Author: gdrthinktank

With Stones Against Russian Tanks

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Long before the Berlin Wall was built, the Soviet satellite state of East Germany was doomed to fall

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

Seventy years ago, on June 17, 1953, about one million people took to the streets in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, which had been called the “German Democratic Republic” (GDR) since 1949. They demonstrated against the poor supply situation and, above all, against the ordered norm increases for workers without wage compensation. During the uprising, political demands were added: free and democratic elections and the restoration of German unity.

For a few hours on June 17, 1953, the communist leadership in East Berlin had lost all control over the GDR. Then the Soviet tanks came and crushed the workers’ uprising. More than 100 people lost their lives.

No help came from the West.

While GDR citizens defended themselves against Soviet tanks with stones and sticks, head of state Walter Ulbricht and his communist comrades had to flee to the custody of the Soviet military administration in Berlin-Karlshorst. For a few hours, the GDR, which was not even four years old, was actually already destroyed. The West stood idly by during these days, as it did later during the building of the Berlin Wall, and indeed could not help. For any active interference would have triggered a military confrontation with the Soviet Union including unimaginable consequences.

Thirty-six years later, GDR citizens again took to the streets against the Stalinist system – and in peaceful protests they were successful this time, eliminating the SED regime of injustice and making the reunification of Germany possible in the first place. When the Berlin Wall fell, Soviet tanks stayed in the barracks, while the Western powers, who held the protection of West Berlin, did not dare to intervene openly. As a contemporary witness, I saw myself in disbelieving amazement at this – then, as now. The Soviets at the End of the Cold War had their own difficulties, mainly of economic nature – that’s true, but they were still a nuclear power and could have reacted very differently in the fall of 1989.

Today, there are politicians in Germany who, in their unquestioning allegiance to the U.S., want to certify directly or indirectly to the same former East Germans who brought down the Cold War that they sympathize with today’s Russia and Putin out of “nostalgic attachment” to the former Soviet Union. This is the reason why fewer people in the German East allegedly support the war in Ukraine against Russia than in the West.

How is that possible? Those who actively opposed the totalitarian occupying power back then now all of the sudden feel sympathy for it in the aftermath? There can hardly be a greater contradiction. Or are they perhaps the ones who can see through the mendacious policy of the West because of the experiences they made in two German states? Do they still feel gratitude? Without Gorbachev and his relenting there would probably not have been a German reunification. In Gorbachev’s back, as is often forgotten today, Stalinist die-hards were ready to undo history, as the attempted coup in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1991 proves. At that time, hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were still stationed in the East of the reunited Germany, the last of whom did not leave until 1994.

It is an impertinence beyond compare when people with a lack of expertise assume the right to judge pejoratively those who had the courage to speak out against a Stalinist dictatorship. For this, those attacked are nowadays publicly put in a corner in my home country as unruly citizens. Any opinion other than the official one does not correspond to the spirit of the times. This also shows the hypocrisy when Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and others talk about events like June 17, 1953. Yet it was people like Steinmeier who courted Putin and pushed natural gas supplies from Russia – they just don’t want to talk about it anymore.

When then as now there is talk about the “evil Russians”, most commentators fail to realize that there was also a time in between, which was not long ago. Perhaps the “old GDR people”, people like me, are a bit more sensitized by their life experiences. We probably feel the new injustice in today’s system the most and understand how much the aggression policy of the USA including the eastward expansion of NATO, but especially the interferences in Ukraine, has destroyed Russia’s initially benevolent attitude towards the West.

We know who, after German reunification, failed to reach out to Russia as a partner and instead build it up as a new enemy.

How the Americans “Won” a Nazi Ship

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

Three-masted barque “Eagle”, formerly “Horst Wessel”

On the German Baltic coast, not only are seawater-polluting LNG terminals being built to accommodate environmentally harmful American fracking gas, but every now and then useful things are also being done.

In the Hanseatic city of Stralsund, the original three-masted barque “Gorch Fock,” now only a museum ship, is currently undergoing extensive restoration at a cost of ten million euros to at least keep it floatable. The ship, which was commissioned in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, was lifted by the Soviets in the Strelasund after the end of the war and confiscated as reparations. It last sailed under the Ukrainian flag before a club managed to bring the completely run-down tall ship back to Germany.

Because the ship sailed under the Russian name “Tovarich” (Comrade) during the Cold War and thus seemed lost forever, the Federal Republic of Germany rebuilt the “Gorch Fock” in 1958, so that today there are two sailing ships under the same name. However, only the second “Gorch Fock” is still operational.

Another, identically constructed German sailing ship – the “Horst Wessel”, named after an SA storm leader and built in Hamburg in just one hundred days in 1936 – was seized in 1946 by the Americans. They “won” the 295-foot, three-masted “Nazi Vessel” in a sort of prize lottery against the Brits and the Soviets but needed some German crew members to get the ship from Bremerhaven across the Atlantic to Orangeburg, New York.

“Horst Wessel” is now called “Eagle” and serves as a training cutter for the US Coast Guard. At least, unlike Ukraine, the Americans have taken care of the ship and kept it immaculately maintained.

Eisenhower, the Union Man

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

In our age of cutting-edge technology, where greedy corporations shamelessly exploit the labor of the mass of their employees and leave them to live little more than from payday to payday, no one remembers words like the following. They did, in fact, come from a Republican president:

Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower (1890-1969)

“Today in America, unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice. I have no use for those – regardless of their political party – who hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”

The statement was made in 1952 by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II and 34th President of the United States of America. Eisenhower, a Republican socialist; a forerunner of Bernie Sanders, so to speak. Imagine that.

The fools today would be: Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, Starbucks …, to name just a few. They all have one thing in common: they suppress workers’ rights by all legal and illegal means and do everything they can to prevent representation of the interests of the weak. They all rake billions into their own pockets and have little more than starvation wages left for their ordinary employees, who can barely make ends meet.

This is what the modern age of the 21st century looks like.

If Eisenhower’s words are anything to go by, then the fools of our day would unfortunately also be those who are sorely informed and believe they must elect Trump, DeSantis or even Biden to represent the interests of the American majority. The exact opposite is the case: for these sorts of politicians use their power and influence in the interests of the billionaire class and ensure that corporations can continue to wallow in their greed.

The latter is obviously not what Eisenhower wanted for the American future. “Ike” would be shocked to hear today’s bullies like Trump and DeSantis talking.

American Socialism

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Most Americans today don’t seem to know this – that in their history they have had presidents from both major parties who were nothing more than socialists helping millions of people out of economic despair with government measures, such as FDR during the Great Depression. The views of Bernie Sanders today are not even half as radical as those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt yesterday.

Harry S. Truman, President of the United States of America 1945-1953

Of course, there are also institutions and agencies in the U.S. that can be called socialist, because they are actually state-controlled, such as the police, the fire department, the U.S. Army, the United States Postal Service, Medicare, Medicaid, and many others.

As a result of widespread, deliberate misleading, the majority of Americans today confuse socialism with the authoritarian version I grew up with in the GDR and think that democratic socialism is the devil incarnate because that is what is drummed into them every day from the corporate media to the churches at the behest of big money, and that is why in all their Christian grandeur they will vote for Trump again. They are ill-informed? Only ignorant people can vote for a pervert like Trump, a demagogue like DeSantis, or another big money directed person like Biden, who on top of it all calls himself a “capitalist” so as not to give any other impression.

Those who really want something good for their country should internalize the following:

Gone

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If I weren’t so appalled at the state of my own homeland, I could laugh my head off at the Trump saga. Germany is in the process of ruining itself beyond repair, and in the U.S. the Punch and Judy show is ruling to the detriment of the people, only a minority of whom – as on the other side of the Atlantic – seem to have their wits about them.

For the first time in 25 years in the U.S., it feels like my native country is slipping away from me – a process I would not have thought possible until recently.

A human being has to stay somewhere. Perhaps one should only enjoy butterflies and self-grown tomatoes and peppers, as long as it is still possible.

Once upon a time there was a country … I no longer have one.

A Free Country

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It’s not because I am writing this – it’s something to think about:

As a child, I had no choice but to attend a so-called “socialist school.” There was no other kind of school in my childhood. We sometimes had a bleeding knee or elbow, which we got while playing in the schoolyard. But none of us died.

I grew up in the middle of the Cold War and on its immediate front line. Only a hundred yards away from my school, columns of Soviet military vehicles drove by every hour. There were thousands of soldiers there, under the tarpaulins were strategic missiles, possibly even nuclear weapons.

We could hear the engines humming and smelled the stinking Russian gasoline.

And we heard foreign sounds.

But not a single one of us children in the entire country did not return home after school because he or she would have been shot and killed – unlike thousands of schoolchildren in the USA today. Today I am convinced we grew up in a mentally healthy society, as paradoxical as this may sound in historical retrospect. In any case, firearms were strictly forbidden. Why do you need firearms in a halfway normal, civilized community?

The overwhelming cause of death among children in the United States of America is death by gun. This is the result of the influence of the gun lobby in Congress, which most likely reaches down to the local level, owning lawmakers and officials like pawns through bribery and corruption and making billions in profits at the expense of the lives of their country’s children. Because that’s what it’s really about, and that’s why the true meaning of the Second Amendment has been deliberately distorted by the US Supreme Court.

Who calls this country Christian and the freest country in the world, where not even children can be sure of their lives in their schools? Really – this is a free country?

The Forgetful Mr. Biden

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

U.S. President Joe Biden called the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Russian President Putin “justified” and termed it “a strong signal.” However, it is the U.S. that does not recognize this criminal court, for good reasons. For otherwise, quite a few of their own politicians would have been internationally indicted for crimes in the past, possibly even Biden himself for his involvement in the Iraq war – and not only that.

On October 16, 2002, President George W. Bush authorized the use of force against Iraq, which led to another senseless U.S. war of aggression. After initial euphoria, U.S. soldiers and large segments of the population soon began to wonder what it was all for. Pictured right: Joe Biden, then a senator.

As a reminder:

In 2001, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden supported President Bush’s decision to attack and invade Afghanistan, a mission which ended in disaster under the current President’s leadership.

In 2002, he pushed for a bipartisan resolution authorizing President Bush to attack and invade Iraq. Five years later, Biden approved a plan to divide Iraq into three regions – one Kurdish, one Sunni, and one Shiite – that was consistent with U.S. strategy.

Between 2009 and 2017, Biden participated in the planning and execution of the wars against Libya and Syria and the coup in Ukraine. The current U.S. President played a direct role leading to the mass protests on the Maidan in Kiev and ultimately to the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was legally elected to office.

Facts no longer matter today.

The shamelessness and mendacity of the West along with its corporate media is unprecedented.

Wall Street Criminals

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

Deregulation of financial markets serves the top one percent, not the common people. It lays the foundation and sets the course for future crises that put the safety and health of hundreds of millions of people at risk. This is the reality of the so-called “free market,” where there is little or no regulation, and where lobbyists in the service of big business corrupt the legislature to ensure that laws are passed according to their ideas and wishes. It no longer has anything to do with real democracy to the good of society.

What more proof and evidence do clear thinking people need to grasp the truth? It cannot be true that people voted for Trump, who in 2017 not only gave a trillion (i.e., $1,000,000,000,000) in tax breaks to corporations and the top one percent of the wealthiest people instead of “cleaning up the swamp” as he promised before the election – rather, he did the opposite: he appointed mostly billionaires to his cabinet.

Who do you think these billionaires would serve? The interests of the working class, which is the majority of the American people?

The mass of people simply do not learn, but are deceived. How is such a thing possible? Only 15 years after the last bank crash, there are still speculators in the financial institutions who gamble away people’s savings – and not only that: Contrary to all the protestations of politicians like Biden now, they not only go unpunished, but are also rescued as under Obama in 2008/09) with taxpayer funds. In plain terms, those who caused the problem in their criminal greed are being bailed out at the behest of the government.

But no one bails out the working-class families who are losing their jobs, are threatened with eviction, and don’t know how to put food on the table.

Against such a legalized Wall Street criminality no election helps anymore. Only mass movements that revolt against injustice can help.

Please watch and listen to the following: Bernie Sanders talking in 2018 about the financial crash of 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQE9r5K2oNA

Bernie Sander’s Socialism

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

I am ahead of Bernie Sanders in only one thing, if not two, but I do not really know. I actually lived in a socialism, unlike probably him; I was born there and grew up in it, for nearly three decades. Like most folks back then, I despised it.

His latest book: As an eyewitness and observer in three countries, each as different from the next as night and day, I have great difficulty refuting Bernie Sanders’ theses.

However, this was more than likely a different socialism than Sanders is striving for. It was a dictatorial, for especially outwardly inhuman socialism in the former GDR, today widely known as “East Germany.” The Cold War circumstances played a big role. In the fall of 1989, hundreds of thousands of protesting people were able to get rid of this socialism, while Soviet party leader Mikhail Gorbachev did not send tanks to crush the revolutionary movement. I was 29 years old at that time and, as today, just a sand corn in the process.

Without our rejection of the socialist form of government, the upheaval leading to German reunification, which took place peacefully in 1990, would not have been possible. The discontent did not come out of nowhere; it had been building up among the people for years.

The second thing that distinguishes me from Bernie Sanders – I don’t know exactly – may be the fact that I spent eight years in the U.S. working with ordinary people at a lower level, so to speak. Here, too, I can base my opinion on personal experience.

After immigrating to the United States for family reasons and going through a period of acclimation – including working for an insurance company in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, and attending college in Clearwater – I was eventually employed by Pinellas County government, wrongly concluding that all the social benefits I could enjoy there were part of the general standard in the United States, a country I still believed at the time to be the freest country in the world. For ten years, so to speak, I walked around with half-closed eyes, seeing only what concerned myself. Actually, a not unusual human trait.

Then my wife and I moved to beautiful Blairsville, Georgia, where we still live today, now retired, aided by circumstances that originated not in the United States of America but in my home country. It was here in North Georgia that I first encountered the social issue in my life, through an employer famously named “Walmart.” Never in my life would I have thought such a thing possible; the way the American upper class treats Americans. My whole way of thinking has changed since then.

I am not a friend of socialism. For nothing in the world would I like to live again in a socialism as I had to get to know it from the GDR. But in the USA, there is also a dictatorship – that of big money, which takes away people’s rights or restricts them, such as health insurance or workers’ rights; for example, the right to organize unions.

I was born in the dictatorship of socialism and will most likely die in a dictatorship of big money. Neither dictatorship leaves much for members of the working class, as I have seen with my own eyes. In the GDR, Socialism locked up its own people behind an impenetrable western border. Anyone who did not agree with the political system had to fear repression.

Those who, through no fault of their own, live under financial constraints in a rich country like the U.S. simply because they needed surgery or are not academics are not living free lives. Fundamental rights such as the right to freedom of expression or freedom of religion do not change this. You do not feel free if you have to worry about health care or food, the rent for your apartment or the mortgage for your house. In the USA, 60 percent live from paycheck to paycheck, and I was one of them for eight years in Blairsville, Georgia.

I am a proponent of a social order in which the capitalist economy is controlled by the legislature through regulations and laws to protect the working majority, rather than allowing corporations a free hand in return for billions in campaign contributions – to the detriment of the many and the benefit of the few at the top. A human system that was once called a “Social Market Economy” at the time I left my home country in 1998.

Be clear about it – in Germany, too, a once comparatively exemplary system is disappearing with each passing day.

If I am not mistaken, Social Market Economy is the kind of “socialism” Bernie Sanders is striving for. I don’t care what he calls it. I don’t care what he calls it. All I know is that he’s right, because he stands up for the human side of society.