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The Eastern European Scene
László Pordány
| In Eastern Europe (call it the eastern bloc, the former Soviet bloc, or East-Central Europe, or use the self-definition Middle Europe), anti-Americanism has taken remarkable twists and turns in the past decades. |
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| The roots of the developments we are concerned with here go back a good sixty years, to the end of World War II. That was the time when the eastern part of Europe, then under Soviet occupation and cut off from the happier part of the Continent, started its long journey on the road of anti-American rhetoric and politics. The onset of Communism introduced a degree and a kind of anti-Americanism not only unheard of, but unimaginable, outside the Soviet bloc. It was agressive, omnipresent, and overwhelming. The ruling Communist party in each country made its propaganda the obligatory tone in the media, in public speaking and writing, and even in private life. |
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In this totally anti-American verbal atmosphere, language was not only manipulated but also twisted to an extent never before seen. Newspeak became hard reality right around the time when the word was invented. Political terms began to signify their opposites. Thus, democracy meant dictatorship and vice versa. "Imperialists" (in more aggressive terminology, "dirty imperialists") were practically synonymous with "Americans," and all this was not just rhetoric. The warmongering Soviet Union and its satellites were collectively referred to as "the peace camp" and "the freedom-loving world." |
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America was the synonym for hell, and Americans were the devils for the peace camp's purposes, with the whole scheme invented by, prescribed by, and controlled from Moscow. Our question, however, is how all this affected the minds of the people or at least the vast majority of the people—let us ignore the blind and naïve believers or those who, for whatever reasons, toed the line. |
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For one thing, the anti-American propaganda scheme backfired. As soon as people realized that they were being totally deceived, America emerged in their minds as the opposite of the lies they were constantly fed, and they created for themselves a mental America that was a synonym for heaven on earth, the ne plus ultra of beauty, freedom, happiness, and prosperity. It was not at all difficult for such an image to develop; let us remember that the Iron Curtain and the Berlin wall were in full operation: mutual travel was rare, television did not yet exist in Eastern Europe, and people could not obtain firsthand information about Western Europe, let alone America. They could not experience it; in their deep misery, they dreamed about it. For them America became a mental and emotional relief from their terrible condition, the Eastern European dream version of the American dream. |
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The people's yearning for freedom, of which America had become a symbol and a synonym, would occasionally take irrational forms. I remember my father coming home one evening, pale faced, whispering to us kids about an American car he saw on the street. (The year was 1951, and there were hardly any cars on the streets of a small Hungarian town, not to say an American car; there must have been at maximum a dozen of those in Hungary at the time.) You could hardly tell its front end from its rear end, he whispered in awe. I never figured out what exactly that meant or why it was so important, but apparently it was a sign of the utmost technological achievement in Dad's eyes, and there was almost religious devotion in his voice. And he was not naïve and no fool: only ten years back he had fought, theoretically (he was on the Russian front), against America as a military officer in the war. And now he adored America, and so did everyone else I knew in the family and the neighborhood. |
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