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."
Darmok (Score:5, Funny)
Shaka, when the walls fell.
Re:Darmok (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Darmok (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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?
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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
Burma-Shave
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"Your O.S. Trip" - RedGum/Michael Atkinson (1981)
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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.
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Darmok and Gilad.
At Tanagra.
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Reagan, speaking at the gate.
Concrete, not "cement". (Score:2, Informative)
Concrete is made of sand, gravel, cement, and water.
Re:Concrete, not "cement". (Score:5, Funny)
Berlin (Score:2)
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When the walls fell
No More Words.
The Wall Fell! YIPPPPEEEEE! (Score:1)
The Berlin Wall fell! I real reason to say YIPPEEEE!!!!
Reminder of who not to credit (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Reminder of who not to credit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
Re:Reminder of who not to credit (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like you have some kind of weird anti-Reagan kneejerk that pops up from time to time. It's ok, relax and chill.
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but the most likely scenario is that the World Bank/IMF finally showed them enough money to go take a powder..
Uh, you consider that the most likely scenario?
I think it's funny all of you like to credit all your highfalutin ideology for conquering the beast
I know someone who was at the protests when the Soviet system fell. He didn't protest because he didn't enjoy the comforts of communism; he did enjoy them . He protested because he wanted freedom.
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Uh, you consider that the most likely scenario?
I certainly do. The Russian banks needed cash, real bad. The decision was a simple one to make. Business is business. How many other governments have done the same thing? Lots... The system didn't 'fall' by any means, where is Gorbachev? Resting comfortably for sure, the system changed, and everybody in the boardroom got paid. In fact nothing really changed upstairs, a minor rearrangement of the furniture, that's all.
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You have a hypothesis there, but I'd love to actually see supporting evidence.
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One thing people learned from Nixon(for the most part, there's still a lot of dummies out there), 'Burn the tapes'... The world is a shark tank. Our facade of civility that we display at the library and in your finer restaurants just does not exist at their level. They are true sociopaths, by choice. Just follow the natural flow of power and mass. It can only lead to one conclusion. The process and motivation is truly universal across all things.
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Yes, well, we really don't know about anything, do we? But some things are pretty obvious, like the color of the sky, and the physical state of water... Even the tiniest glace at animal psychology provides a pretty good clue on the human condition. The gangsters are an evolutionary step. I see nothing abnormal, 'corrupt' or 'conspiratorial' or even anything specifically human about it. It is just the natural process at work. I do not see the big deal. Strip the emotional and sentimental baggage about people
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Still, between two hypothesis, I prefer the one that is supported by evidence. In this case, I know people who wanted freedom, so that's my evidence.
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Yes, I admit, wage slavery is more comfortable than chattel slavery. I know people who want freedom also. And they know that 'revolution' is temporary at best. They seek a more profound solution than merely putting in a more friendly gangster that will give you an extra bar of soap and toilet paper with 63% fewer splinters every week.
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Re: Reminder of who not to credit (Score:5, Insightful)
And he got it: the freedom to be unemployed, the freedom to be poor, the freedom to be left alone to fend for himself in the social darwinist jungle that is capitalism. I hope he enjoys that.
Freedom always comes with a cost: it is scary at first, but once you get used to it, you'll never go back. It'd be like going back to CVS once you get used to Git.
My friend has the freedom to choose where he lives, what career he wants, freedom of speech, and he loves it.
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Yes, Reagan was a lot like git. A lot of people sing his praises, but when you actually look closely at him, he sucked.
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MercuriaI is better than git. SVN is better than git. Honestly I would even take CVS over git any day.
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MercuriaI is better than git.
Oh yeah? They're almost the same.
Honestly I would even take CVS over git any day.
lol now I know you're trolling.
Re:Reminder of who not to credit (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
Re:Reminder of who not to credit (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Reminder of who not to credit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
A more capable President would at least try.
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That more reflects his background - street level activist and local politics, where that's how things are done. That's not really appropriate at the national level, where he had very little experience before becoming President. The result is that he views Congress as damage to be routed around (not
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...
That more reflects his background - street level activist and local politics, where that's how things are done. That's not really appropriate at the national level, where he had very little experience before becoming President. The result is that he views Congress as damage to be routed around (not that he's entirely wrong about that, and I say that as a conservative who's greatly dismayed at the sway the nutjob fringe holds on the Right) and tries to handle that in much the same manner he did back then... which doesn't really work as personal influence and the Party Machine hold much less sway at the national level.
As you say, the nutjob fringe does hold sway over the Right. On an objective basis, there has not been a Congress this obstructionist for more than eight decades. Although the Republicans seem fine with grid-locking government, regardless of the cost the nation, as long as Obama sits in office -- he understandably knows someone needs to actually govern.
Conservative political psycho-babble fantasies about what 'community activists' think need to be set aside. The fact is he is President and needs to deal wi
Re:Reminder of who not to credit (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Reminder of who not to credit (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
Re:Reminder of who not to credit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Reminder of who not to credit (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Reminder of who not to credit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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Not only that, Chernobyl has also helped to bancrupt the USSR. The cleanup cost enormous, more than a yearly military budget.
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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.
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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
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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...
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Well, it certainly wasn't Reagan, who famously called the Soviet Union "evil empire" and was one of the last western leaders to acknowledge that Gorbatschov was indeed changing things. Reagan had a dialogue with Gorbachov, but opened? You got any evidence for that claim?
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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
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Curiously no one in germany talks about those people when it comes to the wall falling.
I lived in Germany as a kid (army brat), and frankly I wouldn't expect them to give any credit to any outsiders - deserved or not. Back in the 1970s it seemed pretty obvious many/most Germans highly resented the presence of American and British forces in Berlin as well as all the American bases around the country, back when the wall still stood. I suspect that resentment would overshadow most everything else.
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25 years later and there are still American bases in Germany. So there can't be that much resentment - not enough to force change anyway.
You'd think resentment would be much higher now, when there isn't even an illusion of requirement of american 'protection'.
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The is probably because the Germans having lost WWII have no choice in the matter and various treaties provide for American and British bases in Germany so long as we choose to maintain them.
I know the British Forces Germany have been slowly drawing down since the end of the cold ware and have plans to be gone my 2019 However in light of the maniac that is Putin that is looking increasingly unwise.
Of all the links you had to use (Score:4, Insightful)
... 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.
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There's no reason to make up lies about a group whose truths don't mesh with your worldview.
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True enough but OP had a pretty accurate description of the bulletin.
The New Wall (Score:2, Insightful)
Will be built by Putin across Ukraine.
Re:The New Wall (Score:5, Funny)
Will be built by Putin across Ukraine.
With his bare hands, while riding on a bear.
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With his bare hands, while riding on a bear.
But what the world really wants to know is: Will he be wearing a shirt?
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To keep all the Ukrainians out, away from the jobs and higher wages?
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You surely jest, since it is the Ukrainian prime minister [liveleak.com] who wants to build a wall.
Teufelsberg listening post (Score:5, Interesting)
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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
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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.
Give credit where credit is due (Score:1)
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
Nothing speaks more clearly to the failure of... (Score:4, Insightful)
... 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.
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An East German accusing others of being uninformed? Oh, the irony!
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So by your argument just because your side of the line had lots of people in it, it must have been a good society?
So... Egypt has more people then east germany... is that a well run society?
Do I need to reference north korea or other places with as many people but which we all understand to be jokes?
Point blank... your society was so shitty that they had to build walls around it to keep people leaving.
How many societies do you know of that are such garbage that they need to stop people leaving with walls an
Meanwhile in Finland (Score:1)
Some thoughts... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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"- 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
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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.
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Re:Some thoughts... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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"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.
"Real Communists" (Score:1)
"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...
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People are greedy. It's like gravity; hold up a rock and you'll expect it to fall.
I disagree. Most people I know aren't that interested in money, or there'd be a lot more people with a couple of businesses, working eighteen hours a day and raking in the money.
What people are is lazy, and that is the start of all good ideas.
Goodbye Lenin! (Score:2)
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US is how far from living under the Stasi?
You don't have a fucking clue! Goddamn! How insulting to the people that suffered can this be? Fuck off, you fucking wiener!!
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Yeah, certainly the way to stop the decline is to say "oh, it was/is way worse somewhere else", put your head in the sand and do nothing.
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>> US is how far from living under the Stasi?
The US surveillance system is much worse than the stasi, it has much more power because it controls nearly all data flowing...
http://apps.opendatacity.de/st... [opendatacity.de]