Comradely nostalgia

I'm really beginning to regret the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites. It's not that I would particularly have wanted to live in the GDR or communist Czechoslovakia (though they do have some appeal). It's more the impact they had on the policy of Western governments. As long as the Soviet bloc offered more or less universal employment, healthcare, free, quite high quality education, pensions etc it was a whole lot more difficult for western ideologues to dismiss them as economically impossible. Its true that they are inconsistent with $100 million CEO compensation packages but no-one in the east was making that kind of dough. I think it's also possible to argue that the existence of a significant military counterweight to the Imperialist States of America acted as a deterrent to the more egregious potential US military adventures. Actually when I look at the prospect of a Toronto/Ontario/Canada led by Fords/Hudak/Harper across a border from an ISA led by a terminally weak capitalist lackey overawed by a gang of raving loonies in Congress the GDR looks pretty good.

One of those books

Once in a while I read a book that makes me go "wow!" because the author has taken a complex topic, presented it in a comprehensible way and caused me to think differently about some pretty big issues. Göran Therborn's Between Sex and Power; Family in the World 1900-2000 is one of those books. It's what the title says; a sociological history of the family, across the whole world, in the 20th century. It's soundly fact based (which hasn't always been my experience with books on gender related issues) yet is not afraid to grapple with theoretical issues or develop theses that are perhaps unfashionable such as the impact of the Bolshevik revolution on family structure and the undermining of patriarchy in Eastern Europe or the role of the United Nations in furthering the rights of women. I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in broad social trends and developments.