Tag: GDR

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.

Russian Roulette with Red Lines

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The War in Ukraine has more than one Culprit

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

The invasion of Ukraine is not going the way Russia envisioned – but the thought of abandoning his plans is unbearable for Vladimir Putin. At stake is Ukraine, his security buffer to the West. The enormous American and European aid flowing there has made the military situation very precarious for the Russians, prompting their president now to order a partial mobilization of Russian forces. There is even talk of using tactical nuclear weapons. An escalation of the conflict to this extent would be a catastrophe for all of Europe.

Workers’ uprising in the GDR in 1953: Soviet tanks roll through East Berlin and other places of the Soviet satellite state. The USA and the two other victorious powers in Berlin, France and Great Britain, looked on powerlessly a few hundred yards away.

Why did it have to come to this? Can the responsibility for this dire situation really be attributed solely to Russia? After all, it was they who started this war. A war, however, that has a long pre-history between Russians and Ukrainians, but also Europe.

At a time when everyone is talking about globalization, it is worth taking a look at recent history. During the Cold War, there were many situations that could have easily led to nuclear catastrophe. The two great powers, the USA and the communist Soviet Union, friends and allies against Hitler in the second half of the Second World War, fought proxy wars against each other virtually all over the world or even intervened directly, as the Americans did in Vietnam.

That was far away. But in the field of tension Europe, the Americans have never dared to act against the Soviets as they are now doing in Ukraine, right on Russia’s doorstep. When the Soviets tried to starve out West Berlin in 1948/49 by blocking the access routes in order to force the three Western powers to abandon the city, the Americans and the British flew non-stop missions via an air lift to Tempelhof to supply the population with all the necessities of life. Military action was out of the question for all sides, although the Soviets threatened it several times.

Four years later, when the workers’ uprising in the GDR took place and Soviet tanks rolled through East Berlin to crush it, the Americans watched in protest from a few hundred meters away but did not dare to intervene militarily. On August 13, 1961, when the East German communists sealed off West Berlin with barbed wire and construction of the Wall began, President John F. Kennedy was in Hyannis Port for a sail and did not want to be disturbed1. The West had known in advance what was going on with the approval of the Soviets – and did not intervene, even though there was a Berlin crisis team in the Washington State Department, set up long before.

Nor did the Americans lift a finger during the 1956 uprising in Hungary, which was put down particularly bloodily by invading Soviet troops; nor during the Prague Spring in 1968, nor in Poland in 1970 and 1981, when, by the way, Republican presidents were sitting in the White House.

These invaded states were all involuntary satellites of the Soviets and wanted to go their own independent ways, just like the Ukraine today. They were not involved in “real wars” with the Soviet Union, but at least the Soviets intervened militarily, and no one helped these countries at the time.

In a certain way, the West had accepted the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, although there, too, the suffering of the population including politically motivated killings, imprisonments and deportations of hundreds of thousands of people were the order of the day. However, even because of all this, economic relations were never seriously questioned between the two power blocks, on the contrary. And in all these moments of world political dangers and wars, when everything was at stake, Russian natural gas and oil continued to flow not only to the Federal Republic of Germany and the former GDR, but to almost all of Western Europe during the Cold War and afterwards. Even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 did not play a destructive role in this pattern of ongoing cooperation, apart from a boycott of the Olympic Games.

So, the question is: Why did the West interfere so massively in Ukraine’s affairs right after the Soviet Union fell apart in late 1991, when individual republics like Ukraine broke away from it and the Russian Federation under President Boris Yeltsin tried to see the West as a partner? What were the Bidens, Trumps and Giulianis and their stooges doing in Ukraine, where almost the entire upper stratum of society including governments were corrupt to the core? None of this looked like well-meaning intentions on the part of the West – more like a dangerous, creeping imperial expansion of its own sphere of power, as the Americans saw themselves as the general triumphant force after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, there is no justification for the war in Ukraine. However, if all accepted red lines from the Cold War era had not been crossed today, this war might not have happened.

Notes:

1 A note on my own behalf: In view of the historical facts and as someone who was born in 1961 at the eastern interface of the Cold War, the question does not even arise to me to whom I owe my personal freedom. The courageous mass demonstrations in the GDR, which led to the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, could have been put down by the Soviets just as they had been in 1953. Here, too, the Americans could only have watched, or rather had to watch, in order not to endanger world peace. I owe my freedom to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet party and state leader and his policy of glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring). – I emphasize this explicitly because I have heard many voices in America according to which the USA and Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall, although the latter was not even in office anymore at the time. It would be more correct to say that the Americans kept the path to this development open – but they could not bring it about themselves.

Mikhail Gorbachev (91) is dead

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Mikhail Gorbachev 1931-2022

Through him and his policy of glasnost and perestroika, the Iron Curtain has become history without blood being shed outside the then Soviet Union, except for Romania.

The German nation owes him a debt of gratitude, because without him the fall of the Berlin Wall and thus German reunification would not have happened. Personally, I am one who is directly affected. Mikhail Gorbachev has fundamentally changed my life. The Soviets could have easily sent tanks during the fall of 1989 and crushed the East German revolution in its cradle. As historical evidence shows, already during the workers’ uprising in 1953, only Soviet intervention had saved the GDR from disintegration. Like back then, the Western powers under the leadership of the USA would have done nothing in support of the people in the GDR in 1989, as they were powerless during the popular uprisings in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland 1970 and 1981.

Faced with great economic difficulties at home, Gorbachev had trusted Western assurances only to find himself disappointed in the end. In the years that followed, the West recklessly and perhaps deliberately failed to treat the former Soviet Union as a post-Cold War partner. The possibility of a lasting and peaceful cooperation between the formerly hostile camps existed very well at that time. Instead, the European West joined the American push to treat Russia as a peripheral power so that new markets and spheres of influence could be opened up in line with aggressive American policy, including in Ukraine.

These historical facts are all too often ignored today.

Let’s see how the official German reaction to Gorbachev’s death will turn out, while at the same time some European countries are trying to deny entry visas to Russian citizens because of the war in Ukraine. In the past, no one would have thought of doing the same to US citizens in the face of the criminal Vietnam War or military interventions against international law in Iraq and Afghanistan under the pretext of lies such as weapons of mass destruction and in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions. There have also been no sanctions from the Western European side against the USA because of its wars of aggression.

When German politicians and German media today talk about an energy crisis as a result of the war in Ukraine, it is not true. The energy shortage in Germany is a consequence of nonsensical Western sanctions and an unsurprising counter-reaction by Russia. These international sanctions against Russia do not harm any country more than Germany and do not lead to peace in the Ukraine, but to a lower standard of living in Germany.

Memo From Camp David

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When George H. W. Bush and the German Chancellor Conferred on the Future about Germany and beyond

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

It should all happen very quickly: Three months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) traveled to the United States to reassure himself of American support for Germany’s future plans toward state unity.1 At a meeting at Camp David on February 24, 1990, he easily found the backing he had been hoping for from U.S. President George H. W. Bush. However, the Americans were primarily concerned not only with German reunification, but also with the expansion of NATO.

In the meantime, a public memorandum about the Camp David meeting exists and can be viewed online.2 It illustrates how, in the period immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West was keen to shift its sphere of influence together with EU and NATO to the East and closer to Russia, the legal successor of the then still existing Soviet Union.

Excerpt of the memorandum of the conversation between then U.S. President George H. W. Bush and then German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, at Camp David on February 24, 1990, released by the National Security Archive. The marked comment of the American President is telling.

In contrast, there is little sign in this conversation of plans for compromise or even peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union within the framework of a future security structure in Eastern Europe. One participant in the conversation is intent on a possible reunification of Germany under the protective shield of the Americans; the Americans themselves see their supremacy in the world after the end of the Cold War as their most important interest in the context of “a new world order”. Both sides unfold their strategy at the expense of the disintegrating Soviet Union. The fact that the Soviets possessed nuclear weapons and that up to half a million of their soldiers were stationed in the GDR is completely ignored, as is Moscow’s reaction to the surprise opening of the Wall on November 9, 1989, which could have turned out quite differently.

I had been born and raised in the GDR, the frontline state of the Cold War, and even on the morning after the opening of the Wall, my father did not trust the situation: “The Russians will not tolerate this, they will send their tanks again.” His “again” referred to June 17, 1953, when workers’ uprisings in East Berlin and other cities had brought the GDR to the brink of collapse and the Ulbricht regime could only hold on to power through Soviet military intervention.

But this time, in the fall of 1989, the Soviet tanks and soldiers stationed on GDR soil remained in the barracks during the crucial hours. The reform policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, brought about by huge economic problems in his own country and mass protests in several Warsaw Pact states, ushered in the end of the Cold War; a development that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Whoever looks at Europe today and sees a despicable war, which hardly anyone thought possible especially after 1989, should remember the recent historical development of the past three decades. There is no justification for Russia’s war against Ukraine – but the historical causes of the current catastrophe go back further than pointing to Europe’s and Germany’s dependence on Russian energy supplies. The terrible suffering of the affected people in Ukraine could have been prevented by more than one side if the Western powers, including Germany, had had the honest intention of building trust with the successor state of the Soviet Union instead of cornering it.

Notes:

1 Kohl had the valid fear that the chance for reunification, which had been offered to the Germans as suddenly as it had been unexpected, might not last long, so that swift action was the order of the day. This was especially true of the Soviet Union’s position, whose concession the German chancellor saw as a singular opportunity in history.

2 The published memorandum of February 24, 1990, can be read here: Memorandum of Conversation between Helmut Kohl and George Bush at Camp David. | National Security Archive (gwu.edu)

As a side note: It’s quite amusing that no small number of people in the U.S. believe Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall. In truth, Reagan did not pressure the Soviets, but took successful steps of détente with them toward disarmament, undoubtedly paving the way for what was to follow a short time later. His words at the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987, remain unforgotten: “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” In contrast, American foreign policy under his successor, George H. W. Bush, very quickly returned to Cold War practices.

Spied on by Communists

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The Secret State Police of the GDR had me in their sights

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

The vernacular called the Ministry for State Security of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) summarily “Stasi” or “Peek and Listen.” It was not as harmless as it sounded on the surface. The Stasi, abbreviated for “Staatssicherheit”, was not a civilian secret service, but a military institution.

They called themselves the “shield and sword of the party,” the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). Under this emblem they observed, denounced, blackmailed, harassed millions and destroyed the lives of thousands: The Stasi.

When this German Democratic Republic went down, I was 29 years old. Like most people, I didn’t dare in the communist dictatorship to be a real resistance fighter. I was rather one of those who often stood there with clenched fists in their pockets and often burned their mouths – sometimes close enough to expose themselves to the danger of the State Security Service. So, I was more of a dissenter, of which there were a few. Otherwise, the non-violent revolution that swept the country in the fall of 1989 and led to the fall of the Berlin Wall would not have been possible. There is no way to make a revolution with people who have adapted to a ruling system.

Anger pent up over the years about the government, which had not been freely elected, erupted into this revolution. It was about freedom rights and democracy, with freedom of travel at the top of the list. It was like a kettle that suddenly boiled over, setting off a chain of events that led to the fall of the Wall more by accident than design.

Of course, I knew at the time that the Stasi existed – but not how intensively they spied on people in their own country. I could not imagine having people in my immediate environment who cowardly and secretly passed on information about me to a communist power organ. Yet in the course of the last few years, I have read more and more books about the Stasi and its practices. Remembering my own experiences, especially in 1985, when I got into serious trouble because of political remarks, I became curious after so long about my own situation at that time – especially how close I came to being harmed. So, I would like to have certainty.

Now I have proof.

Invalid since 1990: Third page of my GDR identity card, issued December 27, 1988.

Unlike the secret documents in the other states of the former Warsaw Pact, the Stasi files were made accessible after German reunification. Anyone who wishes to do so can submit an application and try to find out whether he or she was classified by the GDR secret service as a “person potentially dangerous to the socialistic state”. I filed such an application a year ago and have now received the notification.

In the decisive passage of the letter from Berlin to me it says: “[Our] research has shown that you were recorded in the files of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic. The registration indicates that documents on your person may exist.” Due to the high number of application processing, it can take up to two years before I can receive more detailed information. If this information exists, of course I would like to know what the communists wrote down about me and who was set on me. Because even for the aliases of the spies, their clear names can be requested.

In the months following the fall of the Berlin Wall until German reunification on October 3, 1990, the Stasi had attempted to destroy as much evidence of its espionage activities as possible. In most cases, the documents were shredded, but to this day the Stasi Archive in Berlin is still trying to piece together these mountains of paper scraps with the help of computer technology.

Make it Celsius, if you will

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Miles, yards, feet, inches, and … Daniel Fahrenheit!

From my Writing Room

Copyright © 2020 by Uwe Bahr

Referring to my previous blog about the indispensable transition from a ruthless American economic system comprising certain semblance with elements of 19th century capitalism, another absolutely innocuous subject matter comes to mind that nonetheless carries quite some nostalgic smack with it. Although it is, without doubt, also of far less importance in light of current social problems, the matter nevertheless reveals the sometimes hilarious, widespread mentality in a country where many folks are serious in referring to a Second Amendment, which in recent decades has been completely turned on its head in terms of its original meaning written a cool 231 years ago and ratified two years later. As an aside: The man who penned the infamous lines of said Amendment – James “Jamie” Madison, who would later become the nation’s fourth president and the last of the founders to go – certainly had to use candle light for his literary fabric, provided he used his little quill either in the wee hours or later at night.

Even a bit more ancient than the presumptive law of the gun most Americans deluding themselves with, is their procedure to figure out what the temperature of the day or night might be. In doing so and in a slightly mispronounced style, they use a man’s name who was of German ancestry, born in the year of 1686 in the city of Danzig at the Baltic Sea, back then under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. I have been to Danzig, which today belongs to Poland and is named Gdansk, several times in the 70’s and 80’s. Its downtown is certainly the most magnificent I have ever seen. According to my father, who knew Danzig from his childhood, the historic inner-city was restored almost to the detail after heavy air raids and besiegement at the end of World War II had reduced to rubble nearly the entire city.

The subject of our story – Americans are more familiar with the name than almost anybody else in the world – is Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, the man from Danzig who in 1724 invented the thermometer in conjunction with the scale named after him. He basically is the father of the mercury-in-glass thermometer, which scale became the first standardized measuring unit to be widely used for temperature.

Only a few years later, in 1742, the Swedish astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Anders Celsius (1701-1744) introduced the Celsius scale, an improvement and to date in conventional use throughout the entire Western world of contemporary style. Celsius’ method provided more accuracy, not least because of its conversion to a decimal system.

There are sources claiming that Fahrenheit was furthermore used worldwide to measure temperatures until the 1970’s. Such assertion catches me by surprise, for as somebody growing up in the – what we considered it back then – underdeveloped ages of Socialism, I can only state that, at the time and at least from the 1960’s on, there was not a single country at least in Europe using Fahrenheit instead Celsius. Even the expression was unbeknownst to us. As for Germany, I can say with certainty that most people including me were at loose ends with the term already back then, not to mention the significance of the man who invented the thermometer almost 300 years ago. This certainly constituted a lack of knowledge as well.

At least, Americans today are not completely alone in this world to hold unswerving faith with Mr. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. According to researchers, the Fahrenheit scale is used to date by the following countries: Marshall Islands, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Liberia, Palau, The Federal States of Micronesia, and – you bet – The United States of America.

Americans and their Specter of Socialism

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From my Writing Room

Copyright © 2020 by Uwe Bahr

The closer it gets to the election day, the more the political right in the United States is riding their hobbyhorse of “Socialism” in a desperate attempt to defend a President who not only has proved a lack of intellect and morale, but bullies, lies, and sneers. Followers that are still holding on to him – careless or clueless about the incorrectness of terms used in the heated political language – walk straight into the verbal trap, eagerly abusing the mystic expression themselves. And yet, the strenuous iteration does not make it an inch truer.

This writing comes from someone who – not voluntarily – has lived nearly thirty years in the pseudo-Socialism of the extinct German Democratic Republic (GDR). I would not want to have it back.

Nevertheless, a dose of clarification seems necessary at this point in view of the utter nonsense spreading like a virus in Trump’s America almost every time the term “Socialism” is being referenced.

So, my fellow Americans, hold on to your seats, lean back for a minute, grab one of your numerous dictionaries especially Trump supporters should always have at hand, and look up what “Socialism” stands for. I am for my part quoting for you Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (unabridged), page 2162. A pretty heavy book, by the way – but any other American dictionary will do.

Socialism is a – quote – “System or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.” End quote. Period, that’s it – no more, no less.

Got it?

A socialist command economy – I did not have to see it with my own eyes decades back for coming to the conclusion: Such state controlled, nationalized economy cannot function due to its utter inefficiency. Which makes me wonder: Where in the United States are such circumstances in existence? Is somebody out there who can please prove me wrong?

Hold your politicians, regardless of their political color, responsible for their baseless propaganda trick, don’t let them take you for a fool with an imaginary scapegoat that does not exist. Don’t fall for the catch phrases from political pied pipers who themselves have never lived in Socialism, like no American within the United States has ever even seen a glimmer of Socialism in their country.

For the sake of bettering the conditions for most Americans, it is worth noting here that an accompanying, controlling mechanism – ensuing from the government in terms of checks and balances – must be incorporated in the legal system to protect the little man from exploitation. It’s not called Socialism, but rather: Justice. Those who have – for example – ever worked for America’s largest retailer, W******, (and again, I was there, too), should know what the talk is about. The indiscriminate cut of work hours without any legal regulations versus the corporations own dictates, recurrent bullying, the shortening and eliminating of night shift allowances, the virtually non-existent access to institutions to defend themselves, a broadly lawless work environment in general, as well as a wage which does not allow hard-working Americans to make a decent living – all these facts experienced by the author disparages American citizens to a merely disposable mass of people without rights. The phrase of a “Free Country” becomes a farce here. Not even in the pseudo-Socialism of the GDR have I witnessed human beings being treated like this, which arises the question: Why do Americans, in their very own country with a Christian claim, humiliate their own people that way, albeit the means for a fair treatment and more income justice are available and could be easily arranged? Why?

By the way: If social justice is an interpretation of Socialism, then the pastor in church who commonly calls his sheep all “brothers and sisters”, obviously invoking equality, might be called a communist as well – that is, God forbid, the consecutive comparative of the spell “Socialism.”

Ironically, some 50 years ago, in that very same Socialism I lived through, once a teacher, not exactly convinced of the subject himself, asked his little students what it might look like in Communism. A girl raised her arm, stepped outside the bench and replied with an upright posture: “In Communism they are all brothers and sisters.”

By now we should know what propaganda is. If not – ask your dictionary.

Unparalleled

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From my Writing Room

Copyright © 2020 by Uwe Bahr

If it was not for my American wife, I would not be in this country anymore and long back in Germany. There have been inconsistencies going on everywhere lately, but the United States are presently salient with a good deal of people revealing ominous disturbances toward a sound human mind. A public disease seems widespread in this society like another virus on its own.

In 1989/90, when we sent the self-declared peoples’ government of the GDR (East Germany) packing, I considered these apologists of Socialism the most primitive sort of people I was ever governed under and was certain that I will never see any attempts of that magnitude from a government again to play their own populace for a sucker. Obviously, I was misled here by my own presumptions.

What I am seeing today in the country of my current residence is not only shocking, but nothing more than a largely effective process of national dulling disguised as patriotism. I can’t help myself to express it in a more polite and harmless way. The adherents of Donald J. Trump – in my judgement – suffer from pathetic brainwashing including the influence of conspiracy theories, leading inevitably to a disturbed mind. Never in my life have I seen anything even close to this.

And it makes feelings even worse when noting that white Evangelicals rank among Trump’s most reliable bases. Is this what Christian morality is about? The hypocrites, who tell themselves and others you HAVE to believe in God, should be ashamed for the rest of their life.