East Germans desperately flee Communism.
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Posted in r/ActualPublicFreakouts by u/HannibalK • 9,493 points and 952 comments

Imagine swimming across the river to find a McDonald's, "Aw fuck, we gave up a better life in the GDR for this?" Freedom fries, indeed

Don't read the comments

  • BigBoopPaul [he/him]
    2·
    4 years ago

    The video is creepy as fuck. Why would you want to live in a place that hunts its citizens down like escaped prisoners? That fear and tears seems really genuine, why is it propaganda?

    • Adrian_Zenz [they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      it sounds exaggerated, the woman complains they were going to shoot her or disappear her if they catch her, the truth is moreso they were probably racing over to either help them or save them from drowning

      they would have just shot her if they wanted to lol, this is just western propaganda

      • ItsPequod [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Good ol' Eco's ur-fascism strikes again: our enemies can't value human life enough not to just shoot escapees, but care enough not to shoot, say, anyone else.

      • BigBoopPaul [he/him]
        1·
        4 years ago

        This rationale sounds insane. I think it's a very real fear that she would be detained indefinitely or something if she got caught.

        • Adrian_Zenz [they/them]
          2·
          4 years ago

          did you maybe consider why they're fleeing? could it be because they're criminals, or spies, or general malcontents? if she was an upstanding citizen with nothing to hide, she would be living her best life in GDR

          • Hungover [he/him]
            1·
            4 years ago

            Could it be that they had family in the West? Could it be that they had problems with the leadership of the GDR (socialists had that too, see Sahra Wagenknecht)? Obviously we should not demonize socialist experiments, but we should not completely whitewash them either. And obviously people did get shot at the border.

            • Adrian_Zenz [they/them]
              ·
              4 years ago

              the only people who got shot at the border were propagandists trying to sneak into the country to peddle their capitalist smut

              imagine where the usa would be today if they had abandoned capitalism in favor of communism when the berlin wall fell

              but keep polishing reagan's knob and justifying the way they treated the GDR like outsiders

    • science_pope [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Later she told us: They couldn't just shoot because they could have shot into something else.

      So apparently the evil communists refused to kill people because they might accidentally harm some, like, dirt and trees?