>>>>>I thought you would see through the propaganda of both sides. Betterment is not in just buying cars.
>>>>
>>>>I knew (from many of your posts) that you never liked USA. But I was hoping that you would be more objective, since unlike Mason, you lived under the USSR-type regime.
>>>
>>>Not really, maybe when I was a kid. Since the sixties, it was very un-SSSR-typed, and we enjoyed the difference all the way.
>>>
>>>I like most of the folks I met in these years in the US - they are great people. I met only a few Russians I didn't like. But I don't put much of a preference between USA and USSR - they were both too big to be good, both had imperial policies, and, frankly, I don't drink brown sugar waters. Coke, Pepsi - equally disliked. Rampant corporativism isn't much better than stalinism, IMO. It isn't even more colorful.
>>
>>I don't know what happened to you in the USA and why such a hatred.
>f
>Again, I don't hate the US. I've made good friends there, felt fine and generally got pissed off at what government does to people far less than I did in Serbia/Yugoslavia. It's only in the latter years, when that government abdicated so much of its mandate to corporations, that I became disillusioned.
>
>I do have a thorough distaste for the rule of the mighty, for patronizing smaller countries, for deciding for them on how should they be ruled, for organizing coups, putting marionette governments in place which will sell the wealth of their country for pittance and a bribe... all those imperial/colonial practices. No matter who does them. The US policy only comes more frequently as the matter of dispute, simply because it's the sole remaining superpower in both military and media spaces. Other similarly behaving countries may do worse things, but they don't get as much exposure.
>
>>At least I give you credit for being true to your feelings and leaving the states and going back to your country. But to equate USSR and USA is ridiculous. Either you completely lost your memory or you (or your family) were part of the communist apparatchiks that still long for the good old days of jailing people for a political joke, for lines to buy milk; for special connections to buy books (not cars), for hospitals that had not even basic medical supplies; for the country smelling of piss and vodka; for system that rewarded only those who belonged to the communist party.
>
>Read some history. In Yugoslavia, the period of such life pretty much ended around 1952, before I was born. I was visiting Hungary and Romania a lot during such regimes, and the USSR briefly, and I've seen a lot of difference. Any contact with the foreigners was suspect there, probably tracked by agents (I smuggled some books for a Romanian student expelled from college because his dad was a Titoist), while we had hundreds of thousands of tourists visiting since mid sixties, and we freely mixed with them, visited them (I've been to Germany and Netherlands visiting, they were visiting me - all between '74 and '77). So I've been to all three sides - West, East and SFRY in those years, and I remember them well.
>
>There were some bad sides to the life in SFRY, some limitations and injustice, but generally people felt better then than now, when Serbia is recolonized.

When I was in Europe,, Yugoslavia was the vacation spot of the mid - elite. It was a nice experiment that went wrong.... (how's that for over-simplification). It was also a place where two communities lived next to each other and never met or interrelated. Sure everyone could come and go but inside the country and its own neighborhoods and cities, it was often quite isolated. In some places marriages between different groups was perfectly ok, but in other communities absolutely not. There was a lot of ethnic separatism in some towns and absolutely none in others. After Tito, if anyone disagreed with Milosevic they labeled as counter-revolutionary and put into a separate group.... I was in my mid 20s then and that is the Yugoslavia I remember (and granted, I am not from there and never LIVED there as a resident or citizen). That was a short (very short period of time) for Yugoslavia but it was also a time when it began it's demise....during the turmoil it appeared that everyone - neighbors and different groups - wanted different things.

So, how much of that is accurate and how much of that is way off base?