askchapo

You still can't rid of reverence of the past. USSR revered the Paris Commune, the Paris Commune revered the Jacobins, the Jacobins revered the Roman Republic and Ancient Athens.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.

But is reverence the same as nostalgia? Sure, often nostalgia is an unclear yearning for the past, but it can have direct intent, and sometimes that yearning is related to the possibilities of the past had and that particular aspect still has merit for agitation, no? For this, I mean the possibilities of development provided by socialism. It is a fact that the situation for modern Eastern European countries is different, and the tactics should have differences, but if you're trying to argue for moving towards a socialist system, most would consider it a "return" due to having history with it. I'm not Eastern European, so I'm mostly speculating, but trying to detach from the soviet union and move on, to many laymen is the same as detaching from socialism, no? The goal wouldn't be returning to the USSR but returning to socialism.