m sure the millions of Ukranians who were starved to death and the millions of other people Stalin murdered were consoled by the thought, At least this isn’t racism.
“High moral ground”, my foot.
“Jingoism is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “extreme patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy”…In practice, it refers to the advocation of the use of threats or actual force against other countries in order to safe guard what they perceive as their country’s national interests, and colloquially to excessive bias in judging one’s own country as superior to others – an extreme type of nationalism.”
Bolding mine.
No one is arguing that closed societies are superior to open ones. As I said earlier in the thread, the superiority I referred to was the one the rich feel toward the poor. However, I do find mindless patriotism more than a little disturbing. It smacks of the exact same groupthink we claim to be above.
Your posts are my cite.
However, in the interest of accuracy, I will amend my statement to say, "In my experience, unfortunately, that subtlety is lost on most Americans."
As for the rest of your post, you state you had expectations, and then immediately deride me for having preconceptions. Sublime.
My “preconceptions” as you call them were informed by more than two years of living in Hungary under communism. In fact, since they were based on my actual experience I’m going to go out on a limb here and call them plain old “conceptions”. There was nothing “pre” about them, since I formed them after the experience. I saw what I saw and I shared some of that here.
Your expectation that “we’d help where we could” was no doubt informed by a lifetime of anti-Communist messaging. And as it turns out, the one time the Hungarians asked for help, during the 1956 Revolution, the sum total of the response from the US and the rest of the West was a UN resolution calling on the USSR to end its intervention. This passed the same day Soviet tanks entered Budapest and crushed the Revolution.
So from a Hungarian perspective, one data point about Americans is that they may talk a good game, but when we needed them most, they stood by and watched us die.
You don’t need to point out to me all the reasons the US had for not intervening. Geopolitics are complex, with many interrelationships both obvious and subtle. But try explaining that to the brave men and women of Budapest who paid the ultimate price.
The flat I live in has two bullet holes in it from 1956.
My motivation was to share some observations from my experience. And the quote you reference above is my critique of my own way of thinking. If you got something else out of my words, you need to take that up with yourself.
And if you feel compelled to respond with some kind of lecture on the evils of Totalitarianism, don’t. I know too much about the subject already, and my family has paid in blood a price I hope yours never has to.
So, what they don’t have in Budapest is a Home Depot.