2Ahh Jim: I got to visit the Soviet Union when it was the Soviet Union. "
Me too, and Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, and Poland, and Czechosovakia, and Yugoslavia.......
Never once saw people carrying pods which they carefully put in their cellars until they burst open and became replacements for their hosts,
I've read all of Koestler's books and a lot mote - so what?
What's the difference between a press like the Soviet Union's and and one owned by a handful of billionaires?
In my lifetime one of the main daily papers, still going strong, was owned by a fascist who openly supported the rise of Herr Hitler and extolled the virtue of Mosley and his Blackshirts
As for education - we sang hymns telling us that foreigners were inferior and needed our guidance and lined up in the pissing rain when the Queen Mother drove past or school......
Every State promoting every system 'brainwashes' in one form or the other with whatever method it can lay its hands to.
In the end, it depends how people are able to develop under any system and what the objectives of that system are.
The Soviet Union, China, Cuba, East Germany.... and others placed a large emphasis on developing people's minds socially and culturally, as do Left organisations in Britain - my grandfather helped found The Workers Education Association among his fellow merchant seamen.
Far from being mindless zombies, I found Eastern Europeans highly educated, articulate, cultural and interested to a far greater extent than was the situation back home.
The dream of the left died in these countries for all sorts of reasons, the main one being that the main objective was watered down and lost, and because of outside pressures, not because there was anything basically wrong with that dream.
It provided solutions our own system isn't even looking for - yet, though it is extremely worrying to see where we are heading, with political thugs like Trump and wannabe leaders like LePen looming up on the horizon.
I suggest you read what Terribus is writing if you want a glimpse of Capitalism's 'Brave New World', the necessity of slaughtering civilians, 'them and and us' wars in which anything goes, a system where weapons of mass destruction are no longer for defence, but are essential to the stabilisation of economies - and a source of profit, to be sold to anybody who is prepared to buy them, whatever use they will be put to.
One thing is certain - as far as 'brainwashing' is concerned - when and if it is made possible (it is still the dream of the Assimovs and the Frank Herberts) the idea of education those you wish to enslave will have to go.
Do you honestly think that Putin's Russia, or former Yugoslavia, or the Eastern States encompassing racism and fascism.... is an improvement on what went before, whatever its flaws?
Jim Carroll