…and they usually can’t name anything after that. Some people might mention the Stasi but that’s pretty rare. I guess you’d have a number of people like me that were raised evangelical who were told even owning a Bible in East Germany was illegal (it wasn’t) and churches were banned (they weren’t); but that’s such obvious bullshit I won’t even address it here.
So when you ask US Americans about East Germany, the wall is the first thing that they will say, every time. It’s the hallmark of why they (and communism in general) were “bad”. East Germany doesn’t have a leader they know about like Stalin or Mao. It doesn’t have a scary name for “prisons” like “gulag”. And it doesn’t have a famine that anticommunists can exaggerate and blame on communism. But they do have a wall.
OK, in the ~30 years of the Berlin Wall’s existence, do you know how many people were killed trying to cross it?
Not millions. Not tens of thousands. 140. Over a 30 year period. US Americans have no idea this is the actual number. Instead, we have movies like Bridge of Spies. In that movie, Tom Hanks is in a train going over to the eastern side of Berlin. And in the four seconds the train is above the zone behind the wall, of course they show someone crossing the wall getting shot. Despite the fact that there would have been only say 4-5 people that would have happened to in a given year across the length of the whole wall, not just the spot Hanks’ character was at. The odds of that happening at that exact spot at that exact time were a million to one. But that doesn’t stop Hollywood from including it.
But yeah, the GDR is evil and terrible for killing 140 people. I’m sure there were individual months where Obama droned more innocent civilians than that. But the US is the good guys, right? That’s the worst the US can come up with about the GDR. 140 people. The US can slaughter innocents by the millions but that’s not evil because reasons. Wall bad, agent orange good.
And of course, US Americans never learn about the reasons for building the wall in the first place. The US and FRG used West Berlin as a major base of operations for spying and sabotage into the Eastern Bloc. Something had to be done, or the CIA et al would continue to use West Berlin as an easy access point. I’m pretty sure the wall’s main purpose was keeping folks out more than in. And yes, brain drain out of the GDR was a problem. The west absolutely pumped people in the GDR with (not necessarily incorrect for labor aristocrats) notions that they could be pretty well off in the west. Was the wall the right solution for that? Probably not, but I’m not in their shoes and I can see why they did it.
Now, about the Stasi. It’s a great word, like “gulag”. It sounds scary, right? Most US Americans aren’t familiar with it, but the dedicated anti-communists will always bring it up. Do you know what the secret police in the FRG were called? Probably not, but don’t feel bad. It’s not like we were ever taught about them. But the FRG did have their own secret police, and they acted with as much impunity as the Stasi, just against leftists. Meanwhile, in the GDR… as long as you weren’t a CIA asset, a Nazi, or advocated against the working class (i.e. for capitalism)… the Stasi had no interest in you. Yes, they collected a lot of info on folks. But I’m sure the data profile that Facebook or Google have on most Americans would put the Stasi to shame. And those corporations have zero problems handing that info off to law enforcement in order to put you in the slammer. But Americans think this is perfectly ok because Facebook and Google are pRiVaTE coRpOrAtiOnS, and corporations aren’t able to limit our freedoms. Not to mention, I remember seeing some post-unification polls of East Germans about the things they didn’t like about life there, and the Stasi was waaaay down on the list.
Basically, US Americans are the most deeply propagandized people on the planet. The capitalists built up these scary communist boogeymen that were apparently so evil. But when you learn the truth, you see that on their worst days, East Germany was still a far better country than the US could hope to be on it’s best day.
What East Germans didn’t like was the lack of consumer goods and the restrictions on international travel.
Western propaganda worked. East Germans watched West German TV and saw all the treats in the commercials. They believed that they too would be driving BMW’s and eating bananas in their big-ass houses. Never did it occur to them that all of the treats of the West came with a price.
I think it is very human not to consider the possibility that you might lose what you’ve already got. East Germans didn’t realise that the BMW’s were part of a system with unemployment, lack of community and disgusting inequality. East German media tried to tell the whole picture about the west but were ultimately not believed.
All of this raises the question of what socialist countries can do in the future to prevent reactionary propaganda from taking hold. What should be done to prevent the population from being misled by shiny images of treats?
Have bananas. Seriously the more productive system will win in the end. The ecological question makes a steady rise in consumerism unfeasable and undisirable. A more productive society might give more spare time instead of treats and save the enviroment. However people in the east had less treats just as much work and were horrible to the enviroment as well. Stuff like inequality don’t mean anything. A west German worker might have a Volkswagen, his boss a BMW and his boss a Porsche, all of those are much better than a Trabant so people accepted it. Unemployment existed in the west for a few, the average worker would never assume to be one of the unemployed. The West saw massive immigation to help with worker shortages even. Capitalism is full of contradictions. If your socialism isn’t more productive than that, there is something wrong with it.
I agree that it is important for socialist societies to have bananas and see to it that people’s material needs are taken well care of but I think it is unwise to dismiss the effects of inequality like that. It buys into liberal fantasies of the homo economics, the purely rational human. People don’t behave like that. If you follow that logic East Germans should have been happy just to have Trabants instead of having to ride bikes.
I would claim that a society with Trabants for everyone is a healthier one that one with Volkswagens for some, BMW’s for others and Porsches for a few very lucky guys. By introducing significant economic differences in a society, which really means different levels of freedom and possibilities in life, you add an ideological superstructure to justify them and a hierarchy between people. The guy in the Porsche is believed to be especially important to society and worth more than other people whereas the people in the Volkswagens are believed to be lazy and lacking in worth.
Neither of these beliefs does anything good to people. The guy in the Porsche will start to believe he’s better than everyone else and accordingly act like an asshole. The guy in the Volkswagen will be depressed about being put at the bottom of the hierarchy and blame himself for not being good enough. People will loathe the ones above them in the hierarchy and fear those below them. Building a sense of community will be very hard under such circumstances.
A socialist society should avoid creating big differences. Everyone should have roughly the same standard of living. Not only because diminishing marginal utility means that material wealth will create the greatest happiness if it is shared equally but also because shared material conditions will create the optimal conditions for community and solidarity to arise.
Had the GDR given everyone the equivalent of a Volkswagen (as an example) I believe they would have succeeded, but a Trabant you wait a decade for? And the Volkswagen was not for “some”. Very few German workers would not be able to afford one. You have to look at the standard of average people to learn something about the viability of a society. A socialist society should avoid big differences I agree, but not be overall worse materially than capitalism (this includes spare time which capitalism hardly provides). And the people in eastern Germany were not happy about having cars at all, because they could see and often had family in the west living a much better life. Just because the covid response of my country could be worse I’m still jelous of China because they show very clearly that it could be much better.
For western workers “real socialism” looked poor and restrictive and utterly unapealing.
w/r/t consumer goods… I have no data that backs this up, but I wonder about the divide between the “labor aristocracy” and the working class in the GDR (for purposes here, I’ll define labor aristocracy as those whose material conditions would be better under capitalism versus socialism - so a lot of doctors, lawyers, middle managers, etc). In the GDR I imagine you would have a sizeable “labor aristocracy” - a group of people that saw the capitalist West and thought correctly that their material position would be better with capitalism. However, I believe the working class would still be larger. What we know about capitalism is that the labor aristocracy is given a MUCH larger say in society. For example, consider TV and movies. How often are protagonists portrayed as struggling working class folks? And how often are they portrayed as professionals making good money and no real material concerns - if not outright petite boug or capitalists? When watching the news, how often are crimes that affect the labor aristocracy shown versus crimes against the working class? So I admittedly have no hard evidence, but I wonder if there was a significant divide in GDR society: enough people who could benefit from capitalism (but still the minority) versus a larger working class that wanted socialism and liked the system they had (but certainly wanted some changes). The working class being larger but having significantly less say over how history was written post-unification. So the story now is “we didn’t like how little consumer goods we had”, which is certainly true, but not the whole story as working class of the former GDR is forced to be mostly silent.
This is why the Joker is a working class hero
Remember when the media was telling us Joker was “the incel Citizen Kane” and they were salivating at the thought of a tragedy occurring at the premiere?
Yeah, turns out the movie makes them out to be irresponsible assholes who cause many problems in our society. Which is why they tried to lie to us about it. Warms my heart the movie was a huge hit.
:joker-dancing:
Within the imperial core while having degrees which are accepted and maybe are white passing and male
I think this systematizes the entire situation of the Eastern bloc very well. There were some major issues with the system, for a number of reasons, and people of course didnt like that, and its normal for people to desire things that will improve their material conditions. However, the 90s and 00s really took away the good things that were there during socialism. The entire period of the 90s was basically a dissolution of society. In many ways, it feels like the same level of neoliberalism is only now reaching the West, and the situation in the US and UK really rhymes a lot with that of 90s Eastern Europe, with the absolute dissolution of social institutions, absolute mistrust in society as a concept, rampant individualism and everyone having conspiray theory brainworms.
There is an interview with a person who escaped from North to South Korea and she basically tells the same, she said: I watched the shows I thought most (could become) millionaires and there was no poverty. Then I got here and saw poverty, lived precarious etc. she said her life only got better once the media picked her up to do Anti North Korean propaganda on TV basically.
Park Yeon-Mi that you?
Obviously I would like to have everyone better lives, but to think Titanic means there is a better live for you is a bit naive?
Hard to keep 'em on the farm once they’ve seen Paris.
Titanic is a very romantic movie. It’s not just a disaster movie. North Korean film is very heavy-handed and every movie has a message, and that message is always the same. I can imagine Titanic having a deep effect on a young woman who doesn’t have the words to describe what she’s been dreaming about ever since she came of age.
Lol, well duh. You don’t have to be from North Korea to see a hollywood spectacle and discover “the true meaning of love” and be completely entranced and seduced by the american idea of “freedom”. You just have to be young and stupid. That’s exactly what Hollywood fucking exists for lol. Complete solidarity with the CCP and I’m a sucker for it myself…but sometimes I wonder if they regret allowing the MCU to become a thing there.
I dunno, I think the MCU will regret having Red Guardian being the only fucking actual human being in the last 6 movies.
And IIRC South Korea forbids defectors from returning to the DPRK.
It helps that we live in a world of interconnected mass media and capitalism seems dead set on showing it’s whole ass to the world. There’s treats, sure, but it’s really not that hard to show how the West is gleefully devouring it’s working class like it’s Attack on Titan.
You also have to imagine the world in the 1980s. Pre-internet, acquiring information was really difficult, even in the “free” USA. I was like 13 when we first got the internet, and before then what I could learn was limited to what I heard on TV and what was on the shelf in my local library. So finding out about the horrors of capitalism was a lot harder - even in a communist country. Not to mention in the 80s global neoliberalism hadn’t fully taken hold, capitalism genuinely looked a lot “friendlier” to people back then.
I also think a country like China is being helped by the fact that it is a developing country in the sense that it is actually developing and doing so rapidly. Chinese workers get access to more and more treats which makes it hard for reactionaries to make something that looks like a better offer.
Imagine living in a country where the last 40 years have seen your standard of living rise steadily and predictably. Such a dastardly CCP brainwashing tactic to get the approval of the people. smh my dick head.