feral-toes ago

Quoting the wikipedia page

Rejecting Western mass media culture

Hoxha and his government were hostile to Western (American and British-led) popular culture as it manifested in the mass media, along with the consumerism and social liberalism associated with it. In a speech on the Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee of the PLA (PLA-CC) on 26 June 1973, Hoxha declared a definitive break from any such Western bourgeois influence and what he described as its degenerated bourgeois culture.[106] In a speech in which he also criticised the "spread of certain vulgar, alien tastes in music and art", which ran "contrary to socialist ethics and the positive traditions of our people", including "degenerate importations such as long hair, extravagant dress, screaming jungle music, coarse language, shameless behaviour and so on", Hoxha declared;

It is precisely this culture, coated with a glossy veneer, accompanied by sensational advertisement, handled in the most commercial way and back up and financed by the bourgeoisie, that inundates the cinema and television screens, magazines, newspapers and radio broadcasts, all the mass information and propaganda media. Its objective is to turn the ordinary man into a passive consumer of poisonous bourgeois ideas, and to make this consumption an addiction. Not only have we nothing to learn from this culture, no reason to impart it to our masses and youth, but we must reject it contemptuously and fight it with determinism.

End Quote.

He got one thing right.

cancer_man ago

He had his own brother-in-law executed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahri_Omari

cancer_man ago

Blood feuds were also targeted and, according to not always reliable socialist statistics, they were entirely eradicated. This was achieved once again by the use of draconian methods. Those who participated in blood feud violence were summarily executed, and if property was the issue it was confiscated by the government. Folklore suggests that in some cases Hoxha ordered the killers to be buried alive in the coffins of their victims.

[...]

The Albanian-American scholar Arshi Pipa summarizes Hoxha's policy as follows:

Hoxha was decisive in producing a cultural atmosphere totally dominated by a doctrinaire propaganda exalting nationalism. Linguistics, literature, history, folklore and ethnology have been cultivated, not only to give the people a sense of their own past, but also to spread and inculcate xenophobia, slavophobia, isolationism, ethnic compactness, and linguistic uniformity.

[...]

Because of Albania's religious diversity, he saw it as a divisive factor, unlike in much of the rest of the Balkans where religion played an important national unifying role. Hoxha also feared, particularly with the Catholics, that the church would continue to serve as a potential conduit for foreign influence. The suppression of organized religion began with particular brutality in 1967. All places of worship were closed, many clerics were arrested, and Albania was officially declared to be the world's first atheist state. As in most of his initiatives, Hoxha tended towards the extreme—in this case issuing an order making it obligatory for both parents and children to assume non-religious names. Albanian children were henceforth named after geographical features and figures from the country's mythology, or given freshly coined names. One of the more unfortunate examples of the latter was "Marenglen" a combination of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian Rulers of South Eastern Europe, Bernd Jürgen Fischer

Enea ago

A filthy atheist, the most fanatical of all communist dictators in imposing unbelief on the nation. Albania is the most secular of Balkan nations due to him.

cancer_man ago

Yeah, he was pretty nuts. At least one priest was executed for performing a baptism, others were imprisoned for just wearing crucifixes or owning a bible.

cancer_man ago

Albania in 1982, 3 years before his death. Don't know what they are saying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v_z48do7NQ

Kattie ago

The farmers used quite a primitive technology to be in 1982. Looked more like the beginning of the 1900s.

Interesting that private cars were forbidden.