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Goodbye Jesus

"winds Of Change"


nivek

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20 years ago Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall started their quick fall to destruction.

 

Not much on the LameStream on this event...

 

Pity.

 

Scorpions do their song via above link about the Fall.

 

I have my chunk of the Wall from Berlin.

 

kL

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Not much on the LameStream on this event...

 

They have other adendas.......

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I saw the Scorps play Winds of Change live in front of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. I thought the Russians wouldn't get the significance due to language barriers but they "got" it. Lighters went up and a quiet awe swept across the crowd. I stood their with tears running down my face at the beauty of it all.

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Two things astounded me in those years; one, that it was all happening, and two, that most everyone else wasn't blown away by it.

 

I thought there would always be an East/West conflict; I thought there would always be the U.S. vs the Soviets.

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I did too. I was a kid in the 80s and I grew up in Southern California just down the highway from all that aerospace (Skunkworks, EAFB, etc.). They were just fucking piling it onto our young minds: the Soviets are our eternal enemy, missiles and/or Soviet paratroopers could show up at any moment, start preparing NOW in your childhood war games to fight the Soviets because it's inevitable, etc. etc. It was such a relief when the whole thing blew over in '91.

 

I lived with a guy from Moscow for a couple years. I told him about all that and he said "shit! When we played war games as kids we were always fighting the Germans, never the Americans." He said that his generation actually liked America, up until we went and fucked up Yugoslavia.

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It's stories like that make me glad I was born in '85. The Red Scare never got its hooks in me - by the time I was old enough to start understanding the whole thing the USSR had collapsed. Many of my friends being ~10 years my senior, it makes for a kind of mystifying-in-both-directions situation.

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Was rather amusing all the Soviet gear that was sold on the street shortly thereafter. Wish I would have picked up the set of Soviet NVGs one of the guys was selling inferior though they may have been.

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I saw the Scorps play Winds of Change live in front of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. I thought the Russians wouldn't get the significance due to language barriers but they "got" it. Lighters went up and a quiet awe swept across the crowd. I stood their with tears running down my face at the beauty of it all.

 

 

For some of us, we shed tears of loss of the USSR, and fear for the future...

 

My old roommate was from Moscow. He said that old folks, especially pensioners, had the most to lose. The Yeltsin years were a clusterfuck for almost everyone except for the middle-class-on-up lucky enough to live in the city states of Moscow and St. Petersburg (such as my roommate, who remembers those years as one huge party). The neo-liberals, all hopped up on Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis, came in thinking that the thing to do was to go the opposite extreme. People who think in extremes and absolutes, be they on the right or on the left, have been the bane of the 20th and now the 21st centuries.

 

This isn't to say the USSR was good. Lenin's Machiavellian scheming made Marx turn in his grave, Stalin was right up there with Hitler (though far less organized and calculated about it), and Khrushchev the strongman won out over Khrushchev the peacemaker (granted, there was probably more blame on our end, as far as that went). Of course, neither was the USA the blameless, benevolent hegemon that rode high astride the post-war era like the Biblical "city on a hill", as depicted in neo-conservative myth.

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I saw the Scorps play Winds of Change live in front of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. I thought the Russians wouldn't get the significance due to language barriers but they "got" it. Lighters went up and a quiet awe swept across the crowd. I stood their with tears running down my face at the beauty of it all.

 

 

For some of us, we shed tears of loss of the USSR, and fear for the future...

 

My old roommate was from Moscow. He said that old folks, especially pensioners, had the most to lose. The Yeltsin years were a clusterfuck for almost everyone except for the middle-class-on-up lucky enough to live in the city states of Moscow and St. Petersburg (such as my roommate, who remembers those years as one huge party). The neo-liberals, all hopped up on Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis, came in thinking that the thing to do was to go the opposite extreme. People who think in extremes and absolutes, be they on the right or on the left, have been the bane of the 20th and now the 21st centuries.

 

This isn't to say the USSR was good. Lenin's Machiavellian scheming made Marx turn in his grave, Stalin was right up there with Hitler, and Khrushchev the strongman won out over Khrushchev the peacemaker (granted, there was probably more blame on our end, as far as that went).

 

Every now and then I see 20 or so babushki waving CCCP flags on Nevski prospect. In a city of 8 million, I'd say they are a drop in the bucket.

 

There's a guy who works with my wife who also pines for the old days but according to my wife he is lazy and prefers a handout to work.

 

Most interesting to me is my brother in law, who is a millionaire. He from time to time reflects on the good old days when life was simpler and he had time to spend with friends and family as opposed to his life now where he works from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.

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Every now and then I see 20 or so babushki waving CCCP flags on Nevski prospect. In a city of 8 million, I'd say they are a drop in the bucket.

 

There's a guy who works with my wife who also pines for the old days but according to my wife he is lazy and prefers a handout to work.

 

Most interesting to me is my brother in law, who is a millionaire. He from time to time reflects on the good old days when life was simpler and he had time to spend with friends and family as opposed to his life now where he works from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.

 

My friend told me that by the time he was 9 or 10 years old, everyone in his generation knew that it was bullshit and that it was on the way out. There wasn't much left for them to believe in by the time it went away. I think the old folks who fought the Germans under the red star took it the hardest. Both because they were pensioners who were left out to dry by the new system, and because the country they'd fought and suffered for so terribly was gone. One surefire way for an American to piss off anybody in the Slavic world is to say something like "well if'n it weren't for us 'Murricans, y'all would be speakin' German, ya goddamn ingrates!" The Western front was practically a sideshow compared to the Eastern. The only reason why America came out of it sitting so pretty is because our cities weren't destroyed and our civilians hadn't been massacred. We got off real easy.

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On that note, it grates at me a bit when I see them getting all patriotic on victory day every year. Their government killed all their generals out of paranoia leaving their soldiers to get slaughtered by the Germans. And then when they finally defeated the Germans by outlasting them their government sent the surviving soldiers to Siberia. Now they act as if this was a proud, heroic time for them. It's completely bullshit. They just survived, they didn't win and it was a shallow, empty victory. The patriotism they now feel for these events seems rather stupid and ignorant to me.

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On that note, it grates at me a bit when I see them getting all patriotic on victory day every year. Their government killed all their generals out of paranoia leaving their soldiers to get slaughtered by the Germans. And then when they finally defeated the Germans by outlasting them their government sent the surviving soldiers to Siberia. Now they act as if this was a proud, heroic time for them. It's completely bullshit. They just survived, they didn't win and it was a shallow, empty victory. The patriotism they now feel for these events seems rather stupid and ignorant to me.

 

I figure it's more about the grunts out there defending mom and pop back at the family farm (who were in much greater peril than mom and pop back in Dubuque, Iowa), than it was about the generals, Stalin, or the politburo. My roommate told me some of what his grandfather (artillery officer) saw in Stalingrad and I was like "fuuuuuck..." :twitch: Nothing to sneeze at, that's for sure. Also, other countries get all riled up over battles and wars they lost completely (kind of the whole "we had no chance from the get-go but we sure showed some big huge balls out there, didn't we lads?"), so I figure, yeah.... They also absorbed far more of the German military than the West did. I forget the numbers but I think there were 3 times as many Divisions on the Eastern front (anybody have the figures?) as there were in Western Europe and North Africa. I could see some kind of "martyrdom" thing, absorbing the absolute worst of it for the sake of everyone else.

 

That said, I could see having more reason to be proud if I was from somewhere like (the former) Yugoslavia or the Czech Republic than from Russia, providing that my grandparents were on the right side of things (as in, not collaborators, passive or otherwise). The Partisans/Resistance (not to mention those who fought as auxiliary to the Red Army) put up a hell of a fight, all things considered, and then (with the exception of Yugoslavia) got fucked over by the Soviets. Hell, even the lefties in Italy have something to be proud of when it comes to that.

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