>>>>>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.

I read plenty of history. And for the record, I never made a comment about Yugoslavia; I was talking about USSR which was completely different animal (almost literally :)). I didn't know much about life in SFRY; except from the words of a friend of mine who was a Yugoslavian translator. She even supplied me with some Jazz magazines (since I was interested in Jazz music). And I said, if you read my reply to Nick, that Yugoslavia was much better off in terms of standard of living and some freedoms. As you yourself describe, you traveled quite a bit. I, on the other hand, lived about 60 kilometers from Poland, another socialist country. But for me to ever think that I could ever go to Poland was like for you to fly to the Moon. This was one of the realities of life in the USSR.

The entire argument was whether USA can be compared to USSR. To me this is ridiculous. Nonsense.

I think it is your absolute right to criticize the US-government policies. I do it too with my vote (I vote in every local, state, and national elections); this is my way of changing what I don't like or make policies that I like to stay.