It's an abuse of HN to use it primarily for political or ideological battle, regardless of the politics or ideology you favor.

Since we asked you to stop and you didn't, we've banned this account.

Poland of the early 50s was a pretty shitty place to live, especially as an independent thinker. While I am not familiar with the situation in Italy in the 50s, I am very familiar with the situation in Poland. It was a heavy handed state, happy to execute it's own citizens, and using plenty of propaganda in the state-controlled media too. So I have no clue whether your comparison with Italy is correct or not, but the statement from the New Yorker is hardly factually incorrect.

At least they put this piece into the article:

>But, in Franaszek’s telling, he mostly hated life in California; the pleasure he found in the natural setting was offset by his feelings of alienation and disdain for the culture. “The only entertainment of the locals is to stare at passing cars for hours on end, drinking or shooting from their cars at road signs they pass by,” he observed in a 1964 letter.

So that wasn't very propagandistic.

I don't actually think that sounds heavy handed at all. The reason being a puppet of the USSR is a bad thing is because of how bad the USSR was, not because it's inherently bad to be a puppet. I live in a country that's more or less a puppet of the USA and if someone wrote a sentence like that about my country I'd think it was humerous, not heavy handed.

Ah and the massacres of protesting poles on numerous occasions after ww2 didn't happen then? I