please read some parenti

  • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    This is bullshit. I will refute most of your points as someone who has lived in Socialist Hungary before the iron curtain.

    1. Housing was not guaranteed. You were assigned lodging based on need. If you had no children, you were staying with your parents and two siblings in the 1BR apartment. Once you got a kid, if you were a young couple, you got an apartment with an elderly in it, that you had to take care of along with your new born, until their death. After that the apartment would be yours. To overcome the shortages of housing, the government invested into building temporary housing called panel buildings. They were not meant to last for more than twenty years.
    2. Education was discriminatory in the sense that those favoured by the party got a pass. You have long hair? Your dad had long hair? You are a Gypsy? Yeah sure, you can pass elementary grade 8, but you sure as hell won’t be allowed to go into a four-year highschool for your profession and graduation . Best you could hope for is a 2 year middle school for a manual labour job (szakmunkásképző). If at all. Often it’s off to the fields for you to work at the communal fields.
    3. 0% unemployment because if you are unemployed you go to prison. Off to the fields or else!
    4. Sales tax (VAT) has been 25% even before 1988
    5. The railway system the country has was all built before the second world war. It got maintained during socialism, but the best they could do was put train drivers on concession show trials and execute them when accidents happened instead of actually improving the system. To this day the max speed on these rail lines is 120kmph and many of the smaller lines are falling into disrepair and unelectrified.
    6. Healthcare was universal, however it was not highly developed nor without discrimination. What was true for education was also true here. You better be a good party member or else. If you were lucky, you had a relative working in healthcare to skip waiting lines (I’ve benefited of this a lot)
    7. This one was a given. Although you still had to pay for meals for your kid at the daycare. But the times were also different back then. Those responsible for child care were not necessarily professionals and hitting children if they had misbehaved was still a thing.
    8. I don’t think this had a measurable comparison in any way. How do you draw comparisons?
    9. Ahh yes, how nice. Went from nazi dictatorship to literal Russia planted dictatorships in both East Germany and Hungary ('56).