davidthompson

The Monster Wears Red

With the season of good cheer fast approaching, I feel it’s time for some of these.

  

An Unsustainable Evil

Fell to its knees 20 years ago today.

The Berlin Wall… was an apt symbol of Communism. It represented a historically unprecedented effort to prevent people from “voting with their feet” and leaving a society they rejected. The wall was only the most visible segment of a vast system of obstacles and fortifications: the Iron Curtain, which stretched for thousands of miles along the border of the “Socialist Commonwealth.” […]

There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in Communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about Communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former Communist states…

There are, though, academics making efforts of an altogether different kind. And then there are the mutterings of bedlamites. 

The different moral responses to Nazism and Communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of Communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology…

Paul Hollander, quoted here, from this longer essay.

I can’t say I’ve ever found Communism attractive even as a theoretical sketch. The implications of egalitarian utopias aren’t exactly hard to fathom. Unless, that is, one takes care not to notice certain things or think in certain ways, and then goes on not noticing with growing sophistication. Given the monstrous human cost of Communism – estimated at around 110 million lives - it’s worth giving some thought to this proposal. 

Via Maggie’s Farm. Related: Victims of Communism. 

I Remember Robots

Before Chuck-E-Cheese there was The Rock-afire Explosion.

“I started a new restaurant chain called Showbiz Pizza Place and we got singing robots in there...” 

 (h/t, Anna.) 

Mutterings in Bedlam

Speaking of Beatrix Campbell and her rhetorical fellatio of Honecker’s GDR, here’s a taste of the pathological unrealism to be found at Socialist Unity: 

One of the GDR’s greatest achievements was the creation of a more egalitarian society… Pay differentials between different groups of employees were minimal so that even top managers or government ministers were hardly wealthy in Western terms... This lack of large wealth differentials and class privilege made for a more cohesive and balanced society. For some, such egalitarianism was not amenable and the lure of higher salaries and business opportunities in the West remained strong. This led to a steady haemorrhaging of skilled workers and professionals before the wall was built in 1961. The GDR was a society largely free of existential fears.

One more time.

“The GDR was a society largely free of existential fears.”

Harry’s Place obliges with some helpful footnotes and illustrations.

The Aesthetics of Neglect

100 examples of urban decay photography.

 

Above: Abandoned brewery-cum-bowling alley, Berlin. Photographed by Keith Thorne. [ Via.] Related: Residue and Ghost Baskets.

Captivated

A three-year-old watches cartoons, California, 1963.

 

Via Shorpy. 

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time - likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour - passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker - bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority. At that point, the ability to destroy the world would fall to whoever was on duty.

Isn’t the whole point of having a doomsday machine that you let your enemies know about it? It seems the Soviets didn’t.

The silence can be attributed partly to fears that the US would figure out how to disable the system. But the principal reason is more complicated and surprising. According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves. By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, Zheleznyakov says, was “to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge.” […]

Given the paranoia of the era, it is not unimaginable that a malfunctioning radar, a flock of geese that looked like an incoming warhead, or a misinterpreted American war exercise could have triggered a catastrophe… Perimeter solved that problem. If Soviet radar picked up an ominous but ambiguous signal, the leaders could turn on Perimeter and wait. If it turned out to be geese, they could relax and Perimeter would stand down. Confirming actual detonations on Soviet soil is far easier than confirming distant launches. “That is why we have the system,” Yarynich says. “To avoid a tragic mistake.”

(h/t, Anna.)

Corpulence and Magnetism

Pioneering adverts of the West, 1867-1918. 

  

The marvellous Mrs Gunn and her bust-restoring oils, 1917. “No parafine used.”

Drug Stores of Yore

People’s Drug Store, Seventh & K, Washington, D.C., circa 1920. Candy, prescriptions and abdominal belts.

 

Footprints on the Moon

40 years ago today, some hairless apes did a very daring and clever thing. Around half a billion other hairless apes watched it happen on TV. Such was the daring and cunning involved, and such was the uncertainty of the outcome, it’s worth reposting this. Here’s David Sington’s 2007 documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, in which the surviving Apollo crew members recount their remarkable, at times moving, experiences. There’s previously unseen mission footage, an excellent score by Philip Sheppard, and keep an eye out for Kennedy’s extraordinary speech, about 13:20 in.

Related: Freefall, Craters, Astronomical Odds.