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Government Politics

25th Anniversary: When the Berlin Wall Fell 151

Lasrick writes Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This retrospective describes how quickly the Wall was erected, and how Berliners were completely caught off guard by its construction: "Berlin's citizens woke up one morning in August 1961 to find coils of barbed wire running down the middle of their streets; the first inkling some people had that anything was amiss was when their subway train didn't stop at certain stations. Later, the first strands of wire were replaced with a cement wall, along with watchtowers, a wide 'death strip,' and an electrified fence."
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25th Anniversary: When the Berlin Wall Fell

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  • Darmok (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 09, 2014 @11:02PM (#48348077)

    Shaka, when the walls fell.

    • Re:Darmok (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Sunday November 09, 2014 @11:05PM (#48348089)
      Thank you for doing your part to turn what is general news that I can get coverage for on every single television station (even the music video station!) and finding a way to make it nerd-appropriate.
      • Re:Darmok (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Sunday November 09, 2014 @11:49PM (#48348183) Journal
        Nerd-appropriate would be just how many Western brands and firms sent their production lines to the East.
        Cash that then supported the East German gov for years.
        Nerd-appropriate would be just how quickly Western political leaders had their East German files found and then removed.
        Nerd-appropriate would be where some top East German security experts later found work in the USA.
        The ability of the West to track most of the East German and Russian gov and mil movements.
        The fall of the wall still has many good tech stories but all the press likes is the escapes and television news.
        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Nerd-appropriate would be...

          You swanned past the Reichstag to the Berlin Wall
          In chiffon - Christian Dior
          Gazing at the debris through electrified barbed wire
          So grey - what an awful bore

          You thought the border guards parading looked so picturesque
          And their goose-stepping was so surreal
          Did you have any conception of the blood between the stone
          Did you notice that their guns were real?

    • by Bovius ( 1243040 )

      I cannot tell you how pleased I am that this is the first post here. Thank you, kind sir or ma'am, whoever you are.

    • by gavron ( 1300111 )

      Darmok and Gilad.

      At Tanagra.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      Putin, his arms wide
    • Reagan, speaking at the gate.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Concrete is made of sand, gravel, cement, and water.

  • When the walls fell
  • by Anonymous Coward

    The Berlin Wall fell! I real reason to say YIPPEEEE!!!!

  • by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Sunday November 09, 2014 @11:37PM (#48348153) Homepage Journal
    From Reagan to Hasselhoff: 5 people who didnâ(TM)t bring down the Berlin Wall [theguardian.com]

    In particular, even though the official American narrative is that Ronald Reagan personally tore it down with his death-ray eyes, the article has a more balanced view on the matter:

    But one also shouldn't ignore that Reagan gave his speech on 12 June 1987, a good 29 months before the actual fall of the wall. And there is little evidence that it had much impact on the dynamics of the dissident movement in East Germany, or on Soviet politics at the time.

    • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday November 09, 2014 @11:52PM (#48348187) Journal
      It's hard to imagine a single speech would cause the Soviet system to crumble, and Reagan had problems as a president, but he stood up for freedom, pointing out that keeping another country in a cage is evil.

      Image if we had a president in office right now who stood up for freedom who said, "NSA, close down illegal surveillance." Someone who recognized that sometimes, the end doesn't justify the means. We have too many politicians and not enough leaders.
      • It's hard to imagine a single speech would cause the Soviet system to crumble, and Reagan had problems as a president, but he stood up for freedom, pointing out that keeping another country in a cage is evil.

        There are others who made speeches as well, and none of them are as celebrated as Reagan. The important bit here though is likely that almost 3 years passed between his "famous" speech (which was seen by roughly 10% of the number of people who saw Kennedy's speech in Berlin) and the wall coming down.

        Image if we had a president in office right now who stood up for freedom who said, "NSA, close down illegal surveillance."

        That is political suicide to do that. It doesn't matter if the president thinks that is the right thing to do or not; if they end it they would be bashed as "soft on terror" (or worse) and the next time ther

        • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Monday November 10, 2014 @12:22AM (#48348229) Journal
          So, the summary didn't mention Reagan at all. The article didn't mention Reagan either. In fact, you were the one who brought up Reagan.
          Sounds like you have some kind of weird anti-Reagan kneejerk that pops up from time to time. It's ok, relax and chill.
        • by tranquilidad ( 1994300 ) on Monday November 10, 2014 @01:37AM (#48348377)

          It's not about a single speech and its timing.

          Reagan's speech was part of a much larger program to pressure the Soviets. Reagan believed, fundamentally, that communism was evil and spent a lot of energy fighting it.

          Now, you may rightly argue that Reagan didn't personally tear down the wall. You may reasonably argue that Reagan wasn't the only influence in getting the wall torn down.

          Reducing Reagan's and Thatcher's programs against communism and all that represented it down to a single speech is unfair. Your concentration on the timing of the speech in relation to when the wall came down certainly seems to discount any other actions the US and other countries took.

          Your concern that there were other speeches that aren't as well publicized as Reagan's is fine. How about highlighting a single line or a few lines from those speeches that brought as much focus as Reagan's imperative to Mr. Gorbachev? In fact, most people are probably unaware of what Reagan said in that speech other than his rallying cry and creating such a slogan is often a powerful mover.

          • Reagan's speech was part of a much larger program to pressure the Soviets.

            I don't dispute that. I fully accept that the entire cold war was about trying to bring down the USSR any way possible.

            Reagan believed, fundamentally, that communism was evil and spent a lot of energy fighting it.

            If it was truly about communism then by the time Reagan was in office - and indeed well before then - they wouldn't have wanted to put any energy into defeating the USSR as there was no communism left there. Certainly Reagan had some officials under him who knew that, even if he did not. It took very little time after the revolution for the state to morph from an attempt at communism t

      • by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday November 10, 2014 @12:58AM (#48348297)
        Reagan vilifying the Soviet Union is totally irrelevant to Obama and the NSA. People everywhere love smack talk about faraway enemies, it always plays well. A better Reagan analogy would be the Iran-Contra scandal.

        Now as to Obama, he did order Gitmo shut down. What happened? Congress rebelled, even Democrats, spinning up fear of Magneto-like supervillians too dastardly to contain in American prisons. Congress passed a law making it illegal to bring Gitmo prisoners to the US even for medical treatment, so now we spend millions flying medical equipment down there to rot.

        I suppose a more forceful President might be able to prevail on the Congress more often, Teddy Roosevelt-style, and do something about the NSA, if they had some reason to do so, which they don't. It's hardly ever a voting issue. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was used by both Democratic and Republican administrations to trample the Constitution for decades and voters never cared, because they were so scared of Communism they supported the purge. Now the roles are filled by a new cast of characters, but little has changed.

        • by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Monday November 10, 2014 @04:02AM (#48348665) Homepage

          Now as to Obama, he did order Gitmo shut down. What happened? Congress rebelled, even Democrats, spinning up fear of Magneto-like supervillians too dastardly to contain in American prisons. Congress passed a law making it illegal to bring Gitmo prisoners and not only did Obama fail to veto it, he signed it into law.

          There, fixed that for you.
           
          Seriously, I'm getting just a little fucking tired of the "Obama wanted to fix it, but the evil Congress blocked him" meme. Congress can pass laws - but they only become law either with the active cooperation of the President or only via an explicit override. President Obama has only vetoed two things to date - one utterly meaningless bill on notarizations, and one all but meaningless continuing budget resolution.
           

          I suppose a more forceful President might be able to prevail on the Congress more often, Teddy Roosevelt-style

          A more capable President would at least try.

      • by Sique ( 173459 ) on Monday November 10, 2014 @03:38AM (#48348633) Homepage
        Spoken as an East German: The Berlin Wall Speech was a gesture towards the own people in the U.S., nothing more, nothing less. It worked. The majority of the U.S. still believes this speech had a big impact on the East. We, the East Germans knew that the Berlin Wall was evil, we didn't need Ronald Reagan to point this out to us. We already had 200 shot dead who were trying to get over the Wall. We had thousands of people in prison who were caught planning to cross the Wall. We had singer-songwriter singing about the Wall, and how it cut us off most of the world. When those singer-songwrites sung about not being able to travel to Paris, we cheered, and we were looking up to them for having the braveness to do so. When Ronald Reagan did this, we were annoyed about the big posture and grandstanding and the arrogance of the most powerful man of the world, and we felt like he stole our symbol from us.
        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by Sique ( 173459 )
          If anyone in the U.S. is really interested in what helped to tear down the Wall, look at Helsinki and at the Helsinki Final Act. All the discussions and dissents in the former Communist bloc were based on the Helsinki Final Act, and on the signatures the East European countries put under the agreement on free speech and free travel. This is, what fueled the hope and the struggle. Not a propaganda show by the U.S. president who was in the same moment talking bad about the very documents that were so dear and
        • by Anonymous Coward

          Spoken as an East German: The Berlin Wall Speech was a gesture towards the own people in the U.S., nothing more, nothing less. It worked. The majority of the U.S. still believes this speech had a big impact on the East. We, the East Germans knew that the Berlin Wall was evil, we didn't need Ronald Reagan to point this out to us. We already had 200 shot dead who were trying to get over the Wall. We had thousands of people in prison who were caught planning to cross the Wall. We had singer-songwriter singing

          • by Sique ( 173459 ) on Monday November 10, 2014 @11:29AM (#48350669) Homepage
            You as a Westerner are surely taught: Yes, only the freedom you earn for yourself is true freedom. You might earn it by overthrowing your oppressors or you may earn it by fending off the attempts to take your freedom. And we have seen again and again: Freedom that was brought from somewhere else didn't stay very long. Despite the claims of many ideologues, you can't export freedom. Yes, you can lead by example. Yes, you can overthrow an oppressor. But for a group of people to stay free they have to be able to earn their freedom themselves.

            Yes, the U.S. helped very much to make 1989 happen, but not by giving speeches on the safe side of the Wall. They made 1989 possible by being much more successful in economics, building the much better cars, the better computers, creating the better clothing and the better movies and music. They helped by bankrupting the Soviet Union which was awash in oil money in the 1970ies and early 1980ies, by forcing the oil price down and getting the Soviet Union to waste their money in an arms race.

            But at the same time, the U.S. made things worse by supporting every dictator who was crying "I'm against communism" loud enough. It made things worse by toppling democratically elected governments if they weren't anti-communist enough. It was easy for the communist propaganda to point at South America or Southeast Asia and say: If you are supporting the U.S., you are supporting Imperialism and suppressing people.

      • by Livius ( 318358 )

        It's hard to imagine a single speech would cause the Soviet system to crumble

        It depends on what exactly you mean by "the Soviet system", but the speech where Gorbachev convinced the CPSU to hold competitive elections might qualify.

      • We have too many politicians and not enough leaders

        There's an old Bloom County strip that always sticks in my mind when I think about politics:

        Milo and Otis are sitting in the meadow and one of them says, "What the world needs now are more statesman."

        To which the other replies, "Churchill once said that a statesman is nothing more than a politician that's been dead for twenty years."

        And the other responds, "Like I said, what the world needs now are more statesman."

    • The Guardian? The British version of Pravda? Too bad the Guardian's editorial staff can't share a shallow mass grave with some of the many victims of the Soviet Union.

      • The Guardian? The British version of Pravda?

        Did you actually read the article? If there is something in the article that you find objectionable based on what it actually says - rather than just what you feel about the newspaper that published it - please share that. Sharing silliness such as

        Too bad the Guardian's editorial staff can't share a shallow mass grave with some of the many victims of the Soviet Union.

        Does not further the conversation.

        The article actually cites specific statements, actions, and dates. Are there some in there that you disagree with, or some important ones that you feel they missed?

      • The Guardian? The British version of Pravda? Too bad the Guardian's editorial staff can't share a shallow mass grave with some of the many victims of the Soviet Union.

        The Guardian is on the extremely moderate UK left: at the last general election it came out in favour of voting for the LibDems (who are now in coalition with the Tories, and have reneged on essentially all their manifesto pledges).

        To consider it as extreme left wing, you would need to be some sort of neo Nazi, in which case you can fuck off and die in a box of shit.

        • The Guardian? The British version of Pravda? Too bad the Guardian's editorial staff can't share a shallow mass grave with some of the many victims of the Soviet Union.

          The Guardian is on the extremely moderate UK left: at the last general election it came out in favour of voting for the LibDems (who are now in coalition with the Tories, and have reneged on essentially all their manifesto pledges).

          To consider it as extreme left wing, you would need to be some sort of neo Nazi...

          No, you simply need to be a mainstream U.S Republican today. Conservative policies of the recent past are now denounced as "Marxist" without dissent in current day Republican-land.

    • What Ronald Reagan arguably did wasn't the speech, but his massive expansion of the U.S. military including the thousand ship navy and expanding the other branches as much too. It was something that Russia had to match and basically went bankrupt trying to do so (and America nearly did as well). It is hard to say that Reagan had no impact upon the events surrounding the fall of the wall, although another significant event that had a major role was the disarmament talks that happened in Iceland a little bit later... and Reagan just walking out in the middle of those talks.

      Nobody is saying it was the speech that caused the wall to go down, but it was due to the fact that East Germany didn't fear the Soviet Union was going to crush any independent expression on the part of its leaders that caused the wall to go down. I doubt that would have happened under an extended presidency of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.

      • by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday November 10, 2014 @01:10AM (#48348319)
        Nations don't fall because of (un) diplomatic gestures. They fall because they are conquered, or go bankrupt. The Soviet Union fell because of its bad economy. However, the USSR did not increase military spending in response to the US buildup. [blogspot.com] There was never any reason to think they did, other that it was a nice story.

        The USSR's 9-year Afghanistan misadventure, on the other hand, was extremely costly (look at the above graph from '79 to '89). US support for the Mujahideen surely increased that pain. But the American president who started backing them was, in fact, Jimmy Carter.

        • by FlyHelicopters ( 1540845 ) on Monday November 10, 2014 @02:36AM (#48348497)

          I hate to tell you... but you're missing the obvious, as is that blog that you linked to...

          The Soviet Union didn't increase spending because they COULDN'T. They simply didn't have the money.

          They were faced with a United States that was pulling way ahead, between Star Wars (which wasn't real) and the Stealth Fighter and Stealth Bomber (which were), and many other new weapons... The Soviet Union simply couldn't compete...

          So they gave up, knowing they couldn't keep up.

          The spending worked just the way it was supposed to. If the Soviet Union could have spent it, they would have and the cold war would still be here.

          • by swb ( 14022 )

            I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.

            I don't dispute that the Soviet economy as a whole was ineffective, but lack of money for defense spending seems kind of hard to comprehend.

            I can see labor efficiency getting worse, hard currency reserves being depleted, but when you can direct labor and physical capital for anything you want, how do you run out of money?

            FWIW, I've mostly believed the Soviet Economy Collapse in Competition With The US meme, mainly be

            • I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.

              I don't dispute that the Soviet economy as a whole was ineffective, but lack of money for defense spending seems kind of hard to comprehend.

              I can see labor efficiency getting worse, hard currency reserves being depleted, but when you can direct labor and physical capital for anything you want, how do you run out of money?

              FWIW, I've mostly believed the Soviet Economy Collapse in Competition With The US meme, mainly because it seems to fit and no other explanation has really been offered.

              Their command economy was not efficient enough to produce all of the supplies they needed. They often had to buy Western grain to feed people. The leaders of the country wanted Western luxuries but, due to their restricted economy, had very limited hard money that was useful outside of the USSR. Hell, even the US relied on the USSR for some things. To build the SR-71, the CIA used shell companies throughout the world to buy titanium from the Soviets.

            • If the USSR production facilities couldn't keep up with the demand to feed its workforce [baltimoresun.com] and generate more efficient equipment... how could their economy seriously keep up with us revving up our military industrial complex to new heights?
            • I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.

              Hayek wrote a book about this question- The use of knowledge in society. A quote:

              The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

              To put it another way, no communist politburo can centrally manage the knowledge necessary to make a modern economy work. There's simply too much to know. In a market economy, the participants know how to play their role, and how to get what they need to give their customers what they want. They need to know nothing more than that. Millions of such people quietly playing their own role delivers success. In a command economy, th

            • I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.

              I don't dispute that the Soviet economy as a whole was ineffective, but lack of money for defense spending seems kind of hard to comprehend.

              ...

              Your instincts about the defense spending in the USSR are dead-on. They never ran out of money for defense. They ran short on supplies for everything else, and the civilian economy suffered terribly for it, but defense was always flush with resources.

              The USSR had, by the end of the 1960s, a fully militarized economy - the military was first in line for everything, taking so much that by the mid-1970s it stalled economic growth (this before Reagan, or even Carter, was in office). The notion that the Reagan m

          • by mackil ( 668039 )
            Excellent point. I often wondered to what extent the first Guld war played in stopping the Soviets from the "military" solution, once things began crumbling. When they saw some of their best hardware defeated so handily by the Coalition forces, did that keep them from launching a military strike to preserve the Soviet state? Interesting to think about.
        • Not only that, Chernobyl has also helped to bancrupt the USSR. The cleanup cost enormous, more than a yearly military budget.

          • Not only that, Chernobyl has also helped to bancrupt the USSR. The cleanup cost enormous, more than a yearly military budget.

            Citation please.

            This seems an absurd assertion. The Chernobyl clean-up employed about 250,000 people for two years, mostly with low tech equipment, while the Soviet military had about 5 million men under arms, a lot of it very costly high tech gear.

      • by Alomex ( 148003 )

        The politburo was informed in 1979 in a super secret session that the economy could no longer support the arms race and the USSR was broke. Nothing much seems to have come out of it, except that one young Comrade Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was in attendance. Some believe that this was the moment he started planning the changes needed for the USSR to survive.

        As to Reagan his true contribution was his willingness to negotiate with the USSR. Thatcher had to point out to Reagan that Gorbachev was a willing

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      In particular, even though the official American narrative is that Ronald Reagan personally tore it down with his death-ray eyes

      Interestingly, here in Germany the narrative is pretty much that Reagan had nothing to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall whatsoever. The politician we consider to have had the most influence on events is Gorbatschov. Who, meanwhile, my russian friends think was weak and didn't have much influence...

      • by Skater ( 41976 )
        Don't believe everything you read on the internet. I've lived in the US my entire life, and I've read a lot about the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, but the GP post was the very first time I'd heard this supposed strong connection between Reagan's speech and the wall falling. His speech may have been a significant event - everyone remembers "Tear down this wall!" - but I've never heard the theory that that's what caused the opening. I've also never heard that the Hoff had anything to do with it, eithe
    • Wow-- isn't that a mega straw man, pointing out that a speech didn't bring down a wall. Who the hell says that his SPEECH (written by Peter Robinson) caused the wall to be brought down? It's often suggested it was his policies. Debate that.
      • Who the hell says that his SPEECH (written by Peter Robinson) caused the wall to be brought down? It's often suggested it was his policies. Debate that.

        Tell me, what policies did Reagan partake in - beyond driving our own country into insane debt by massively increasing the military budget - that had any effect on the USSR? People credit Reagan for bringing about the end of the Berlin Wall and ultimately the USSR even though he did very little in reality; particularly when one considers that t was already in a death spiral before he took office.

        I'd be happy to debate this. I would love to know what was special about Reagan that brought this about th

  • by Jiro ( 131519 ) on Sunday November 09, 2014 @11:46PM (#48348169)

    ... you linked to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This is a left-wing organization (most of whose members are not atomic scientists), which opposed anything the US did that was hostile towards the Soviet Union--you know, the country that was responsible for the Berlin Wall to begin with.

    This is equivalent to having a post about Bill Gates about how bad monopolies are. Sure, monopolies are bad, but it's a little odd.

  • The New Wall (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Will be built by Putin across Ukraine.

  • by GrahamCox ( 741991 ) on Monday November 10, 2014 @01:21AM (#48348347) Homepage
    One of the installations made obsolete by the fall of the Berlin Wall was the NSA's listening post on the Teufelsberg (itself an artificial hill built from the millions of tons of rubble cleared after WW2, burying a Nazi training camp and the highest point in the city). This should be on the list of any self-respecting nerd's list of places to visit in Berlin. It's really eerie now, largely abandoned though sort of occupied by some sort of artists' commune. You can get into the radomes which housed the antennae, and the acoustics in there are incredible - a whisper will travel around the room and a sharp clap goes around and around. Rumour has it that the flooded basement rooms, which are currently inaccessible, house some strange and dark secrets. The whole place will give you the shivers (and a great view over the city). I visited last year just after the Snowden revelations, and the overwhelming sentiment was the hope that one day the rest of the NSA will go to ruin in the same way.
    • by TWX ( 665546 )

      Rumour has it that the flooded basement rooms, which are currently inaccessible, house some strange and dark secrets.

      If you mean obsolete computer and radio equipment, filing cabinets, metal desks and chairs, some safes that were left open when their contents were removed, and a break room and possibly a billet for some staff, all of it corroded to the point that it can't be removed intact, then you're probably right.

      I've been into a Titan II missile silo, there's a museum outside of Tucson, Arizona tha

    • Rumour has it that the flooded basement rooms, which are currently inaccessible, house some strange and dark secrets.

      Fortunately Gandalf killed that Balrog - so it's all good.

  • Ted Turner and Satellite TV (certainly not satellite defense) brought down the wall. Starting in Poland of all places(you remember Lech)... No, actually the Goodwill Games in '86 brought enough bootleg satellite dishes into Russia to bring in a good glimpse of western media. The propaganda game was suddenly over for the old politburo. Took three years, but they grabbed their money and ran, guess where?

    Or what, maybe it was the western banks dangling all that money in front of them that did it... That sounds

  • by Karmashock ( 2415832 ) on Monday November 10, 2014 @02:39AM (#48348507)

    ... Communism then the need to build a wall to keep its own "lucky" citizens from fleeing their joke of a society to the west.

    If communism were better, it would have been we that had to build a wall to keep our people from defecting.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    President Niinistö sees a heightened risk for a new kind of cold war [yle.fi].
  • Some thoughts... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Evtim ( 1022085 ) on Monday November 10, 2014 @06:39AM (#48348963)

    10th Nov 1989 was surreal experience for me. I had prepared a birthday party for my friends but did not tell them [was supposed to be a nice surprise]. So in the evening I browsed the district and picked them up from the usual places where we congregated. While going to my place we all noticed that the streets have grown very silent....it was a rainy, coldish evening but still....where was everyone?

    Once we entered my place the mystery was reveled - my father emerged from the living room with some tears in his eyes and ordered everyone in front of the TV. The wall was down....they were just announcing it on the central news...

    Well that was a nice birthday party I can tell you:))

    A quarter of a century later, having lived and work in the West for more than a decade now I can say a few things:

    1. Those "communists" back home were not communists at all. They were just a bunch of power hungry criminals who hid behind a label....nobody ever implemented the basics of the Marxists ideology...no-one. "The means of production belong to the people producing the wealth" - I never saw this happening.

    2. The few idealists that sincerely worked to implement the communist ideals were shunned away by careerist and criminals - many of them ended up in Gulags. Btw, this is not unique behavior for communists - do you think that [for example] if Christ walked today in the Vatican and asked them why are they breaking fundamental ideas of Christianity, like for instance being filthy rich, he will be met with open arms? I think we will crucify him again...

    3. The version of the communist ideology that was presented to me in school was something that I subscribed for with both hands. Forget for a moment that no-one was actually trying to bring this future around - what they told us was very close to the Start Trek future. All basic necessities of life will be for free and accessible to all members of said society + a few extras brought up by civilization. The list went --> basic necessities are air, water, food, shelter, warmth [energy] and clothing. The extras were child-care, education and medicine.

    4. Once the system collapsed and the new way started coming in, the greatest disappointment in my life began to occur. Namely - in short order I realized that the western system that we all thought "had figure it all out" turned out to be wasteful, inhuman construct that only pretends to work for humanity. Just like the "communists" then...I realize that the free market system does not serve humans and it is in fact the most wasteful system ever created. I realize that the western countries are using very well developed science to control and manipulate the citizenry. And we all know that it works...I realized that people here are no better human beings than us back home. In fact those of us that managed to remain humanists in poor, corrupted, police state - we are REAL humanists. In the west many people appear humanists only because the times are [relatively] good. But when the hard times come the veneer of civilization is quickly gone. Just look at the rise of extremism in Europe - one financial crisis [created by your inhuman market system, western people] and suddenly all kinds of nasty societal developments occur - xenophobia, intolerance, ultra-greed...

    5. The whole communism-capitalism thing is pure 1984 stuff [we are always at war with Eastasia]. Do you see what happens today - a new cold war is coming. Or a hot one even...I wonder why that is? Is it because the people in the east really hate westerners [and vice-verse]? Are we, the common folk the reasons for this? Because according to politicians - yes, we want war. After all the politicians do our bidding, is that not so? Or could it be that on both sides we have criminals who are filling their pockets while hiding behind [or highjacking] ideological labels? Could it be that the problems of humanity have nothing to do with political labels? I think so....

    In conclusion - let's celebrate the fall of East European criminal regim

    • by Anonymous Coward

      "- communism never failed since no-one tried it"
      oh yes it failed, every time; you have a problem understanding this, though. You can't figure out that the very basics of the Marxist ideology lead to chaos every time. The fathers of this system understood this perfectly, that is why they were prepared to kill off a portion of the population, terorize whoever was left and generally make your life very difficult since when you are busy all day to get a piece of bread you are not going to have any time left for

      • you can tell very quickly you can't escape your marxist ideology, even when you are denying it; you still have this need for the collective. Now you are calling it humanity

        If it's marxist to believe in something other than people as purely selfish economic worker drone units, then I'm a Marxist.

        You are putting a slightly different spin on the mad right wing calamity that was Margaret Thatcher saying "there is no such thing as society".

        Individuals are close to powerless in an individualistic society, unless they are one of the lucky ones at the top of the heap.

      • by k6mfw ( 1182893 )
        uh, capitalism is where man exploits man. With communism, it's the other way around.
    • by k6mfw ( 1182893 )
      Excellent post, you also illustrated wars are decided by a few politicos and not common folk. What is your analysis of the 2003 movie "Goodbye Lenin!"?
    • by Intrepid imaginaut ( 1970940 ) on Monday November 10, 2014 @10:32AM (#48350177)

      Marxist communism fails wherever it is tried (and saw to the murders of over 100 million innocent people) because it's fundamentally broken. It lacks any of the value indicators that are essential to any economic system.

      Marx believed firmly in the labor theory of value, and as such all economic power derived from human labor, not from mechanical power and as such almost completely ignores the value of intellectual work, the guy who figures out the right way to apply labor to raw materials is fantastically more effective than the one who does it the wrong way.

      Communism is also terrible at effectively allocating resources since it lacks the price signals that bundle cost and relative value and communicate them in a way that enables efficient allocation of resources to maximize what people collectively perceive as good, which is why communist economies always fail, and will always fail, even in the presence of automated systems that produce and distribute all of the essentials of life to everyone equally.

      "All basic necessities of life will be for free and accessible to all members of said society + a few extras brought up by civilization. The list went --> basic necessities are air, water, food, shelter, warmth [energy] and clothing. The extras were child-care, education and medicine."

      And yet that's very much what exists in the social welfare systems of most western countries today, with a few exceptions. They focus, quite rightly, on trying to get people back to work, but for the most part nobody starves by the roadside. Simultaneously they harness the desire for self improvement and reward it, creating an incentive for advancement.

      As to the rest to be honest it just looks like a lengthy paranoid misanthropic screed.

      • "All basic necessities of life will be for free and accessible to all members of said society + a few extras brought up by civilization. The list went --> basic necessities are air, water, food, shelter, warmth [energy] and clothing. The extras were child-care, education and medicine."

        And yet that's very much what exists in the social welfare systems of most western countries today, with a few exceptions.

        Yes, luckily we live in a society that isn't organised purely on laissez faire lines, but has incorporated some elements of socialism. It's why life is better today for 99% of people (in Europe at least) than it was a hundred years ago.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      "Those "communists" back home were not communists at all. They were just a bunch of power hungry criminals who hid behind a label."

      In other words: They were like every real-wrold communist ever, as opposed to the idealized versions that live only in the heads of Western Marxists...

  • A movie made about fall of Berlin Wall where the mom awakened from a coma but doctor tells son his mom must not get too excited. However, while she was in a coma the wall came down so he has make it convincing things are still the same (their resident was on the east side). He gets help from friends including one who wires up a TV set to a VCR and they create various programs from East Germany. There's a few things he has to mitigate like explaining the big Coca Cola billboard that appears in her window vie

He who has but four and spends five has no need for a wallet.

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