[QUOTE=Dominic Mulligan]
Oh bull. Wherever there’s communism, there’s untold suffering. Present day communists trying to distance themselves from the likes of the Soviet Union has to be the greatest exercise in backtracking ever. Communists throughout the 40’, 50’s and 60’s were only too eager to associate themselves with the likes of the USSR (look at the Cambridge spy ring, for instance - highly educated men willing to give secrets to the Russians), and now, when the horrors of mass starvation, GULAGs and purges cannot be brushed off as Western propaganda quite so easily, they’re desperately trying to distance themselves from it.
If every attempt at employing communism has resulted in disaster, then shouldn’t that imply something about communism itself?
The two situations aren’t even remotely analogous. The USSR used conscripted men, with no idea of what they were getting in to. Even in the film it states that the cameraman was allowed right next to the reactor without any protective clothing - do you seriously think this would have been allowed in the UK or America, for instance?
You’re talking about American volunteers, who likely would know exactly what it is that they’re getting themselves in to, likely briefed on the dangers beforehand, especially if they were radiation workers, such as yourself.
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How many americans of the time would actually understand the real dangers of chernobyl? What do you know about the nuclear power industry and radioactive materials that you didnt get out of the newspapers and magazines? Do you even realize the radiation dose you get from common household items? Did you know that granite has 10-20 ppm of uranium and you can get an infinitesimal dose hanging out in Grand Central Station waiting for your train? You get 4 mSv from our favorite SDMB procedure - a lower GI radiographic dye image. you get about .1 mSv sleeping next to another human for a year. We got fed a steady diet of nuclear horror stories by the media and people more interested in their agendas rather than truth [that nuke power is actually pretty safe.] Near as I can tell, soviet media never fed into the horror stories about how unsafe nuke power was.
And again I reiterate, the common Ivan iin the street is just like you and me. The problem comes when a perfectly good principal is put into practice by people. There is no doubt that pure communism is a nice idea, but people are only human. We have the urge for more Everybody would like to have a nice home, plenty to eat and drink, nice clothing, books and music [access to live musicians, a killer stereo and records or whatever format is common in your age] The problem with ANY form of government is human nature. Why the hell should a senator or congresscritter get multiple retirement packages? Why should they be able to vote themselves payraises, and whatever perks they have? Why shouldnt I get $50,000 a year instead of my social security of under $12000 a year + whatever I can manage to scrounge out of my income and put into savings. I bet I work at least as hard as a congresscritter, and I don’t have a staff to help me do my job. I would love to have the ability to junket off to investigate something and not show up at the office in person.
The average Ivan in Soviet era russia worked a job like any of us, hung out with his buddies, lived in crappy housing and didnt really get time off other than a state sponored vacation to a state sponsored resort once a year. Cars and phones were luxuries and expensive.
In our version, we worked, lived near our job - many people in what we today would consider crappy housing, we were LUCKY to actually take planned vacations to a resort - we would do something like in dirty dancing, head off to a small motel for a week or two and they were definitely not state sponsored. Cars were still expensive, we frequently had a party line rather than a private phone until into the late 60s. Multiple phone lines? That wasnt even common until the 90s and the proliferation of computers and the internet.
The common ivan didnt send people to Lubyenka or a gulag. The common ivan didnt get up in the morning and try to figure out a way to destroy the US and democracy. The common ivan didnt even covertly think about how to spy for the US.
The common american didnt keep the blacks and hispanics in a ghetto, apply double standards of law to blacks and hispanics and be so scared of the idea of communism that we broke constitutional law… um, wait a minute, yes we did. Oops.
I guess democracy sucks. Maybe we ought to try monarchy again.
