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By: カナ
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Anonymous asked: How was the fall of the Berlin wall not a good thing
You mean the anti-fascist defense rampart? Well, let’s look at the origin of East Germany:
While the distortions of Cold War history would lead one to believe it was the Soviets who divided Germany, the Western powers were the true authors of Germany’s division. The Allies agreed at the February 1945 Yalta conference that while Germany would be partitioned into British, US and Soviet occupation zones, the defeated Germany would be administered jointly. [2] The hope of the Soviets, who had been invaded by Germany in both first and second world wars, was for a united, disarmed and neutral Germany. The Soviet’s goals were two-fold: First, Germany would be demilitarized, so that it could not launch a third war of aggression against the Soviet Union. Second, it would pay reparations for the massive damages it inflicted upon the USSR, calculated after the war to exceed $100 billion. [3]
The Western powers, however, had other plans. The United States wanted to revive Germany economically to ensure it would be available as a rich market capable of absorbing US exports and capital investment. The United States had remained on the sidelines through a good part of the war, largely avoiding the damage that ruined its rivals, while at the same time acting as armorer to the Allies. At the end of the war, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the USSR lay in ruins, while the US ruling class was bursting at the seams with war industry profits. The prospects for the post-war US economy, however, and hence for the industrialists, bankers and investors who dominated the country’s political decision-making, were dim unless new life could be breathed into collapsed foreign markets, which would be needed to absorb US exports and capital. An economically revived Germany was therefore an important part of the plan to secure the United States’ economic future. The idea of a Germany forced to pour out massive reparation payments to the USSR was intolerable to US policy makers: it would militate against the transformation of Germany into a sphere of profit-making for US capital, and would underwrite the rebuilding of an ideological competitor.
The United States intended to make post-war life as difficult as possible for the Soviet Union. There were a number of reasons for this, not least to prevent the USSR from becoming a model for other countries. Already, socialism had eliminated the United States’ access to markets and spheres of investment in one-sixth of the earth’s territory. The US ruling class didn’t want the USSR to provide inspiration and material aid to other countries to follow the same path. The lead role of communists in the resistance movements in Europe, “the success of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany,” and “the success of the Soviet Union in industrializing and modernizing,” [4] had greatly raised the prestige of the USSR and enhanced the popularity of communism. Unless measures were taken to check the USSR’s growing popularity, socialism would continue to advance and the area open to US exports and investment would continue to contract. A Germany paying reparations to the Soviets was clearly at odds with the goals of reviving Germany and holding the Soviet Union in check. What’s more, while the Soviets wanted Germany to be permanently disarmed as a safeguard against German revanchism, the United States recognized that a militarized Germany under US domination could play a central role in undermining the USSR.
The division of Germany began in 1946, when the French decided to administer their zone separately. [5] Soon, the Western powers merged their three zones into a single economic unit and announced they would no longer pay reparations to the Soviet Union. The burden would have to be borne by the Soviet occupation zone alone, which was smaller and less industrialized, and therefore less able to offer compensation.
…
The Allies agreed at Yalta that a post-war Germany would pay the Soviet Union $10 billion in compensation for the damages inflicted on the USSR during the war. This was a paltry sum compared to the more realistic estimate of $128 billion arrived at after the war. And yet the Soviets were short changed on even this meagre sum. The USSR received no more than $5.1 billion from the two German states, most of it from the GDR. The Soviets took $4.5 billion out of East Germany, carting away whole factories and railways, while the larger and richer FRG paid a miserable $600 million. The effect was the virtual deindustrialization of the East. [13] In the end, the GDR would compensate both the United States (which suffered virtually no damage in World War II) through the loss of its scientists, technicians, blue-prints, patents and so on, and the Soviet Union (which suffered immense losses and deserved to be compensated), through the loss of its factories and railways. Moreover, the United States offered substantial aid to West Germany to help it rebuild, while the poorer Soviet Union, which had been devastated by the German invasion, lacked the resources to invest in the GDR. [14] The West was rebuilt; the East stripped bare.East Germany’s starting point was much lower than West Germany’s, not as some happy coincidence or a defect of a socialism yet to be built, but because of capitalist-imperialism. With this in mind, let’s look at what the DDR managed to accomplish:
Over 90 percent of the GDR’s productive assets were owned by the country’s citizens collectively, while in West Germany productive assets remained privately owned, concentrated in a few hands. [16] Because the GDR’s economy was almost entirely publicly owned and the leadership was socialist, the economic surplus that people produced on the job went into a social fund to make the lives of everyone better rather than into the pockets of shareholders, bondholders, landowners and bankers. [17] Out of the social fund came subsidies for food, clothing, rent, public transportation, as well as cultural, social and recreational activities. Wages weren’t as high as in the West, but a growing number of essential goods and services were free or virtually free. Rents, for example, were very low. As a consequence, there were no evictions and there was no homelessness. Education was free through university, and university students received stipends to cover living expenses. Healthcare was also free. Childcare was highly subsidized.
Differences in income levels were narrow, with higher wages paid to those working in particularly strenuous or dangerous occupations. Full gender equality was mandated by law and men and women were paid equally for the same work, long before gender equality was taken up as an issue in the West. What’s more, everyone had a right to a job. There was no unemployment in the GDR.
Rather than supporting systems of oppression and exploitation, as the advanced capitalist countries did in Africa, Latin America and Asia, the GDR assisted the people of the global South in their struggles against colonialism. Doctors were dispatched to Vietnam, Mozambique and Angola, and students from many Third World countries were trained and educated in the GDR at the GDR’s expense.
- Democracy, East Germany, and the Berlin Wall
This was an incredible project to undertake, given the harsh starting point and the context of building socialism surrounded by enemies. And how did our lovable US imperialists react to this?
The CIA and other U.S. intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies look bad.
It was a remarkable undertaking.
The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, etc.; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions … all this and much more. [See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, p.400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sabotage and subversion.]
- The Other Side of the Berlin Wall
East Germany was placed in a prime position for geopolitical sabotage.
Another factor that played into the building of the wall was the terrible “brain drain” that the West was inflicting on the East: “The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East.”
Here’s a relevant passage from the Gowans article:
“A hypothetical capitalist East Germany would likewise have also had to build a wall in order to prevent its population from seeking salvation in another, more prosperous Germany. Incidentally, people have fled and continue to flee, to richer countries also from poor capitalist countries. However, the numerous black refugees from extremely poor Haiti, for example, have never enjoyed the same kind of sympathy in the United States and elsewhere in the world that was bestowed so generously on refugees from the GDR during the Cold War…And should the Mexican government decide to build a ‘Berlin Wall’ along the Rio Grande in order to prevent their people from escaping to El Norte, Washington would certainly not condemn such an initiative the way it used to condemn the infamous East Berlin construction project.”
The wall was never an ideal, I don’t think we even have to say it was good, but it was necessary. It was certainly better than the alternative, and this issue was much bigger than voting Democrat or Republican - one unideal option was much different from the other, which would have been total catastrophe. We no longer live in the Cold War (well, not as much), and all we need to do is look at what happened after that wall came tumbling down:
When the Wall came down, the imperialists swarmed into East Germany. The East was annexed by the West in 1990. There was finally reunification, but not on a working-class basis.
The unhindered movement of private capital took on momentum after the collapse of East Germany, ushering in a new era of exploitation. The once growing economy of the East, in which everyone was guaranteed a job, schooling, housing and health care, became a de-industrialized wasteland. The real unemployment rate rose to nearly 50 percent in some parts of the former East. (The Guardian, Nov. 15, 2006)
“It took just a few weeks to realize what the free market economy was all about,” said one East German. “It’s rampant materialism and exploitation. Human beings get lost.” (Reuters, Oct. 16, 2008)
The demise of the Berlin Wall should not be championed as a liberating moment in working-class history. Nor should it be equated with the apartheid wall in Palestine or racist prison walls. Whereas these latter walls represent the domination of the imperialists over oppressed peoples and the working class, the Berlin Wall was a defensive barrier employed by a workers’ state to stop imperialism. Not all walls are the same.
- Anniversary of Berlin Wall demise gives workers no reason to cheer
If you’re really interested in Cold War fact and fiction, you may want to take a look at Austin Murphy’s The Triumph of Evil.
I’m sorry, but no. That post glosses over many, many things. While there is nothing outright _wrong_, with regards to plain facts there, but that’s simply not the whole story.
One thing not mentioned entirely is the complete lack of any way whatsoever to influence who was in charge. “Elections” were a farce. All that you could even do was vote “yes” or “no” to the suggested SED “volksrat”, and since the secrecy of elections was only a thing on paper, voting no might have repercussions. When the decisions of a government that kept reelecting itself started not matching up with reality, there eventually were million-strong protests in 1953 that finally led to the SED focussing less on heavy industry and more on the peoples actual needs, like food production, but that is what it took - it was not the result of any sort of sane process.
This trend of communism dictated from above continues with a rich tradition of repression of any sort of political opposition by means of the Stasi, an organization running a system of total surveillance the likes of which would make the NSA of today jealous (With an estimated minimum of 2% of the DDR population working as informants), carrying out first arrests and later “zersetzung” of people that had been deemed uncomfortable - campaigns of almost comically evil psychological harassment against the victim and their family and friends. The Stasi was also not above sabotage, supporting western neonazi and antisemite groups and carrying out assassinations. (Additionally, unless you were 100% on message, you’d of course never end up in any leading position whatsoever anywhere. That that might not encourage people to stay in the DDR is obvious.)
The Berlin wall was the logical conclusion of a system where the Right Way To Do Things had long been decided by a small elite, and everybody else would either eat it or shut up. Notwithstanding any western sabotage, that repressive system or not wanting to become a part of it more than anything is what made people flee (economic reasons ranked, effectively, dead last - people were, after all, off well enough), and what eventually lead to the walls fall.
To try and sell the DDR, especially in its late days, as anything but a thinly veiled totalitarian state is looking at things through rosy glasses and deciding not to learn from mistakes, and that’s not okay.
Thank you, Halcy, for taking the time to lay down some truth. The original post was the fucking depths of willful historical ignorance and probably the worst thing I’ve seen on Tumblr, which is saying a fucking lot. It’s even got faked (as far as I can find) newspaper quotes! “Anti-fascist defense rampart”? That’s the name the OP had for the wall designed to keep an entire population in physical and ideological imprisonment? What the actual fuck? It’s way worse than the idea of “those who don’t learn from history…” because it’s not even a lack of learning from history it’s a willful distortion of it. You can believe in socialism or not but no sane person can look at what the DDR was and say, “Yes, this is a system to be emulated” without willfully deceiving themself and others.
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