221–230 of 324 posts
Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/ [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125774
The 2018 film is a really good movie, I would highly recommend checking it out!
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Remember the GDR called the Berlin Wall the "Antifascist Protection Barrier"
There were no fascists in the DDR. There are fascists in the former DDR today. So I guess it worked.
Not officially although in reality the Stasi quite happily reused Gestapo files, and there were numerous National Socialists who ended up east of the border.
The GDR had a series of fake political parties, besides the Communist, in order to pretend they were a democracy. I believe they did have one that pretended to appeal to such people.
"There are fascists in the former DDR today."
Much more so than the west which did not have years of Communist rule.
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There were no fascists in the DDR. There are fascists in the former DDR today. So I guess it worked.
The fascists were everywhere in the DDR: just called members of the party or as part of the Stasi. And I take the definition of fascists as anyone who prioritizes their political system, State or political view to a point of depriving any other citizen of their basic freedom.
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There were no fascists in the DDR. There are fascists in the former DDR today. So I guess it worked.
> There were no fascists in the DDR. That was certainly the party line of the DDR at the time. Do you honestly believe it? It’s no coincidence that Vladimir Putin, a former KGB man who served in East Germany, claims that his war in Ukraine is justified in the name of denazification. It’s an easy rhetorical trick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_...
In reality, a lot of careerists shifted their loyalties from the National Socialist government to the Communist one. There were several years in which the Communists, much like their western counterparts, tried to weed out all the Nazis, before realising many of them were experienced in administering things. (The Eastern Bloc had its own smaller version of Operation Paperclip, although the scientists tended to be less willing.)
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As a Venezuelan, I think the difference is not the Natural Resources, or at least is not the main difference. In 2017, the shortages and economic crisis generated by 15 years of communist policies has pushed around 4 million people out, and then, the regime "elected" a Constitutional Assembly which has the power to create a new Constitution and to overrid any previously elected organism (as it was at the time the opo…
I can only speak of Czechoslovakia, but from 1968 to 1989 there was no ideology. After the soviet occupation, there was normalization era, that was explicitly about compliance with the regime, not about believe in communism. I agree though that it is more complex, but for some reason, Czechoslovakia wanted to keep all the people and exploit their work, while Venezuela and Iran seems to let the people go in exchange f…
When I talk about Ideology, I am not referring to the people, but the regime hiercachy. I would guess in the case of Czechoslovakia the regime had some Ideology alignment with the Soviets, but I truly don't know. But yes, they modern approach seems to favor the exile instead of the reclusion or so it seems
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Communism is the idea of "can't we all just get along?" which is obviously not something you can actually implement, but is easily used as a buzzword by evil regimes. Remember, H-tl-r called his regime "socialist", much the same way N-rth K-rea calls itself "democratic"
You can spell out Hitler and North Korea here. Meta has no power here.
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As a Venezuelan, I think the difference is not the Natural Resources, or at least is not the main difference. In 2017, the shortages and economic crisis generated by 15 years of communist policies has pushed around 4 million people out, and then, the regime "elected" a Constitutional Assembly which has the power to create a new Constitution and to overrid any previously elected organism (as it was at the time the opo…
I can only speak of Czechoslovakia, but from 1968 to 1989 there was no ideology. After the soviet occupation, there was normalization era, that was explicitly about compliance with the regime, not about believe in communism. I agree though that it is more complex, but for some reason, Czechoslovakia wanted to keep all the people and exploit their work, while Venezuela and Iran seems to let the people go in exchange f…
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The fascists were everywhere in the DDR: just called members of the party or as part of the Stasi. And I take the definition of fascists as anyone who prioritizes their political system, State or political view to a point of depriving any other citizen of their basic freedom.
Authoritarianism isn't the same thing as fascism.
If you want to take a more Trotskyite view, many post-revolutionary states enter a so called "Bonapartist" phase, where militarism, ultranationalism and symbology combine to produce something which looks a lot like Fascism. Mao and Stalin were not above using ultranationalism and chauvinism to push their rule. North Korea has gone all the way with this with Juche which contains mystical, ultranationalist and even racial supremacist features.
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People go on about surveillance but it's not really the problem compared to murderous dictatorships.
Murderous dictatorships are enabled by mass surveillance and personal data collection. Especially East Germany, which was obsessed with data harvesting on every individual and installed as many CCTV cameras as its budget and tech would allow. East Germany would be creaming itself over the panopticon we are walking into.