[Newsbot]

Title: Germany marks 50 years since rise of the Berlin Wall
Category: History
Posted By: wildrosegirl
Date: 2011-08-13 07:36:08

[GreenTiger]

That wall was a lot of misery for a lot of people for a very long time.

It should be utterly removed and sunk in the ocean.

[saturn_656]

GreenTiger GreenTiger:

That wall was a lot of misery for a lot of people for a very long time.

It should be utterly removed and sunk in the ocean.

The remains should be ground to dust then spread over the ocean.

Which reminds me, I think I have a chunk of the Berlin Wall kicking around my house somewhere...

[Unsound]

saturn_656 saturn_656:

GreenTiger GreenTiger:

That wall was a lot of misery for a lot of people for a very long time.

It should be utterly removed and sunk in the ocean.

The remains should be ground to dust then spread over the ocean.

Which reminds me, I think I have a chunk of the Berlin Wall kicking around my house somewhere...

I think almost everyone who's been to Berlin as a tourist has a chunk of the "wall". Mine even had a little bit of spray paint on it...

[Brenda]

I don't. I refuse to.

[Unsound]

You refuse to what?

[Brenda]

Own a chunk of the Wall.

[Unsound]

Ahh. Y not? Not that I think for a second that the piece I have actually came from the wall, but it was still kind of a cool thing when I was 16.

[Brenda]

Because I refuse to treasure something that brought so much devastation.

[saturn_656]

I wouldn't say I treasure it (them). I actually have two chunks. One was picked up for me by my grandparents when they visited home (my father is German born).

The second came with my World in Conflict box set. Didn't know it came with a chunk of the wall until I opened the box.

[Thanos]

Some East Germans lament the fall of the Wall. They don't miss the police state they lived under but they miss the sense of community and the non-predatory economic arrangement that they used to have when they were separated from the West. After Communism died the East was flooded by West German carpetbaggers who ripped apart what was left of the East German economy and the East basically got treated the same as places like India and China were when North America began shipping jobs there. Low pay, few benefits, and the typically shitty sweatshop treatment that capitalists set up everywhere they go. Add in the (then) West German government allowing mass immigration of Turks into the Eastern areas and wages were driven down even lower. For a few years, even including today, a lot of East Germans certainly didn't have very much to celebrate with the Wall disappearing.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall might be a major milestone in the victory of freedom over tyranny, but like all things it hurt some just as much as it helped some. Someone else's views of freedom probably don't mean a lot to people who had the rug ripped out from under their feet in terms of job losses, low wage warfare aimed at the working class, and losing their homes to some financier's whiz-kid scheming.

[saturn_656]

$1:

The Fall of the Berlin Wall might be a major milestone in the victory of freedom over tyranny, but like all things it hurt some just as much as it helped some. Someone else's views of freedom probably don't mean a lot to people who had the rug ripped out from under their feet in terms of job losses, low wage warfare aimed at the working class, and losing their homes to some financier's whiz-kid scheming.

The collapse of communism upset the economies of Soviet aligned countries all over the world.

East Germany was not special in this regard.

[Thanos]

Because I'm not an American or a Mammon-worshipper I'm probably a Communist by the standards of this forum. I really don't see the loss of community in exchange for rapacious predatory capitialism as a positive. That the former Soviet states had significant percentages of their populations stating a few years after the Wall had disappeared that they wished none of it had ever occurred shouldn't be so casually ignored. Or hidden behind a bunch of yahoo "we won! take THAT, Commies!" celebrating coming from people who didn't live there and who had literally nothing at all to do with the way events played out. Down with all police states? Yes, absolutely. Exploit these unfortunate places and people with the same psychopathic anti-community economic thought patterns that marked the American Wild West of the 19th century and the Wall Street of today? Umm, duh, no.

[saturn_656]

Germany isn't exactly a "predatory capitalist state". For many years the economy of the old West Germany has been subsidizing the east, which continues to lag behind the rest of the country.

Some former East Germans may lament the fall of communism, likewise some former West Germans may not like having to carry "the east".

[Brenda]

Western Europe does like to have to carry Eastern Europe. That includes countries like Poland (whose people work for cheap and bring all their money back to Poland, kinda like here and India, but then with truck drivers and agricultural personnel), Bulgaria, Hungary etc etc.