Happy Honecker!
This is a cross post from Socialist Unity and the Morning Star
(Some traitors who betrayed socialism)
Sixty years ago the German Democratic Republic was created out of the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany in response to the introduction of a separate currency in the Western sectors and the go-it-alone creation of the Federal Republic in September 1949 It lasted until 1990 when the people voted to accede to the Federal Republic.
(Dupes of Capitalism)
The first GDR government was composed of individuals with a track record of active opposition to the nazi regime. Many had spent years in concentration camps, prison and exile. They returned determined to build a democratic, anti-fascist Germany.
It began life at a great disadvantage compared with West Germany. It comprised only a third of German territory with a population of 17 million, as against 63 million in the west, and was considerably poorer, having little heavy industry and few mineral resources.
(East German Soldier Conrad Schumann betrays his Fatherland)
One of the GDR’s greatest achievements was the creation of a more egalitarian society. Measures were introduced to counter class and gender privilege and increase the educational and career prospects of working-class children.
As a result, the GDR became probably the most egalitarian society in Europe. Full gender equality and equal pay were also enshrined in legislation. Pay differentials between different groups of employees were minimal so that even top managers or government ministers were hardly wealthy in Western terms.
Even in terms of housing, economic and class difference played little role. All areas contained a mix of professional and working-class people. This lack of large wealth differentials and class privilege made for a more cohesive and balanced society.
For some such egalitarianism was not amenable and the lure of higher salaries and business opportunities in the West remained strong. This led to a steady haemorrhaging of skilled workers and professionals before the wall was built in 1961.
The GDR was a society largely free of existential fears. Everyone had a right to education, a job and a roof over their head. Emphasis was placed on society not on individualism, and on co-operation and solidarity. This process of socialisation began with nursery children and continued through school and into the workplace and housing estates. The government argued that the workers who produced the commodities that society needed should be placed at the forefront of society.
(An abundance of goods under socialism)
Those who did heavy manual work, such as miners or steel workers, enjoyed certain privileges – better wages and health care than those in less strenuous or dangerous professions such as office work or teaching. There were workplace clinics, doctors and dentists attached to large factories and institutions. The workplace and trade union were largely responsible for ensuring medical care, the provision of leisure and holiday facilities and childcare, even down to the most personal issues of finding accommodation. The trade union owned and ran a whole number of rest homes, sanatoriums and holiday accommodation used by the workforce and their families for nominal prices.
This system helped to solve working parents’ problems of caring for their children during school holidays. By the 1980s around 80 per cent of the population was able to go on some form of holiday, although most of these would be taken in the GDR itself, many in one of such centres at very low prices. No worker could be sacked, unless for serious misconduct or incompetence. However, even in such cases, other alternative work would be offered.
The other side of the coin was that there was also a social obligation to work – the GDR had no system of unemployment benefit because the concept of unemployment did not exist. Pay levels in general were not high compared with Western standards. But everyone knew that the profits they created would go into the “social pot” and used to make life better for everyone, not just for a few owners or shareholders who would pocket the surplus. Most people recognised that the surplus they created helped increase what was called the “social wage” – subsidised food, clothing and rent, cheap public transport and inexpensive tickets for cultural, sporting and leisure activities.
The idea of a social wage is a vital concept for any society purporting to be egalitarian. It was instrumental in ensuring the implementation of greater social equality, undermining privilege and class hegemony. Although most people lived in rented accommodation at controlled and affordable rents, a considerable minority owned their own houses and some built their own privately owned houses. Rents remained virtually unchanged over the life of the GDR and no-one could be evicted from their home. There was therefore no homelessness or fear of becoming homeless.
From a country with few raw materials and an underdeveloped industry devastated by the second world war, the GDR rose to become the fifth strongest economy in Europe and among the 10 strongest in the world. The economy was characterised by central planning. This enabled the government to plan growth, set priorities and determine where to invest, but there was the downside that such centralised planning on such a scale could be inflexible and cumbersome. However, a vital factor holding back the GDR economy was a strict boycott by Western governments, preventing the export of advanced technology.
Vorsprung durch Technik
Over 90 per cent of all assets in the GDR were owned by the people in the form of “publicly owned enterprises” (VEBs). By contrast, in the Federal Republic a mere 10 per cent of households owned 42 per cent of all private wealth and 50 per cent of households owned only 4.5 per cent.
After the war, large estates owned by the former landed aristocracy, the Junkers, were broken up. Five hundred estates were expropriated and converted into co-operatives or state farms and thousands of acres distributed among 500,000 peasant farmers, agricultural labourers and refugees. Later the government encouraged, sometimes cajoled and pressured farmers to join co-operative farms, but farmers retained ownership rights to their land. By 1960 nearly 85 per cent of all arable land was incorporated into agricultural co-operatives. In 1989 there were 3,844 agricultural co-ops and these were one of the big achievements of the GDR, proving to be efficient and better for the workforce. For the first time in history, agricultural workers were freed from round-the-clock work just to make a living.
With agricultural co-operatives run on an industrial scale, workers enjoyed fixed-hours working and shift systems, had regular holidays, childcare, training opportunities and workplace canteens. All this certainly helped stem the flight from the countryside to the towns. For the first time in Germany, women enjoyed completely equal rights with men, both in their personal sphere and the workplace.
(Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer married the Wall)
They were provided with the means and opportunities of developing their careers and personalities beyond or instead of their traditional roles in the home, as wives, mothers and daughters. Some 91 per cent of women between the ages of 16 and 60 were in work.
Most women viewed success in their careers as a main source of fulfilment – this is about the same percentage as for men. Some 88 per cent of all adult women worked and a further 8.5 per cent were in full-time education. Most women were also highly skilled. Only 6 per cent had no qualification at all, whereas in the Federal Republic 24 per cent had none.Despite these figures, in the top echelons of government and party male patriarchy still persisted.
The country’s record on internationalism was exemplary. It took the idea of solidarity with other, struggling nations seriously. It sent doctors and other medical staff to the front line in Vietnam, Mozambique and Angola. It gave engineering, educational and military support to many countries.
It also gave numerous foreign students from countries struggling to free themselves from the legacy of colonialism free training and education in the GDR.
(A hero of the proletariat! Vic Allen was a Leeds University Professor and a CND National Council member. Along with a number of other academics, he was a Stasi agent)
Of course the GDR had a whole number of serious shortcomings and in terms of individual rights and democracy left a lot to be desired.But to dwell only on these aspects as the mainstream media in the West has done, is to ignore its genuine achievements.
(Peter Fechter, 18 , left to bleed to death. Sad - but true socialism must be protected)
Since its demise, many have come to recognise and regret that the genuine “social achievements” they enjoyed have now been dismantled.
Unfortunately, the collapse of the GDR and “state socialism” in 1989 came just before the collapse of the highly lauded “free market” system in the West.
John Green and Bruni de la Motte have just written a new booklet, Stasi Hell Or Workers’ Paradise? Socialism In The German Democratic Republic – What Can We Learn From It? Available from the Morning Star
(Propaganda and lies)
UPDATE
Over at Socialist Unity, Comrade Nick Wright of the Communist Party of Britain has a dream:
Imagine a socialist Britain.
Private education is abolished and the children of workers are given privileged access to higher education.
Private medical care is abolished and doctors and dentists wages brought closer in line with average earnings.
Landownership (apart from private houses and co-operative farms is abolished and rental income made illegal. An upper limit is placed on the number of employes an enterprise is allowed to employ and profit levels are highly taxed.
The private export of capital is outlawed and profits from overseas investments is government controlled and highly taxed.
Most employment in the City is ended and the skilled labour thus displaced is directed into public service jobs
banks are nationalised and farmers incentivised to join co-ops or, in the case of big farms are taken in pubic ownership.
Anybody care to guess what proportion of the British population might want ti migrate to say, Germay.
Racist and fascist propaganda is outlawed and it expression attracts severe penalties.
The military, police and security services are purged of people whose loyalty to the socialist government is in doubt
What a lovely country this would be. Let us hope that one day the Communist Party of Britain attains power.
Comments
| 8 October 2009, 11:03 am |
OT, but I can’t wait to see the comment on this from, er, Socialists and internationalists everywhere:
Saban wants to buy al-Jazeera
Egyptian newspaper al-Mesryoon says former Israeli media tycoon has submitted another offer to purchase television network from Qatari emir through Egyptian mediator
Former Israeli billionaire Haim Saban is holding negotiations for the purchase of 50% of the al-Jazeera television network from the Qatari government, Egyptian newspaper al-Mesryoon reported Wednesday. The negotiations are said to be conducted through an Egyptian mediator.
According to the report, the television network is experiencing financial trouble despite its immense popularity. This is the second time Saban is negotiating with the Qatari emir.
The media tycoon visited Qatar in 2003 together with former US President Bill Clinton, as part of a conference aimed at promoting peace in the Middle East.
Saban backed out of the same negotiations in the past without offering any explanation. His new offer was submitted recently through an Egyptian businessman.
In addition to the Saban Group’s media activity, and its stakes in Israeli communications company Bezeq, Saban used to be a musician and has a dual Istraeli-American citizenship. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1944, and immigrated to Israel in 1956.
| 8 October 2009, 11:36 am |
The GDR was a society largely free of existential fears.
Correct. Everybody who had some fears was eliminated by the STASI
Those who did heavy manual work, such as miners or steel workers, enjoyed certain privileges – better wages and health care than those in less strenuous or dangerous professions such as office work or teaching.
Correct. These people even could buy toilet papers once a year, not like the ordinary plebs.
A question strictly connected to the topic: All psychiatric institutions are unguarded in the UK or only the ward where the author was an inmate?
| 8 October 2009, 12:01 pm |
I think articles like this compare nicely to stuff written in the 1960’s and 70’s by apologists of the British Empire which, grudgingly, conceded that everything wasn’t quite perfect but there were genuine achievements which should be celebrated. This is coupled with an inability to understand why the people who were the primary beneficiaries of these achievements were so keen to see the system destroyed.
The world of the authors has vanished and is never coming back yet they can’t quite come to terms with it.
| 8 October 2009, 12:03 pm |
I don’t think The Onion could come up with better satire. Thanks that really made me chuckle.
Surely this post belongs in the arts section though?
| 8 October 2009, 12:23 pm |
while the article is very shit, your headline did a least make me laugh.
I would fear for the sanity of the comrades responsible for this rubbish were it not for the fact that they are already either sectionable or highly corrupt or both.
| 8 October 2009, 12:23 pm |
A friend of mine works on kidney disease and is the only person I know who managed to get a grant to buy a tank. After the wall came down he looked at the kidney disease in the workers of a lead acid battery and a carbon tetrachloride plant. There were medial units attached to the factories and the workers, while all damaged, all had so-so or good kidney function. He then tested the local community. Many had less than 50 kidney function; the workers in the factories were tested, but not their families nearby. So he needed to examine the waste pits. The pits and lagoons were filled with what ever the factories wanted to get rid of, and no one wanted to walk in there with waders; hence, he purchased a East German Army tank, with full NBC kit, and used it to collect samples.
It was very, very sad. The amount of pollution in East Germany was beyond description, the population was very unhealthy. The diet was high in carbohydrates and high in fat; the workers used to joke that the two problems with food shopping were getting enough to eat and trying to lose weight.
My friends conclusion on his kidney disease paper on the East German population was a bit stunning; there was no control population in East Germany. Everyone, from birth until death, had some level of kidney damage, mostly from the heavy metals and chlorohydrocarbons in the environment. The amount of heavy metals discharged by East German into the rivers was stunning. Indeed, at the mouth of two of Germany’s major rivers there are ore grade deposits of Chromium and (if I remember correctly) Nickel.
| 8 October 2009, 12:42 pm |
“The GDR was a society largely free of existential fears. Everyone had a right to education, a job and a roof over their head. Emphasis was placed on society not on individualism, and on co-operation and solidarity.”
So that’s why people risked and in some cases lost their lives to escape, if communist societies were and are so fantastic why did and why do they need to prevent freedom of travel?
“Rents remained virtually unchanged over the life of the GDR and no-one could be evicted from their home. There was therefore no homelessness or fear of becoming homeless.”
Of course there was no fear of becoming homeless, the fear of the gulag would nip that in the bud, no one could be evicted from their home but anyone could be relocated to the gulag.
“It sent doctors and other medical staff to the front line in Vietnam, Mozambique and Angola. It gave engineering, educational and military support to many countries.”
Well they had to really didn’t they? After all it was the communist fantasy of empowering the proletariat that caused all the deaths, destroyed all the infrastructure, burned all the schools and let all the military advisers “advise” in the first place, wasn’t it?
“Pay levels in general were not high compared with Western standards. But everyone knew that the profits they created would go into the “social pot” and used to make life better for everyone, not just for a few owners or shareholders who would pocket the surplus.”
Or the upper echelons of the communist “owners” of the ideology, they all lived like paupers too did they?
“No worker could be sacked, unless for serious misconduct or incompetence. However, even in such cases, other alternative work would be offered.”
Doing what? Breaking rocks, making jack boots, don’t tell me, painting all the buildings that wonderful shade of grey?
Every single paragraph of this bullshit is fantasy, the wet dreams of blind, deaf and very, very dumb communists.
If it was so fucking great how come it’s so fucking obsolete, so what’s the answer, another Neo-con/Zionist dirty trick, all the people who crossed into West Germany with tears in their eyes were what, sad at losing the protection of SStasi, they were devastated that the USSR could no longer provide them with Lada’s, was that it?
The “German Democratic Republic”, only the most obtuse of ideological imbeciles could say that without a menacing supercilious smirk on their face.
| 8 October 2009, 12:55 pm |
And of course the legacy successor parties to the old Eastern European Communist Parties are now happy companion parties to the Labour Party in the Socialist International, but somehow I don’t think we’ll be seeing any calls on HP or on the part of Jonathan Freedland et al for us to join in protesting about the Labour Party’s and affiliated Trade Union ongoing alliances in the EUP and international NGOs and UN forums with the supporters and celebrators of these murderous regimes.
| 8 October 2009, 1:54 pm |
I was disappointed by the references to “the wall”, surely it is the “anti-fascist protection barrier”.
| 8 October 2009, 1:55 pm |
Say what you like about British defamation law, but at least you can’t libel the dead. Does anyone know how it is under Russian law that Stalin’s g/grandson is being allowed his day in court to sue the newspaper in Russia for defaming his dear grandad? I just heard grandson on radio saying the more he reads about his grandad, the prouder he becomes of him.
| 8 October 2009, 2:47 pm |
We salute comrade Nick’s indefatigable anti-dentist stance.
| 8 October 2009, 2:54 pm |
> It gave engineering, educational and military support to many
> countries.
It sent parts of its air force to fight on Syria’s side in the Yom Kippur War. Mercifully, the planes saw no action. Still, a post-WWII, post-Holocaust German state that sends parts of its armed forces to participate in a war of aggression – and potentially extermination – against Israel is an abomination and has forfeit its right to exist.
(And, of course, the GDR’s heavy-handed caricature of the Scandinavian, Canadian or Australasian welfare state was paid by subsidies from Western Germany and debt financing. The debts eventually broke the back of the East German economy)
| 8 October 2009, 3:49 pm |
Let’s not forget that with the formation of the GDR millions of East Germans who had supported Hitler were suddenly transformed into “socialists” who were then told that they had no responsibility for Nazi crimes as the country was not heir to the facism which was supposedly a product of capitalism and that thousands of high-up nazis were given jobs in the stasi and government. As a result many psychological and political issues which West Germans dealt with over the last 60 years were not even confronted in the east.
And the morning star is defending the bastard state? Jeez.
| 8 October 2009, 4:35 pm |
“It sent doctors and other medical staff to the front line in Vietnam, Mozambique and Angola. It gave engineering, educational and military support to many countries.”
Well they had to really didn’t they? After all it was the communist fantasy of empowering the proletariat that caused all the deaths, destroyed all the infrastructure, burned all the schools and let all the military advisers “advise” in the first place, wasn’t it?
Well, no, actually. The widespread destruction in Angola and Mozambique during this period was largely caused by the invasion of South Africa and the chaos generated by South African proxy forces, namely UNITA and RENAMO.
| 8 October 2009, 4:56 pm |
Graham,
The Nazis WERE socialists. Just National ones.
| 8 October 2009, 5:41 pm |
“pubic ownership” sounds like an intriguing concept. Can Comrade Wright explain?
| 8 October 2009, 6:10 pm |
Hmm, a Britain with purges in public services. Reminds me of the film ‘It Happened Here’. Oh wait, that wasn’t about socialism, was it?
| 8 October 2009, 6:28 pm |
BnR, and the East German state claimed to be a Democratic Republic… what’s your point?
| 8 October 2009, 6:29 pm |
Vic Allen, the Leeds Univ. professor and a member of the CND National Council who was a Stasi agent sounds like a recent episode of the Inspector Lewis (sucessor to Inspector Moore) series where a murder in Oxford Academia has it solution in who in the 1980s had betrayed an East German professor to the Stasi.
Germany has not only the legacy of the Nazis to deal with, but that of the Communists as while. At least with the latter, the Germans can say that it was not their choice, but imposed on the eastern part of Germany by their Russian conquerers. Of course that would not have happen had they not enthusasticly followed Herr Hitler and the Nazis to the bitter end.
In the inmortal words of the punch line to a joke in “The Lives of Others” (great movie), all the former East Germans can now say:
“Screw you, Honecker, I’m in the West, now!”
| 8 October 2009, 6:34 pm |
Hi Graham, re:
“Let’s not forget that with the formation of the GDR millions of East Germans who had supported Hitler were suddenly transformed into “socialists” who were then told that they had no responsibility for Nazi crimes as the country was not heir to the facism which was supposedly a product of capitalism and that thousands of high-up nazis were given jobs in the stasi and government.”
wouldn’t it also be fair to say that the same thing happened in the West, where many former Nazis and Nazi-supporting industrialists managed to become democrats overnight?
Although, not, I agree, in terms of moral responsibility – Austria was and is much more analogous to the DDR in that respect.
| 8 October 2009, 6:36 pm |
David All, it was Endeavour Morse who’d betrayed the Prof, surely?
Bialik, I don’t follow about It Happened Here. That was about a Nazi occupation of Britain, and subsequent partisan uprising.
| 8 October 2009, 6:44 pm |
Graham,
The Nazis WERE socialists. Just National ones.
Well I don’t want to get into a long historical discussion with you but I’d suggest that any elements that looked like “socialism” in the nazi party were kaput on On July 6, 1933 the day that Hitler declared the success of the National Socialist revolution and consolidated his power by choosing to throw in his lot with the establishment (and conservatives) at the expense of the SA (many of whom believed in the more “socialistic” parts of the nazi programme. So perhaps it would be better to say that the nazis were a kind of socialists until the point where the conservative establishment started fellating them (always a danger as we can see with Cameron and the Latvian SS vets.)
| 8 October 2009, 6:48 pm |
Amie. I am lost as to how the Russian libel laws work but the whole thing has the potential to become one of the most dangerous current events in Europe.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/09/15/russian-libel-case-ballooning-into-referendum-on-stalin/
| 8 October 2009, 6:55 pm |
Some West German friends of mine used to have elderly realtives in the GDR, and every year they would save up like mad so they could afford to go and visit them. (It was very expensive because the GDR would effectively tax visitors, a certain number of Deutschmarks per person, per day.) The old folks would ask them to bring all manner of things that they couldn’t get in the East. Things like window glass and putty, tins of paint, coffee, toilet rolls, sewing machine parts, and of course western currency. You could spend your entire retirement on the waiting list for a hearing aid.
| 8 October 2009, 6:57 pm |
Ah sorrow, that should have been Inspector Morse, not Moore in the above post.
| 8 October 2009, 7:03 pm |
It is strange that communists charge the rest of the world with ‘ignoring the genuine achievements’ of societies like the GDR when they systematically ignore the much greater achievements of the FRG. Twenty years on, the FRG is still paying to help the former GDR live down its ‘achievements.’
The GDR was a society largely free of existential fears.
Our comrade has evidently not heard of ‘Republikflucht.’
All this certainly helped stem the flight from the countryside to the towns.
Largely because LPG members had their land forcibly collectivized and were obliged by law to live where they were told.
Despite these figures, in the top echelons of government and party male patriarchy still persisted.
What, nothing on the achievements of Margot Honecker?
having little heavy industry and few mineral resources…From a country with few raw materials and an underdeveloped industry devastated by the second world war,
Not been to Chemnitz, Jena, Zwickau, Rostock or the coalfields or potash mines then. In fact, prior to WWII what became the GDR was, on average, more prosperous and industrialized than the West. Devastation there was, but the West got Marshall Aid to rebuild while Stalin forbade the East Germans from accepting it, while he moved all possible plant and equipment from the GDR to the Soviet Union as reparations.
By the 1980s around 80 per cent of the population was able to go on some form of holiday, although most of these would be taken in the GDR itself, many in one of such centres at very low prices.
By then, on average West Germans took two holidays a year, most including a holiday abroad. For which they didn’t need a visa.
Pay levels in general were not high compared with Western standards. But everyone knew that the profits they created would go into the “social pot” and used to make life better for everyone, not just for a few owners or shareholders who would pocket the surplus…By contrast, in the Federal Republic a mere 10 per cent of households owned 42 per cent of all private wealth and 50 per cent of households owned only 4.5 per cent.
A group of Dutch textile workers came to visit the Malimo plant near Zwickau. As they toured, they discussed machines and practices in their respective plants. When they reached the car park, the Dutch were astonished to see only one car sitting there. “Whose is the car?” they asked. “It belongs to the Director” replied the tour leader. Still unable to take in the situation, one of the visitors said, “Well, who does the factory belong to?” “It belongs to the people, of course,” said the tour leader, now a little irritated. The Dutchman furrowed his brow: “Oh! In our country it’s the other way round.”
| 8 October 2009, 7:09 pm |
wouldn’t it also be fair to say that the same thing happened in the West, where many former Nazis and Nazi-supporting industrialists managed to become democrats overnight?
To a certain extent. But I would say that while many ex nazis in West Germany were allowed to integrate into society for the most part they faced some sort of denazification and were not excused en masse at the dawning of a new age. The West German state constantly found itself apologising for the nazi past whilst in East Germany the holocaust (for instance) was officially just another of the crimes which could be attributed to capitalism. I think in Stasiland Anna Funder lists the shocking amount of East German secret policemen and officials who had pasts in the Gestapo and SS, but I can’t put my hands on the book to find the quotes.
| 8 October 2009, 7:25 pm |
The prize for this piece should be a ticket to see “Goodbye Lenin”. My only surprise is that I’m the first to mention that film when the post has been up for 9+ hours.
| 8 October 2009, 8:13 pm |
Alec M: You are right. Inspector Morse did inadvently betray the East German professor when he carelessly wrote a note to the professor on Oxford police stationary. The informant gave the note to the Stasi, who used it to arrest the professor on a charge that he was a British spy. The professor subsequently died in Stasi custody.
| 8 October 2009, 9:05 pm |
David T – if it wasn’t for your efforts most of us would have no idea that such lunacy exists.
The Socialist Unity comments thread is a treasure trove.
How do people come to believe this rubbish?
How do they sustain their illusion in the face of hard evidence?
I mean it’s worse than religious faith which, while nonsense, cannot actually be disproved.
It is really – literally in the case of Maoists and Stalinists – the same as holocaust denial.
| 8 October 2009, 10:25 pm |
a bit OT, but related: Herta Mueller, an ethnic German from Romania who emigrated to Germany in 1987 because her writings were critical of the Ceausescu regime, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Committee said her work “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”. Read the entire story at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/08/world/main5370748.shtml?tag=stack
cjcjc: The veteran Keynesian economist, the late John Kenneth Galbraith had these die hard believers in Communism in mind when he remarked in the 1970s that with enough faith some people will believe anything.
| 8 October 2009, 11:42 pm |
And of course the legacy successor parties to the old Eastern European Communist Parties are now happy companion parties
And Angela Merkel was a member of a “front” party. Burn the witch.
| 8 October 2009, 11:46 pm |
Let’s drink to the fall of the wall – a great moment for the global left: amongst other things it led to the release of Nelson Mandela and the defeat of apartheid, the first left government in Italy since about 1920 and the stumbling towards a Israel – Palestine peace agreement.
| 9 October 2009, 12:28 am |
After the Wall came down the company for which I worked bought businesses in Leipzig and Halle. A colleague told me that a common sight was West German Mercedes and BMW’s lying kaput at the side of the potholed roads, while the Trabants rolled merrily on. So don’t mock the Trab!
| 9 October 2009, 6:56 am |
I was quite suprised to find out that this week that recently deceased spanish civil war veteran, trade unionist and latterly senior citizens champion Jack Jones was a paid informer of the Soviet Union.
| 9 October 2009, 8:53 am |
‘“It sent doctors and other medical staff to the front line in Vietnam, Mozambique and Angola. It gave engineering, educational and military support to many countries.”’
MfS officers also trained the secret police services in Mozambique, Angola, Mengistu’s Ethiopia, the ‘Peoples Democratic Republic’ of Yemen, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
| 9 October 2009, 9:31 am |
> MfS officers also trained the secret police services in
> Mozambique, Angola, Mengistu’s Ethiopia, the ‘Peoples
> Democratic Republic’ of Yemen, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
At least in the case of Ethiopia, they did not only act as trainers and avisors, but participated actively in torturing and murder. Germans being Germans, the Stasi personel serving Mengistu kept records and archives of their deeds, so it would have been perfectly possible to prosecute them after the fall of the GDR. The supreme court of reunited Germany, however, amnestied them all.
When speaking of Iraq, one should not forget Saddam’s attack on Iran; morally, it might have been a fight of evil against evil, but from a legal point of view, it was still a war of aggression, and the role of East German helicopter pilots and the tactics developed by them in this war of aggression were crucial and might even have been strategically decisive, see here: http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_214.shtml
| 9 October 2009, 10:22 am |
Anaximanders, why did you feel the need to include the phrase “neocon/Zionist” into this discussion, which obviously has nothing to do whatsoever with Jews, Israel, or Zionism. I realize your post was sarcastic, but I find your linkage of “neocons” and Zionists puzzling and disturbing, even if written sarcastically. As you know or should know, Zionism is the connection of the Jewish people with their homeland. It is unrelated to conservative, liberal, or any other type of right/left politics. Even if you are writing from the rhetorical point of view of the far left, why repeat a falsehood often used to encourage anti-semitism?
| 9 October 2009, 11:21 am |
Graham, thanks. I think that’s right – I was thinking in particular of Martin Lee’s description of post-war West Germany.
Re:
perhaps it would be better to say that the nazis were a kind of socialists until the point where the conservative establishment started fellating them
I think that’s right on one level, but kind of misses the point that what really distinguished Hitler and Stalin, and their regimes, was not an opinion about ownership of means of production, but a shared addiction to political violence and the abuse of law.
For a German policeman with 12 years experience working for the Nazis, starting work for Stalin in 1945 did not constitute much of a day-to-day change in his employment. Different rhetoric – same job.
There are also more direct social parallels – there was something very (national) socialist about Robert Ley’s “Strength through Joy” organisation, for example:
“As of August 1 [1938], the great savings programme for the People’s Car ‘Strength-Through-Joy’ will begin. I herewith proclaim the conditions under which every working person, can acquire an automobile.
Each German, without distinction of class, profession, or property can become the purchaser of a Volkswagen.
The minimum weekly payment, insurance included, will be 5 marks. Regular payment of this amount will guarantee, after a period which is yet to be determined, the acquisition of a Volkswagen. The precise period will be determined upon the beginning of production.
Application for the Volkswagen savings programme can be made at any office of the German Labour Front and of ‘Strength Through Joy’, where further details can also be obtained. Factories and shops can submit collective orders.
A Volkswagen for every German—let that be our aim. That is what we want to achieve. Will all of you help in that; it shall be our way of saying ‘thank you’ to the Führer.
| 9 October 2009, 4:44 pm |
I have no real disagreement Tevya except for the part about Ley and the Labour front in terms of my point about the “socialist” elements of the Nazi party being effectively finished after 1933. (Of course Hitler still kept some show of “socialism” in order to keep parts of society onboard but as wiki (I’m feeling lazy) has it:
Hitler had no sympathy with the syndicalist tendencies of the NSBO, and in January 1934 a new Law for the Ordering of National Labour effectively suppressed independent working-class factory organisations, even Nazi ones, and put questions of wages and conditions in the hands of the Trustees of Labour (Treuhänder der Arbeit), dominated by the employers. At the same time Muchow was purged and Ley’s control over the DAF re-established. The NSBO was completely suppressed and the DAF became little more than an arm of the state for the more efficient deployment and disciplining of labour to serve the needs of the regime, particularly its massive expansion of the arms industry.
| 10 October 2009, 8:40 am |
nodrog @ 9 October 2009, 12:28 am
” a common sight was West German Mercedes and BMW’s lying kaput at the side of the potholed roads, while the Trabants rolled merrily on. So don’t mock the Trab!”
So have you been to Liverpool; or Dundee?
Vic Allen’s mitigation was one of the most disgraceful I ever have heard… I was pro-East German, so what’s the problem?
Now, perhaps Zin can tell us what the difference is between Bin Laden and Guevara.