Re-evaluate#1: Enver Hoxha

it's actually quite hard to see what difference he made in the long run... Albania's isolationist regime collapsed at the same time as the other eastern bloc countries, leaving communism there as as much of a historical blip as it would have been if the country had remained in the orthodox soviet camp.

There's a great descrption in Paul Theroux's Pillars of Hercules about Albania.

It wasn't the only regime to have idiosyncratic grooming regulations. Dr Hastings Banda wins hands down every time.

does anybody have any insight into the "no, it was good, actually" revisionism among very online self-described marxist-leninists? it's very "niche" for lack of a better term, like I don't think many socialist-sympathetic folks retain too many illusions about what communism looked like in the GDR, or Albania, or Romania, or under Mao or Stalin...but the anti-communism of the U.S. was of course couched in misrepresentation, in propaganda, so "I don't believe anything the U.S. says" is imo not an irrational position. but I also think the historical consensus on these countries is correct. Some of these folks will claim Democratic Kampuchea gets a bad rap! but re: Hoxha, they consider him a guy with the vision to industrialize a country being left behind by the 20th century, a place that would otherwise have been strip-mined by the west, etc. That this was incontestably a police state...well, we like the police if they're men of the people, right? Anyway, I think about this contingent more than I should, probably -- it's like worrying about people who believe aliens built the pyramids: revisionist history is a self-feeding addiction...but it's a curious thing to me

Given that the latest news from Albania is "AI minister pregnant with 83 children" I can kinda understand the desire to give ol' Enver another shot. And it would be pretty cool to make out with someone in one of the bunkers.

I don't think I have any great insight but I do think about the same things, I sometimes hang out in leftist revisionist spaces and I try to keep an open-ish mind about whether I've been filled with Western lies about some of these regimes. And I can believe that some of the more outlandish stories of Communist evils are invented or significantly exaggerated - I think there's legitimate debate around how to view something like The Gulag Archipelago - but I can't really get on board with excuses for things like Katyn or the show trials. Like, sure, the Nazis were actually responsible for Katyn and the Russians faked the evidence when they admitted responsibility in the 90s? Tbh I haven't seen much in terms of defending the Khmer Rouge; the helpful thing for leftists is the fact that Communist Vietnam ended up fighting them while the US hated Vietnam too much to support their ouster.

Lea Ypi (a prof at LSE) has written a couple of works addressing some of these points from an Albanian perspective. I haven't read them so here is a review.

https://artreview.com/what-is-lea-ypi-trying-to-achieve-indignity-review-hannah-proctor/

The #1 suggests this was a series of threads with the same premise. Would be interesting to see what other regimes came up for ILX scrutiny - or if #2 turned out to be, like, Teenage Fanclub.

#3 pineapple on pizza

though really #1 ought to have been Pol Pot, whose nick within the organization was "Brother Number One"

you _can_ take the soul out of Soul Brother Number One, but he'll commit genocide

i refuse to take seriously anybody who says "enver hoxha was good really", but that might be mostly because the way i know enver hoxha is through a friend of mine who proclaims herself an "orthodox hoxhaite posadist"

she's not serious about it for the record. if y'all don't know posadism, it's the idea that the space aliens are communist and will arrive to overthrow capitalism. frankly sometimes that seems about as probable as anything else.

remember that first season of the simpsons where bart was traded with an exchange student from albania? i didn't know anything about albania. i'm not sure how much the writers knew about albania!

I await Dua Lipa's response

Quite an interesting article about an earlier Enver Hoxha fanboy, Cornelius Cardew. It's in Albanian btw.

https://www.reporter.al/2014/08/19/kujt-sherbeu-cornelius-cardew/

Nice

"i refuse to take seriously anybody who says "enver hoxha was good really""

Its the old version of "9/11 was good actually"

come to think of it, my "orthodox hoxhaite posadist" friend is actually a distant relative of cornelius cardew! i assure you however that she is _not_ an actual hoxhaite :)

Wow!

Speaking of Albania (where I have visited, albeit 20+ years ago or so), I thought this article about Randy Newman's fascination with the country engrossing:

https://contingentmagazine.org/2025/06/09/newmans-own-albania/

I suppose this thread needs namechecking too: Albanians

I visited Albania in 1989. Other people in the party said it reminded them of Spain in the 50s, at least in terms of the extent to which the country had or hadn’t been given over to tourism. I can’t comment on that, but I can say it was gut-wrenchingly poor.

The #1 suggests this was a series of threads with the same premise. Would be interesting to see what other regimes came up for ILX scrutiny - or if #2 turned out to be, like, Teenage Fanclub.

I wondered if ILX had ever discussed Tito and it turns out he was #2: Re-Evaluate#2: Tito. Maybe it's my own leftist echo chamber but his reputation seems pretty good, though I don't know what's to be said about his role in the perhaps uniquely catastrophic aftermath of his time in power.