The politics of the 1930s are still playing out in Eastern Europe - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Soviet-imposed communism, I wrote that night in an article for The Post, had suppressed the politics that drove events in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other East Bloc states before World War II
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remystewart on 11 Nov 19The political impact on WWII still is making an impact now
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Thirty years later, the politics of the 1930s are still playing out in the former Eastern Bloc. Poland is governed by an authoritarian-minded right-wing government closely aligned with a reactionary Catholic Church. An uneasy peace prevails in the splintered remains of Yugoslavia after a devastating ethnic war.
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They are authoritarian and socially reactionary — anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is a favorite theme of Poland’s ruling party. Prewar evils such as irredentism and anti-Semitism are alive in mainstream politics to a degree they are not on the other side of the former Iron Curtain.
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Yet some legacies of communist rule have proved enduring, perhaps because they are all too compatible with the resurgent illiberal movements.
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One is the use of state-run national television for political propaganda. After the establishment of democracy, Poland moved to make its government-owned network independent, similar to the BBC.
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After the war, while West Germany de-Nazified, East Germans, Hungarians and Poles were told they bore no responsibility for fascism or the Holocaust, which were portrayed as capitalist crimes.
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Eastern Europe is far better off than in 1989. Its people are vastly richer and, in spite of creeping authoritarianism, far freer. But the euphoria I saw and shared in that momentous weekend in Berlin seems a little naive 30 years later. We underestimated the tenacity of the culture created by Soviet communism — and the perils of a return to history