Cmon, don't fuck this one up
Well There's Your Anticommunism, a podcast about never learning any lessons, with liberals
Okay I just skipped to a random point in the episode and heard the line
the Stasi was a couple orders of magnitude more effective than the Gestapo in WW2, like it was the worst police and fanatic police really
like Jesus fucking Christ. And the amazing thing is, in literally the next line the guy points out the contradiction
at the same time, when it came to it, when push came to shove, they didn't shove and they didn't push, which is just really kind of strange 'cause you would have expected them to shoot at people in the end
Yeah, you would have fucking expected that since you're comparing them to the Gestapo - maybe the fact that they didn't do that ought to make you rethink your evaluation of these supposedly authoritarian and highly repressive socialist states, but no, you just move right on, no light bulbs going off in your head or anything, just
another sort of context lesson here, that it is important, if you wanna do a socialist movement, to have, like, an interest in the next generation of it instead of torturing all of them
oh fuck off Alice
there were a lot of off-ramps where the Soviet Union could have created a more sustainable version of socialism, and they just chose not to
THE FUCK DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?? like, this isn't talking about Gorbachev's fuck ups or Khrushchev's reforms, it follows the previous quote so I guess "sustainability" is "not repressing people"? Like, this is what you're pointing to as the reason they collapsed, they were just too mean to their populace?
the Soviet Union was a shitty alternative, but it was an alternative, you had someone trying something else, maybe it wasn't working but they were trying something else
industrializing in like 20 years? massive increases in living standards? massively powerful industry? technological innovations? actually winning the Space Race despite what the Americans might say? um, sorry, that's not working apparently
THE FUCK DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?? like, this isn't talking about Gorbachev's fuck ups or Khrushchev's reforms, it follows the previous quote so I guess "sustainability" is "not repressing people"?
it's one of my more controversial opinions here but I think Khrushchev's reforms were actually necesary he just fucked up the implementation
Yep, I think there were roughly 3 issues at play:
1.) Khrushchev’s implementation sucked and had a mix of good ideas and bad ideas.
2.) The bureaucratic structures in place from before him pushed back on any significant changes to how the economy was to be run. I think the Brezhnev era was in part a response to these attempts as Brezhnev largely just tried to keep things as they were (even though the Soviet economy desperately needed some changes).
3.) I believe a fully centrally planned socialist economy was not possible until the 1970s or maybe even the 1980s. Central planning is more efficient than the free market, but you need the computers and the math behind you. The 60s were a period where you reach a level of significant complexity in the economy but the computer tech and the math just wasn’t there yet to match the task.
leontief's models are pretty good and they're from the 30s but yeah the economic calculation problem was only recently solved with computers
There were many different policies and some of them were just decent while others were fundamentally malignant (and many in between).
How self-absorbed and attached at the hip to your own conservative upbringing do you have to be to talk like this jfc.
3 hours of Rocz trying to wrangle a reactionary "Anarchist" and a vehement anti-USSR "Communist" as well as a guest
Gonna be "fun" for sure
It was sadly pretty damn lib BUT not as lib as the Palace of the Parliament one. There were also a few shoutouts to the DDR's acceptance of homosexuality (in the 80s) and their excellent housing policy.
Well that sure was an episode. Seems to me the GDR didn't really have a good choice. Don't build the wall, brain drain happens and your country collapses. Build the wall, you spend a massive amount of resources maintaining it and your country collapses anyway. Really the lesson here is that the Soviets should never have given the other allies their own parts of Berlin.
The biggest problem with this episode by far is how they don't emphasize at all just how not denazified West Germany was. Weird stuff about being upset at rehabilitated nazis in the East but not the people directly in control in the West. Pretty cringe.
Because if they mentioned that, it would provide an avenue for people to question their narrative that the stasi existed solely for oppression of workers instead of as a very effective denazification program.
Isn't there some easy statistic that there literally was more ("former") members of the nazi party in west german government positions in the decades after the war than active nazi party members in the state during the actual time of nazi germany?
They mention it off-handedly at one point, but they're certainly not given equal time.
east germany collapsed because west germany hired neo nazi gangs to cause trouble and beat up pro GDR supporters astroturfing a movement when the majority actually wanted to remain in east germany. Also Gorbachev refused to back them if they cracked down on the aforementioned nazis
it was very like Euromaiden but far more tragic
some things like the reinstatement of the nazi laws, and the destruction of the palace of the republic were just plain vandalism and wanton destruction of something beautiful just because it made the west look ugly in comparison
east germany collapsed because west germany hired neo nazi gangs to cause trouble and beat up pro GDR supporters astroturfing a movement when the majority actually wanted to remain in east germany.
Do you have a good source on this?
no because I learned this in a conversation with someone who knows a lot about east germany. We had a very good conversation and I learned lots of things but I can't really prove any of them
fun berlin wall fact most people who sneaked over to west berlin ended up sneaking back in to east berlin. Turns out that people who are getting no respect in socialism because they have no valueable skills don't have such a great time in capitalism either. People who might have had a better life in the west like doctors had too much to loose to take a risk like that
you aren't going to become a millionaire if you're broke and have no marketable skills now
Do you have a good source on this?
btw, another fun fact: common "victims of the Berlin Wall" tallies include people killed by West Berlin guards despite blaming it all on the East and the Soviets.
Another fun fact: over the four decades of the wall’s existence, the GDR killed ~140 people trying to scale it. 140 people over 4 decades.
The Israelis killed nearly TWICE that number of peaceful protestors just from 2018-19 (the Great March of Return).
The US probably had individual months where Obama or Trump killed that many innocent people with drones.
Berlin Wall episode? You couldn't pay me to listen to it, I fuckin know I'll be livid at Liam and Alice by the end.
Reminder to everyone here to give Bruni de la Motte’s Stasi State or Socialist Paradise a read, it’s great.
