Personally I liked the Hollander Themes reading because it talked about a concept that I was somewhat aware of but had not really put much thought into. Specifically why some countries: China, North Vietnam, Cuba and the SOviet Union did not have a lot of widely available information regarding the negative aspects of their societies unlike the United States. Something that stood out to me in this reading was a small section right in the beginning which mentions that how intellectuals traveling to those different countries tended to compare their own societies to the ones they were visiting. And this idea reminded me of a similar concept or basically another variation of this process that anthropologists did when doing studies on other cultures. They tended to compare their own culture to the ones that they were attempting to learn about. This connection brought me to the conclusion that biases commonly become a part of what someone is researching unless they can learn to separate their own cultures/societies from the one that they are writing about. Or similarly placing their societies or cultures above those that they are studying.
Also in this reading I saw connections between the other readings that we had done previously, especially the one on Molnar and the concept of the “fellow- traveler” which I felt was explored in a bunch of different ways in Hollander’s chapter.
To answer one of the questions that Riley gave us, I believe that many intellectuals aligned themselves with the soviet union because as Hollander’s reading says, those intellectuals are shown a carefully selected set of events meaning that they see only what those countries, in this case the Soviet Union, want them to see. I believe Hollander calls it a “technique of hospitality.”(6) Therefore these types of societies would be more appealing to them since they are not seeing any negative aspects of them. In the Aron reading, communism is placed in the “hope that the future will bring the advent of the classless society” so I guess that would that theres also only one way to get there and thats what they teach the soviet union.
I also had a question about the nonpolitical vs political tourist comparison in the Hollander chapter which is: Can there be a combination of the two tourists? (page 19)
Between the Hollander and Judt chapters there was a shared idea of the dislike of America. Although Hollander is talking about comparing America and the Soviet Union, he says that by quoting barzan that “we, the united states, are so extensively unpopular. (page 16).
America being unpopular is talked about in Judt, the word america came to be known as a collective term describing all the negative, undesirable, and disturbing things about Western life (190)