There is some Western pollution – Subways, McDonalds, Burger King, KFC and Starbucks are here and there. A trolley car that rolled by this AM was littered with Citibank graffiti – excuse please – advertising. Western capitalism has penetrated without the usual bombs. But most of what we see is local business and lively commerce. Prices are moderate. It’s bustling and beautiful. This would be a wonderful place for a young couple to fall in love.
Tonight we will have dinner at a restaurant that the guide book tells us was founded by “American expatriates.” My mouth waters to be such, to be away from our sleazy consumer culture. Our population, so addled by agitprop, is dumbed down to the point of incoherence. We idolize warriors and athletes and movie and TV celebrities. We have artificial limbs and flag waving and national anthems and all the other symbols of perpetual warfare. Our intellectual and journalistic classes are glommed on to power like remora to a shark.
I wish to be an expatriate, and this would be a nice place for that..
I wondered at the outset if people were different elsewhere. They are not, of course. We all have the same needs. But cultures are different, and people behave differently here in socialist Europe than in the US. The major difference is agitprop, but the absence of public health care and adequate pensions makes the US an ugly and insecure place. People might indeed rebel if they were not always kept at war with others.
But I don’t know that for sure, as like I said, they are dumbed down.
Tomorrow we are going to do a walking tour. We generally don’t do that, but this one is different. It is going to take us through Czech history during Communist occupation. I imagine now, before we take that tour, that life then was not so terrible as American propaganda made it to be. But it was not good. It was surely much, much worse than Soviet propaganda made it out to be.
The Soviet Union was a military dictatorship. Where once they had czars, they were replaced by premiers., and ham-handed at the propaganda game. It was communist, but called itself “socialist.” American commissars liked that, as a fear of “socialism” allowed a second-worse system, “free market”capitalism, to rise up. This prevented our development along European lines, as were were taught that there were only two ways.
Czechoslovakia was taken over by military coup in 1948, and was under Soviet occupation until 1991. There was an uprising in 1968 which was brutally put down. We see housing now, these large gray apartment complexes, that give testimony to how repressive that system was. They appear empty. The Soviet Union, which Jeane Kirkpatrick famously said could never be brought down except by vioence, fell quietly.
She was so wrong, completely wrong as one can be wrong. It is the US that can only be toppled by violence. In that same year, 1968, that th Czechs rebelled there was also a rebellion in Chicago, and it took a brutal police attack to control it. Hubert Humphrey was then nominated for president as a Democrat after the front runner had been murdered. Humphrey had not even won a primary. (Robert Kennedy died of a bullet fired at close range behind his ear. The man who supposedly fired the shot stood across the room, an amazing feat. So oppressive is the intellectual culture that people fear to question that official finding even forty years later.)
Please, Americans, don’t brag about things. You’re not all that great.
Real socialist countries as we have visited are peaceful and prosperous places. And that is all that life can be about – enjoyment for the greatest possible number of people, the free exchange of labor, protection of the commons, and security in health and retirement.
Piece of Mindful 
Please, Americans, don’t brag about things. You’re not all that great.
Keep preachin’ it, brother. Maybe people will quit moving here.
I wish to be an expatriate, and this would be a nice place for that.
Fine, but the problem is that when too many of you Americans move somewhere, well, it becomes like America: you want everything done by high or low bidders; you want diversity, so you import a bunch of gypsies, then create sanctuary cities to shove them down our throat, and pretty soon the place looks like Detroit or Boulder, depending on who does the moving.
Stay home. Fix your own problems.
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There must be a secret code for unraveling that comment.
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My post was just an observation. In Montana we see people from California move in, looking for “a better place”, and gushing about the rural culture and lifestyle. But what do they do? Go to county meetings and ask for all dirt roads to be paved, road signs put up, more social services, etc. I guess to make it easier for illegals and drug dealers to ply their trade.
Mexicans move here, complaining about the lack of jobs in Mexico. What do they do? Start a chain migration of relatives and demographic growth from the home country, people with few skills and ability, and we start to see a recreation of what they left behind.
Some of the things that energize European culture, such as ethnic homogeneity and its attendant in-group mores, are not anything I see you upholding. I’m not sure you are a good prospect for them.
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That is not useful. Expatriates usually don’t take their homeland with them. They want out. I want smarter, better educated and more substantive people around me. In my exoerience, Californians want California, but they want it cheap and sparsely populated.
We’ve discussed the Mexican problem before and you refuse to acknowledge A>B>C. You only know about C. There is not much more to talk about.
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There is not much more to talk about.
Oh please. Your understanding of immigration is so “phoned in”.
I want smarter, better educated and more substantive people around me.
Initially I laughed at this, but it is more a reflection of you than those around you. For all your bragging about your empathy and understanding, you carry around with you a basic dislike and intolerance of your fellow man.
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Phoned in. I get it. Because I link policies to consequences of politcies, I am giving it light treatment. You, on the other hand, merely attribute the whole mess to the weaknesses inherent in one set of people versus another.
I know how that comment you cite sounded, but at the time it worked for me. I can only deal with the Swedes and Kralj’s and all those stupid Democrats for so long. Budge is pretty good, hits hard and all, but the rest aren’t worth the time I spend. And the time I spend is wearing, as it is telling me I need to be on to better things than this. There’s no meaningful feedback out there, no one who thinks like I do. Everyone is grouped. I hate writing for people who agree with me, and so want people who bring it. But they have to get where I come from, and hardly anyone does.
This was kind of neat – and totally a coincidence. I put up a post before we left the country on how NATO murdered Gaddafi’s kids, and compared it to what happened in Norway and said that Libya now had the right to bomb the prime minister of Norway using NATO’s logic.
A few days ago I had a very large number of emails, and most of them, almost 25, were “likes”, which is what WordPress does when someone clicks on the “like” button at the bottom of a post. These emails were all likes, and all originated in Czech Republic or Germany. In other words, people get it, but the ones who do get it are not American.
That’s interesting, but I would like for someone to take me on based on something other than their not getting what I say based on their never being exposed to thinking the type of thoughts I think. Ya know?
So I feel like an expat.
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…thinking the type of thoughts I think.
Well, don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.
I find your moral equivalencies to be skewed. Your Libya-Norway, for example. Good for you that some Eastern Europeans enjoy the irony. It doesn’t change the skewed nature.
Oh yeah, on immigration. Last time I checked in you bloviated about how NAFTA impoverished Mexico, so they decided to come here and get on disability. You are happy to latch on to that nugget and call it good. But that is a small part of the deal, and that you don’t look at any more than that speaks of someone happy to draw conclusions based on a limited world view. Immigration was big before and after NAFTA, and immigration includes a lot of people not affected directly by trade agreements. In the Mexican case, we have government policy urging people north to send back remittances instead of investing in infrastructure and economic growth at home, and the urging of a colonization mentality. Mexico is not that bad off economically, having a GDP per capita (World Bank) higher than some of the Eastern European countries you are currently so fond of. Yea, I know Mexico has more inequality in income distribution, but even so the choice is not emigrate or die.
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Libya Norway perfectly illustrates the “we’re rational they’re not” mindset, The same dee killing children, is OK in your mind in once case not in the other, I don’t have the problem here, nor do the Czechs or Germans.
Immigration I love it when I bring up one problem, and the defense is “yeah, well its not the only problem.”. Read up on the matter from a non-right wing source, gather some facts in the ground, then we can talk.
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