Back in the USSR

‘You don’t how lucky you are boy, back in the USSR…’ (Lennon/McCartney 1968)

As things turned out, when we found out just how ‘lucky’ they were, it was pretty much the opposite of lucky… Unless your idea of luck is bleak and very nasty. However, despite the mainstream media being less of a lapdog then, you really only got to see the horrors of it once it all broke apart (And the Ukraine girls would really like to knock them out).

But it was idealized and romanticized in song and fiction – and still is. The fact that under socialism, the politically well-connected bureaucrats lived lives of comfort and indeed, pampered luxury (with ample goods from outside their hegemon) while most people’s lives were anything but the utopian paradise, has somehow vanished. If it gets mentioned at all, it wasn’t real socialism.

Oddly, despite being tried over and over again, it never is ‘real’ – or rather it always is real, real horrible, real starvation, real deprivation, and not the rosy romanticism. The truth be told, I suspect most wannabe socialists do know, deep inside, that it isn’t going to be different, ever. They just assume they’ll all be the commissars, and be able to write non-binary poetry as their contribution to society. Other, lesser people will do the scut-work.

As they should know, in practice, it’s only the commissar’s spoiled daughters who get to do that. The commissar is too busy with the normal brutality, treachery and corruption of being extremely rich and powerful by harnessing the state’s monopoly on violence and the power derived from it. Besides, you don’t get to be the commissar by not cheerfully shooting non-binary poets, or anyone else, who won’t dig.

But all of this grows in a manure of fiction, where somehow the probability of the average joe being a commissar is glossed over. The state has been allowed to grow an image of a benevolent father who will allow all its spoiled children to be non-binary poets or whatever. Well, except for the people who dislike their poetry, who will either be shot or be slave labor, but that’s OK because they can’t really be considered human with such execrable taste. This ‘pandemic’ has seen a vast expansion in state power (particularly in my own country) which bears no resemblance to their daydream, and has brought little but misery… but you wouldn’t think so to read of it or see it on TV. The tide of positive propaganda rolls on. It’s a tide driven by the left’s takeover of the publishing, the media, and academia, with distance and rotten education providing cover.

Of course some of us push back. It’s not easy, as that is a lot of weight one is pushing. It’s a long war, and one in which the establishment holds most of the territory and heavy weapons. All they lack is the ability. Still, we do not surrender. We fight where we can, and choose our ground.

And one of our most effective bits of hilly ambush terrain has always been laughter. It’s a serious business, but let’s face it, a lot of the rose-tinted fiction of the benevolent state caring for all of us… is, to anyone remotely capable of logic or even having two brain-cells to rub together, inherently ludicrous. It may be ‘iffen ah don’ laff’ funny, but it is funny. Everyone knows a local petty bureaucrat or three, and have had the ‘joy’ of dealing with them, and the cost and damage of having to. Governments are that on steroids. The bureaucrats are the same kind of people, the least capable and worst people… who always want that sort of job, and will do whatever necessary get it. You want the sort of person who kisses there to run your life? Really? You know what what they want you to kiss? Welcome to the USSR.

So: that’s CLOUD-CASTLES… It should make you laugh. And it goes from absolute government power to as near as practical to anarchy. That’s the first draft of the cover.