Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
Maybe that's the secret of how to win a war against America - just deprive her of loo paper...
ROFL! Look, I know that toilet paper isn't a very big deal -- as a 10-year-old, I went on two-week Boy Scout campouts in rural Turkey (it was a joint American/Turkish scouting program); I was also in the Boy Scouts in Japan; I've done youth hostels, I've done wilderness trips, I know how to wipe my butt with newspaper or Sears catalog pages or oak leaves.

At the same time, however, lots of people are more picky than I am about what they wipe their butt with. If you want to attract wealthy 55-year-old foreign tourists who'll spend a lot of money in restaurants and fine hotels, rather than 20-year-olds who plan to stay in cheap youth hostels, it's important to pay attention to minor details like "toilet paper quality." (Remember, at least part of the rationalization for spending so much money on Sochi is that the facilities would continue to generate revenue from international tourism long after the Olympic games were over.)

Initially they are jumping back and forth between the civil war in Russia and the 1930s as if it was the same period. This appears to be a fairly recent documentary but it's worthy of the cold war, in its exaggerated one-sidedness.
I don't at all agree with Hanna's characterization of the documentary -- of COURSE a movie about mass graves filled with executed victims is going to use "dramatic" music (whaddaya expect, Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance"?), and but I "Liked" her comment anyway because of her point about the documentary's recentness.

(There's nothing wrong with this kind of "one sided" documentary as a sort of antidote to the rosy-colored, pro-Soviet apologetics of liars like Walter Duranty, or as an eye-opener for extremely naive viewers who think that "Communism is just like sharing cookies in kindergarten". But people who already know that Stalin had blood on his hands deserve a more balanced look that is just as honest about the bloody brutality of Tsarist society and other problems that the USSR was trying to solve.)