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Stan Persky, author of 'Post-Communist Stories,' talks to The Tyee.

Author Persky: 'The failure of communism (or Stalinism, or Soviet-style communism, if you prefer) raises the profoundest questions for a socialist like me.'

[Editor's note: As you've no doubt been reminded this week, the Berlin Wall fell just about 25 years ago, ushering in an era that philosopher and writer Stan Persky, who splits his time between Vancouver and Berlin, reflects upon in his new book Post-Communist Stories: About Cities, Politics, Desires. An excerpt runs today on The Tyee. And Persky's old friend Tom Sandborn caught up with him to have the conversation below.]

Tyee: This book is based on your 1995 release Then We Take Berlin. Although you have added lots of new material reflecting your experiences and observations in Eastern Europe over the quarter century since the Wall fell and revised and updated the material that first appeared in 1995, you must have had a reason to revisit your earlier work rather than write an entirely new text. Tell us about the process that led to this book's creation.

Stan Persky: The obvious reason for putting together a book of both new and revised writings about post-communist Europe is that this year is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the emblematic image of the Cold War. I was worried that people wouldn't remember what had happened.

Many of the students I teach in university today have never heard of the events of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe. Many of them have never heard of the Soviet Union, whose dissolution occurred in 1991, shortly before they were born. In fact, many of them have never even heard of communism.

It turns out that 2014 is a year of many historic anniversaries. In addition to being the 25th anniversary of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, its also the 25th anniversary of the popular uprising in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China that was crushed by the Chinese Communist Party's army, and then erased from people's memories by methods described in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It's also the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of World War I in 1914, and the 75th anniversary of the joint Soviet-Nazi attack on Poland that began World War II in 1939. And, for those keeping track of such things, it's the quarter-century mark for the introduction of the World Wide Web, the now-ubiquitous http://www.whatever that takes us everywhere and nowhere. As someone who writes "for the record," I see it as part of my job to prevent forgetting, and to not only remind fellow citizens of what happened in our past, but to try and figure out what it meant so that we won't be doomed to repeat our historical mistakes.

Second, as a writer, I want to show the connections between the past and the present. By coincidence, 2014 also is the year in which the majority of the people of Ukraine overthrew their corrupt, Russian-dominated government in order to try to establish a society that's moving closer to the European Union, the rule of law, and a decent standard of living, and away from the influence of Vladimir Putin's authoritarian Russia.

Link:
'I'm Still Waiting for Someone to Come up with Communism 2.0' (in Culture)

A crowd of protesters waves flags showing Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, beside President Vladimir Putin of Russia at a rally in Budapest. Orban announced later dropped a proposed tax on Internet usage that angered thousands, who felt that the tax was an attempt to cut off one of the few sources of information not controlled by Orban's allies. Photo: New York Times

Budapest:A quarter-century ago, as Hungary helped ignite the events that would lead to the collapse of Communism, the ferment produced a new political star.

Viktor Orban was 26 then and a long-haired law graduate. In June 1989, five months before the Berlin Wall came down, he lit up a commemoration of the failed 1956 revolt against Moscow with a bold call for free elections and a demand that 80,000 Soviet troops go home.

Now, days after the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hungary is a member of NATO and the European Union and Mr Orban is in his third term as Prime Minister. But what was once a journey that might have embodied the triumph of democratic capitalism has evolved into a much more complex tale of a country and a leader who in the time since have come to question Western values, foment nationalism and look more openly at Russia as a model.

Looking east: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Photo: AFP

After leading his right-wing party Fidesz to a series of national and local election victories, Mr Orban is rapidly centralising power, raising a crop of crony oligarchs, cracking down on dissent, expanding ties with Moscow, and generally drawing uneasy comparisons from Western leaders and internal opponents to President Vladimir Putin.

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"He is the only Putinist governing in the European Union," said Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister.

Some other Eastern European countries, especially Poland, have remained oriented toward the West and still harbour deep suspicions of Russia long after the Cold War ended.

But Hungary is one of several countries in the former Soviet sphere that is now torn between the Western ways that appeared ascendant immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union and the resilient clout of today's Russia. Money, culture and energy resources still bind most regional countries to Russia as tightly as to Europe. Mr Putin's combative nationalism is more popular here than what many see as Western democratic sclerosis.

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Putin protege Viktor Orban spreads his wings in Hungary

Communism in Albania: A True Story
A narrative about the rise and fall of Commuism in Albania during the cold war.

By: A Rose #39;sthorns

Go here to see the original:
Communism in Albania: A True Story - Video

Sources:Data are latest available as of Nov. 12, 2014 from thefollowing sources: World Bank, United Nations DevelopmentProgramme, Freedom House, and Transparency International. Methodology:

Gross Domestic Product per capita figures are in 2011 international USD. Life expectancy figures are for all persons at birth. Child mortality rates are the number of deaths of children under the age of 5 per 1,000 live births. Average years of schooling are for all adults 25 years old and older.

Freedom House awards countries two scores: one for political rights and one for civil liberties. Each country receives a score from 1 (best) to 7 (worst). For this presentation, scores are inverted and averaged into an overall freedom score of 1 (worst) to 7 (best)

Data for Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index begin in 1999 for most countries. TI scores countries on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best). This presentation inverts scores so that 100 represents the most corruption, 0 the least. Prior to 2012, TI had an identical scoring system, but on a scale of 0 to 10. These scores were multiplied by 10 to equalize the scale across the entire time span.

UNDP education data is provided at irregular intervals (1990, 2000, 2005 and annually onwards). For gaps between years of data, graphs show interpolated results. For other indicators, gaps between data are treated the same way. If no data exist prior to a certain date, graph data begin at the first available data point.

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Legacy of the Berlin Wall: Communism's 25-Year Shadow

This week we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it communism. However, as we approach this anniversary, I am disturbed to see a resurgence of this destructive ideology right here at home.

Communism as a political structure is a failure. We know this to be true based on itshistory. We have seen theimages of despair from behind the Iron Curtin. We know that when the state crushes theindividual that failure of the society is sure to follow.

Why then, with these lessons less than 30 years behind us, do our leaders seek to embody this damaging ideology here in America under the guise of a different name: progressivism?

Our very own president is on the record as having said things such as, You didnt build that. He is also famous for his talking point of everyone getting his or her fare share.

We are a nation of equal opportunity, not equal outcome. This administration hasdedicated itself to replacing the individual with the state. If the current regulatory scheme of the EPA or the IRS is not enough proof that communism is growing here at home, then I present to you exhibit A:Obamacare (or the Affordable Care Act for my liberal friends).

This disastrous policy is the single largest attempt in this nations history to bring theindividual to his or her knees in a state of perpetual dependence upon the government.

This, my friends, iscommunism in the guise of a helping hand.

Just because you do not see Soviet style force in our towns and cities does not mean that the ideology of the former USSR is not present and thrivingwithin academia andgovernment here at home.

Here in America, communism goes by a different name.

Progressivism is communism. Make no mistake about it.

The rest is here:
Stay vigilant against communism