According to a news article posted at MSN, Steven Spielberg's new Indiana Jones movie has upset the leader of the Russia's Communist party. He says that the movie inaccurately portrays Russia, and he says that the movie runs the risk of provoking a new Cold War.
That's pretty funny, coming from the leader of a party which used to respond to anything even remotely resembling criticism by sentencing such dissidents to imprisonment in Siberian labor camps. Apparently, the Russian Communists are now so toothless that they have to resort to whining on their websites. They're calling for a "boycott" of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull". As if Russia was ever a big market for American movies anyway! For decades, our movie makers thrived in spite of the censorship which prevented our movies from reaching Russian viewers. Somehow, I doubt that Spielberg cares a whole lot about whether or not a few disenfranchised Russian Communists watch his movies.
I also think that it's rather amusing that the Russian Communist party chose to express its opposition to Spielberg's movie on its website. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the U.S. military establishment basically create the Internet as a means of assuring that the military would have a reliable means of sending messages to and from various locations in the event of a nuclear strike initiated by the Soviets? So now Russian Communists are using our military technology in order to protest our movies.
To the clueless individuals who think that America was largely responsible for the Cold War, I would suggest a rerun of the video showing Nikita Krushchev as he pounded his shoe (in an infantile display of aggression) during a 1960 meeting of the United Nations. That, combined with his earlier 1956 statement to the effect that the Soviet Union would "bury" the United States, made it seem altogether reasonable to surmise that the U.S.S.R. did indeed plan to impose its evil ideology on the rest of the world.
Nina Krushchev later explained that the "shoe banging incident" was caused by the new and uncomfortable shoes her father was wearing at the time. His watch subsequently fell off as well. Gosh, those Ruskies made such quality products! Prior to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., Russian Communists didn't seem to mind making people wait in interminably long lines for shoes which were ugly and uncomfortable (if they could even get shoes at all). That's what happens, folks, when you utterly remove all financial incentives for manufacturers to go the extra mile. Maybe if the U.S.S.R. hadn't sacrificed quality for egalitarianism, they'd have had fewer Westerners (and fewer Russians) rooting for their demise.
Of course, shoddy workmanship and long waiting lines was the least of their problems. The fact that West German Communists shot people for attempting to cross the Berlin Wall from east to west didn't exactly do anything to ease people's fears, either. Nor did historical knowledge of Stalin's "Great Purge," in which millions were murdered. Nor did the fact that Soviet leaders blatantly oppressed Russia's numerous Christians, whose views about God were ostensibly made obsolete when the state was deified by Stalin, Lenin and their ilk.
Reagan was right. The U.S.S.R. was an "evil empire". Russians who want to rewrite history in order to make it appear as if Russian Communism was a noble enterprise are always free to make their own propagandistic movies, as they have always done, but Americans who value the truth will not give a fig what Russian Communists think about the latest Indiana Jones movie (which, if anything, portrays them in a much more positive light than they deserve).
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