Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

Which is to say, there's a little fact that I want to relate that has to do with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, i.e. Yugoslavia when it was Communist.

All people entering the military were required to read New Leftist Herbert Marcuse's works, particularly those which dealt with the hegemony of the mass media as being tools of ideological and capitalist oppression. This analysis could easily be turned on the Yugoslav state itself, and the Frankfurt School people, to my understanding, critiqued both the capitalist West and the Communist East as having the same types of hegemonic manipulation of people through the media. So....right there, you have a mass indoctrination of folks with works that could easily be applied against the current regime. Here's the kicker though:

Enlistment in the military was mandatory for every Yugoslav citizen, which meant that EVERYONE was aware of Herbert Marcuse in Yugoslavia during Communism.

In fact, the Frankfurt school became the quasi-official ideology of the Communist League, which self consciously changed its structure away from being a Party, although in the individual republics it functioned in a very prominent capacity.

When we're talking about a country adopting New Left principles into its socialism en masse, we might not by any means be talking about perfection, but whatever it is we definitely are not in Kansas anymore; rather, we're in a world where the normal expectations about what's allowed and what isn't are totally and completely messed up beyond conventional understandings.

As Leszek Kolakowski writes in his "Main Currents of Marxism", Yugoslavia formed the interesting case of the socialist country where speech was freest but where it was easier to get arrested for your speech than anywhere else.

Weird indeed.