The wall had two sides

[IndianaGreen]

The wall had two sides

Monday 09 November 2009

The orgy of self-congratulation in Berlin by Western leaders to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall is hypocritical and designed to encourage the myth that no valid alternative exists to crisis-riddled capitalism.

Their condemnation of the 40 years of the German Democratic Republic as a brutally repressive state in comparison to enlightened Western democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is, at best, an oversimplification.

The GDR came into being during the cold war. It was never the intention of the Soviet Union, which liberated eastern Germany from nazi dictatorship, to set up a separate state.

Moscow intended that Germany should be united along the lines of Austria, which adopted military and diplomatic neutrality.

It gave force to this intention by allowing US, British and French forces to share the occupation of Berlin even though the Red Army alone had captured the German capital.

But the Western allies had different plans for West Germany, triggering division by their imposition of the deutschmark and, throughout the period of the open border until 1961, sabotaging and undermining the new GDR economy.

The US gave massive economic aid to the FRG, intending its success to be a source of propaganda against the less dramatic gains in the underdeveloped East, but that was not the only difference between the two states.

Whereas denazification was systematically carried out in the East, former Nazi Party members were allowed to continue in the FRG as government ministers, teachers, judges, prosecutors, military officers and diplomats.

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/82997

[izquierdista]

1. Fair and balanced

I was wondering when I would hear a non-teabag view.

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. K and R Our idiotic media has dumbed this topic down.....

...to the point that literally nothing can be learned from it.

So nothing *will* be learned from it.

[Skinner]

3. So, am I to conclude that the purpose of that whole Berlin Wall thing...

...was to keep West Germans from fleeing their failed capitalist dictatorship for the communist paradise on the other side?

[DavidDvorkin]

4. And yet they tried, anyway!

Despite the West German border guards who callously shot to kill.

[R. P. McMurphy]

5. Oh Man! Burned by Skinner!

That's gotta hurt. :)

[IndianaGreen]

6. Berlin Wall's fall: Four former East Germans assess changed lives

Former GDR leader Egon Krenz is proud that the wall came down under his watch without any bloodshed, but he also asserted to WSJ that there is no German unity. Former East Germans have mixed emotions and point out that the East is still lagging behind. Like everything in life, their perspective clashes with the public view championed by the Western media. One question ponder is how abortion rights have suffered since the wall came down. In Poland in particular, abortion rights that were once guaranteed by the communist state, no longer exists. Women and LGBTs have lost in this "liberation" that followed the Cold War.

Here is another article:

Berlin Wall's fall: Four former East Germans assess changed lives

"The wall is gone, but there is still no unification, no equality between the two Germanies," argues Ms. Muehlmann, who is working on her doctoral dissertation. "A lot of the things that the GDR citizens built disappeared."

As the world marks two decades of German unification, four ex-Eastern Germany residents welcomed the day in a more subdued way, remembering what had represented home and thinking of forward step as well as all the hopes that haven't materialized.

Understanding the perspective of people like Muehlmann is a way for Germany to heal the "wounds of the unification process," says Johannes Moser, a professor of European ethnology at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University.

"After the wall fell, a lot of people from the west came and told people in the East how bad everything had been there. Many residents of the GDR felt downgraded, as though their own lives, their own biographies had come under attack," says Professor Moser. "But there's been a rethinking process. Everybody's looking at the different facets of unification now."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1109/p06s07-woeu.html

[era veteran]

7. One side alive & one side drab

I visited the east in 1973 & it was a soul sucking fake city. They did have the bust of Nefertiti though.