Reading a book "Complying With Colonialism - Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region" as a part of my studies and starting to again notice how this otherwise excellent text does this weird dance around the question of the Soviet Union, socialism, communism and the (positive) effects these had in the world.
One article does state that life in Yugoslavia was better as told by the people who live there, but no analysis is given.
Another article on Russian migrant woman to Norway however does this: "Both systems allow (or in the case of the Soviet system, force) women to work outside the home and participate in public life."
And no real source for this "forcing" is given, it's just casually dropped into an antiracist book. It does manage to frame the equality of the USSR in a negative way with just a few words. And this then informs the reader.
What I would like to ask from the writer here is if working for pay is somehow a choice in capitalism, because it absolutely is not.
What I am thinking about here is the way these academics themselves analyze types of propaganda that upholds oppression and produces stereotypes yet end up in a way doing the same, seemingly in passing.
There is an article in the same book about the way we all get sort of brainwashed by the colonial images and ideas around us from a young age by everything from childrens books and fairytales to everything we are told as being "true". Yet the book kind of turns around and does the same.
good catch! no-one is immune to propaganda and so on, and it will often bleed through when people are looking for casual discourse & comparisons outside their explicit area of study. pretty funny when those accidentally flank the main arguments for people who know those subjects better.
Academia has to do a weird dance too, in a lot of places in the core if you give even a little positive light to AES or former AES you're blacklisted or lose your job even when its outside your field.
That is very true. And my uni at least is ran so hard by neoliberal rules that pretty sure most keep the more critical out of that just as protection, which of course is the point.
