Europe

Sometimes even people who have lived through a collapse don't understand it. My family lived through the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s, and yet since moving to Germany my parents have fully bought into the dominant ideology here, they listen to all the liberal mainstream media and it's turned them into total turbolibs. When you bring up the possibility of a serious crash because of the energy/deindustrialization crisis they say that can't happen in democratic countries like Germany, it only happened in Romania because it was a communist dictatorship. And it was supposedly good that it happened because that was "the market correcting itself", there was "too much" industry and building under communism.

What's funny is that the part of my family that stayed in Romania are not buying the western liberal line to the same extent. They're split between nostalgia for communism in my grandparents' generation and full on petit bourgeois reactionary brainworms in the generation after them, especially in the more well off ones, complaining about welfare, criminal ethnic minorities, and adopting all the standard American conservative talking points ("woke" this, "woke" that, trans panic, too much racial/gender diversity on TV, etc.).