Prime Junta
Guest
Having finished the game, I think the it merely makes fun of rightoid-inspired prejudice, but is actually seriously harsh on "communism". What it's really critical of is not one ideology or another, but of human nature and the human propensity for self-delusion and dividing into "tribes", two things which go hand in hand with fervently subscribing to a totalitarian ideology.
I'll let you in on a dirty communist secret.
The story of Communism as it really existed is grand tragedy worthy of Euripides. From the fiery Manifesto, through the Paris Commune, to the victorious revolutionaries making love in the Winter Palace, through the dark and brutal days of War Communism, NEP, Stalin's cult of personality and purges, the terrifying brutality of the Great Patriotic War and the impossible victory over the Wehrmacht, the glorious days when it looked like actual, real Communism like Marx envisioned it was almost within reach: all of it, with the withering away of the state, plenty and leisure for everyone and a universal flowering of the human spirit. And then stagnation, decline, defeat by the forces of neoliberalism or worse than that, transformation into a travesty of what it was supposed to be.
We almost made it. The human cost was horrifying, but we almost made it. Or maybe we didn't and for a while there it just looked like it. And in the end, we ended up with nothing. Failure. A neoliberal, proto-fascist dystopia worse than in the countries that never attempted it. The closest approximations to it are the lukewarm strong-public-sector-with-free-markets Nordic countries and they're not only showing no interest in further progress but are declining further.
Every communist has to deal with this. It's a lot of baggage. We can claim the triumphs, yes, but we also have to face up to and own the horrors and the tragedies. Pol Pot's killing fields, Lubyanka, the famine of 1932, Bukharin in his cell writing a constitution for Stalin while waiting for execution, Lenin's liquidation quotas for class enemies, that's all ours too. It's a lot of cognitive dissonance to deal with and each of us deals with it in their own way, from STALIN DID NOTHING WRONG to TANKIES AREN'T REAL COMMUNISTS.
One of the things that really moved me about Disco Elysium is that it takes this cognitive dissonance and looks at it straight in the eye, and doesn't flinch. It is especially hard on Communists and communism because this is the place it comes from. We really need to do better next time. And we really do need to look really hard at the history we claim, and how we, as individuals and as Communists, relate to it.
Apologies for the sincerity. I'll go back to our regular programming presently.
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