FidelCastro [he/him]
The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.
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1·3 years agoA comparison between the governments of The GDR vs West Germany:
The GDR:
Otto Grotowohl became the first prime minister of the GDR and an active proponent of a long-lasting peace settlement in Europe. He was the former leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. He had been imprisoned by the Nazis several times.
Walter Ulbricht, became the first general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED - formed by a merger between the Communist and the Social Democratic Parties in the Soviet Zone in 1946). He was a former joiner, and spent his years of exile in the USSR.
Ulbricht was replaced by Erich Honecker, a former roofer, who became party and state leader after Ulbricht. Honecker had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1935 and spent the following 10 years in a Nazi prison.
Wilhelm Pieck became the first president of the GDR. He had spent the Nazi period and war years in exile in the USSR together with Walter Ulbricht.
Albert Norden, a member of the SED Central Committee, was the son of a Rabbi and had been arrested for political activities during the Weimar Republic, escaping before the Nazis could arrest him, was to spend his exile years in the USA.
Herman Axen, a member of the Central Committee, came from a Jewish family and survived internment in both Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Klaus Gysi, later Minister of Culture, also came from a Jewish family background and escaped the Nazis to spend his exile working with the resistance in France and Britain.
Markus Wolf, who became the GDR’s head of counter espionage, came from a Jewish background. He was the son of the renowned playwright and medical doctor Friedrich Wolf . He was also in the Soviet Union during the Nazi period.
Rudolph Herrnstadt came from a Jewish family and spent the Nazi and war years in Soviet exile. He became the first chief editor of Neues Deutschland, the national daily newspaper of the SED.
Alexander Abusch, the first Minister of Culture, was born to a Jewish family in Cracow and spent the war years in French exile.
Hilde Benjamin, also from a Jewish background, became the GDR’s first female minister and its second Minister of Justice. Under the Nazis she had been banned from practising law because of her Jewish background. She was the wife of Dr. Georg Benjamin (brother of the writer and cultural critic Walter Benjamin) who was murdered in Mauthausen concentration camp. She was instrumental in bringing in a whole raft of legislation favouring gender equality in the GDR.
West Germany:
In West Germany, Konrad Adenauer became the first post-war Chancellor. He was an arch-conservative, ardent Catholic and pre- war mayor of Cologne as well as President of the Prussian State Council. Before the war he had called for a coalition government with the Nazis, and although never a member of that party himself, he was certainly no anti-fascist.
His first post-war government was packed with other right-wing and Catholic figures as well as high-ranking former Nazis.
Hans Globke was Adenauer’s personal advisor. He had been an active member of the Nazi party, and had served as chief legal advisor to the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior, the section headed by Adolf Eichmann that was responsible for the administrative logistics of the Holocaust. It was he who co-wrote the official annotation explaining the implementation of the race laws which legalised the discrimination against the Jews.
West Germany’s second Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, the man credited with the country’s post-war “economic miracle” and dubbed the “father of the social market economy” had previously occupied a leading position in the Nazi Reichsgruppe Industrie and the Institute for Industrial Research financed by the chemical conglomerate IG Farben that supplied Zyklon-B for the gas chambers.
Kurt Kiesinger, who followed Erhard as Chancellor in 1966, joined the Nazi Party in 1933, a few weeks after Hitler came to power. In 1940, he was employed in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ radio propaganda department, rising to become deputy head from 1943 to 1945 and was liaison officer with Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda.
Heinrich Lübke, who became President of the Federal Republic in 1959, was another controversial figure. His signature (which he disputed) was found on the building plans for a concentration camp. He was involved in the setting up of an aircraft factory in an underground chamber and, under his direction, barracks were built to house concentration camp inmates who worked as slave labourers. Lübke was also involved in setting up the army research station at Peenemunde (where the V2 rockets were developed under Werner von Braun) as building director of the Schlemp Group. From 1943-45 he was responsible for the employment of concentration camp inmates as slave labour.
Hans Seidel, Commander-in-Chief of the allied ground forces in Central Europe from 1957 to 1963, served in the Nazi army’s French campaign of 1940 and became Chief of Staff of the military commander in France. In April 1944, Seidel was appointed Chief of Staff to Field Marshall Rommel.
Reinhard Gehlen, President of the BND, the West German secret service until 1968, had been chief of Hitler’s military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front. He had been officially released from American captivity in 1946 and flown back to Germany, where he began his intelligence work once again by setting up an organization of former nazi intelligence officers.
Only when Willi Brandt, who first became Mayor of West Berlin (1957-66), became German Chancellor (1969-74), was there a genuine anti-fascist at the helm of the Federal Republic. He had spent the exile years in Norway working as a journalist and hiding from the Nazis. For many years he was ostracised by establishment figures in West Germany as a ‘traitor’, just as Marlene Dietrich and others who left Germany during the Hitler years were. It was perhaps not surprising that it was only under Brandt’s Chancellorship that a thaw in East-West relations began to take place with a tentative rapprochement between the GDR and FRG (West Germany).
Some relevant excerpts from the book "Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It" by John Green and Bruni De La Motte
West Germany vs The GDR:
Within weeks of the end of the war, the Soviet occupation forces encouraged the re-establishment of trade unions, cultural organisations and political parties. Already by July 1945, a Kulturbund (Cultural League for the Democratic renewal of Germany) was set up in the Soviet sector to assist with the re-opening of theatres, music venues and cinemas and to promote Germany’s democratic cultural legacy as an antidote to Hitler’s fascist de-culturalisation and xenophobia.
It took another three months before the formation of political parties and trade unions were permitted in the US sector, which also hindered the setting up of cultural organisations, fearing that they would rapidly become dominated by communists and leftist forces.
In the Soviet zone, which later became the GDR, there was a determined effort to eliminate Nazi ideology and to remove those who were either war criminals or top Nazi activists from all positions of power as stipulated in the Potsdam Agreement reached between the Allies in 1945.
Many of the guilty who had been implicated or had taken an active part in committing atrocities inflicted on Russia and Eastern Europe by the Nazis fled to the West before they could be brought to justice. There they were able to enjoy a comfortable and undisturbed life.
Adenauer‘s own words on being against German Reunification:
Even after it came about, the Soviet Union saw the creation of the GDR as a temporary measure with eventual reunification still the logical outcome. It actually put forward proposals for unification in 1952 but received a hefty ‘no’ for an answer from the West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
He was an adamant opponent of unification under any circumstances other than under a capitalist system. He famously said that he would “rather have half of Germany completely than a whole Germany only halfway”
Adenauer said in 1954: “The best way to regain the German East is rearmament”. And secretly West Germany was re-armed with the help of the USA.
Source: https://archive.org/details/StasiStateOrSocialistParadise/page/n17/mode/2up
The soviets literally locked them up and made them do science at gunpoint lol
Meanwhile the GDR purged the absolute fuck out of anyone attached to the nazi government.
For more info, read page from 10 on here:
In the 1950s more than 77% of all West German judges and justice ministry officials were “former” nazis, which is an even higher percentage than during the actual Third Reich itself:
0·3 years agoEither that or “I am a crypto-fasicst”
2·3 years agoChina has plenty of its own social issues with queer / LGBTQ+ rights (eg gay marriage still being illegal) and is not always going to line up with our own cultural indicators either.
Understanding the context involved with a policy like this allows us to critique it more clearly than the very generalized take on it we’re seeing from most western press.
Given our media’s vested interest in attacking China from any angle they can, I think it’s healthy to not take these stories at face value when they’re first presented to us.
Our country is trying very hard to manufacture consent for this latest cold war and none of us are immune to propaganda.
If I remember correctly, the “effeminacy” thing China has been gunning against isn’t about gender expression as much as “idol culture”. I’ll see if I can find the threads I was reading on that from a queer activist in China.
As is typical, the western media happily jumped on trying to use this as a propaganda angle. The thread I was reading had some criticism of other policies because China isn’t a utopia, but it was pretty clear on the intent there.
Edit: Found it. Thread on the topic from our comrades over at r/GenZedong.
No everything has to be serious at all times and we cannot find any humor in the absurdity of hell world. The last time I smiled was on August 19th, 1991. I wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence. Every day at exactly noon I have the same meal of an expired Maoist MRE I store in a pit covered in old issues of a revolutionary newspaper. I sleep in a bed made of flags from every failed revolution so that they are never forgotten. In the evenings I stare at a picture of vodka by candlelight, but I do not allow myself to drink because there is nothing to celebrate. Every local org has banned me after I attempted to split it by assassinating the leadership. There is no plumbing in my house I shit in a brass bucket with a picture of Gonzalo and Deng french kissing in the bottom of it. My house is actually an overturned T34 in an abandoned junkyard in Wisconsin. I have a single friend in this world and it is a tapeworm named Bordiga that I met after ingesting spoiled borscht on 9/11 in the ruins of building 7 (I blew it up after finding that a nominally leftist NGO inside of it wasn’t sufficiently anti-imperialist, the attacks on the world trade center were a perfect revolutionary moment for me to enact direct praxis against liberalism). My source of income is various MLM schemes in the former soviet bloc that have been running for so long no one remembers who I am, they just keep sending money. I have not paid taxes since McGovern lost the Democratic nomination for president and my faith in electoralism died more brutally than my childhood dog after it got into an entire jar of tylenol. I own 29 fully automatic rusted kalashnikovs and three crates of ammunition entirely incompatible with them or any other firearms I own. My double PHD in marxist economics and 18th century Swiss philosophy (required to understand Engels) sits over the fireplace of my home, my fireplace is a salvaged drum from a 1950s washing machine that was recalled for locking children inside of it. I chose that washing machine model on purpose because I am anti-natalist. During the latest BLM protests I firebombed a Nikes outlet in the middle of a peaceful candlelit vigil. William F Buckley and I wrote hatemail to one another for 47 years until my final letter gave him an aneurysm. The only water I drink is from puddles. George Lucas and I dropped acid together during an MKULTRA southern baptist summer camp and he went on to write the movie Willow about our time together. The best way to test whether an electrical wire is live is to drool on it and shrimp salad is racist. You can make an IED out of potassium and the instructions are online thanks to Timothy McVey, who was actually a committed antifascist communist slandered by the deep state as part of operation condor. Every time a liberal files a restraining order against me, I carve a mark into the wall. I am running out of walls. When Amerika finally collapses I will be ready to lead the revolution. I am very smart and people like being around me.
The Reality Of Feds in Organizing
Every single org is going to have feds in them. Work around the bastards, keep them busy, and expect that ultimately they will probably compromise your group. At that point, you’ll need to move on to your next project with one or two people you trust.
Orgs collapsing is close to inevitable in the imperial core. The Feds are lazy and terribly incompetent, but alsp have billions in funding. If an org doesn’t collapse from wreckers and you present a real threat to empire, then they will eventually just start murdering you and everyone you trust until it does.
Fed-jacketing is an effective tool that feds ironically use to paralyze groups and remove figures that are threatening to them before they can gain momentum.
The trick is to inoculate your org from the beginning and mininize the behavior and damage the feds can inflict by having clear standards of behavior that you expel anyone shitty for. Treat anyone disruptive and incompetent the same way you’d treat a fed because there is no difference.
The 3 goals of a socialist in the imperial core
In my opinion, the three things that actually matter in the core are:
Goal 1: improving material conditions for the people who are suffering
Goal 2: through goal 1, raising class consciousness to create more comrades
Goal 3: with goal 2, slowing The Machine so it becomes even more ineffective and harms less people (in both the core and the periphery).
Join an org
join the best org you can that is doing goal 1 sufficiently well. Do not get choice paralysis, just pick one that seems decent. Will probably be DSA to start since they generally work with everyone. If you find out an org is SWERFs/ TERFs/ or another type of cult, then you can always leave.
You don’t even have to “join” to begin with, just pick a local org and attend a meeting or event. That’s it, just do something this weekend for an hour or two.
You’ll gradually meet other people “who get it”. Eventually, you’ll wind up in an even better org when that one splits / collapses / or you find one you like more.
There is no such thing as a perfect org, you will always have people to work around when you are doing work for The People.
Conclusion (A Call To Action)
All Power To All The People. The beast is dying. Lift our brothers, sisters, and siblings out of the stomach acid so they can heal and then also help in the work. Do not let the feds feed you doom.
Join an org and get started. You’re on this site, so you’re ready.