this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Just speaking to the first one as I have some experience regarding that, the reason people feel Hungary has been a better place to live under communism might be because of any of the following:
No other Central or Eastern European country is so blatantly serving the interests of Russia and China over its own and (that of its aliies') either. Maybe that's not a coincidence.
Calling Hungary's economy a "market economy" would imply that the majority of Hungary's capital assets is not captured by government aligned interests.
I don't personally have experience with the rest, but what you've written implies Hungary would be better under communism. The truth is, Hungary has a huge voter bloc that wants to go back to communism, and they elect fascists that promise to do it. The result is obvious.
Oh, the transition to communism wasn't simple either, Hungary set the still-unbroken world record for hyperinflation in the fist years of communism, when they managed to inflate their whole money supply to a collective value of 0.3 US cent. So those guys were obviously saying "we were better under the monarchists!". And they were in clear majority, before communist elites in Hungary called in Soviet troops to reestablish the repression.
It's truly bizarre to me how when eastern Europeans like us talk about our countries, our opinions don't matter because some poll contradicts us. You know far better than I do what was and is going on in Hungary, but talking about Romania like the streets were paved in gold during the communist period is utterly bizarre. Many families spent their life savings on getting smuggled out of the country via Serbia, the government covered up pogroms against the Roma, many Hungarian minority towns were intentionally disadvantaged, and Jews, while initially huge supporters of the Romanian communist movement (for obvious reasons), were later systematically purged from any position of power and the government eventually came up with a deal with Israel to get Israel to pay thousands of dollar per Jew allowed to leave.
None of these sound like the hallmarks of an equitable, safe and stable society.
To be honest, I think most of these people are edgy contrarian Western people if not straight up agitators. Yes, the current US system does abhorrent things. Yes, it is often hypocritical against Russian and Chinese policies. But the mental gymnastics required to go from "US imperialism and worker exploitation bad" to "Russian / Chinese imperialism and worker exploitation good" is a huge leap.