Sometimes one can only wonder at the mentality of politicians, or perhaps their ability to refuse to acknowledge the often disastrous past. Watching the former German "Socialist" (Read as Communist) Party attempt to destroy the other parties candidate for the Presidency here is certainly an interesting exercise. Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran Priest and scourge of the former rulers of East Germany, is the candidate of choice of all Parties except "Die Linke," the new name for the former communists.
Watching them witter on about how Gauck is a "turncoat" who "benefitted from the system and now undermines all the good ..." or cry about the fact that he revealed all the Stasi files and their abuses of human rights could be amusing. You certainly couldn't make up some of the stuff they accuse him of. I rather liked his reply, which ran along the lines of "if the former DDR was such a wonderfully democratic state, and everyone was so equal and so happy there; why did they need the Stasi? Why did they need to kill everyone who wanted to try a different regime? Why did they lock people up for even talking about wanting a different regime? If everyone was so equal; why did the Party have secret resorts and luxury travel arrangements no one else had access to?"
If you think he got any answers to that, think again. One of the saddest things I've seen on this was a young woman earnestly trying to convince the interviewer that "In a proper Communist State, there is no inequality, no hardship and no one goes without work." When challenged about the DDR situation, her response was to dismiss it as "teething troubles while they struggled against the Capitalist onslaught" and her response to the Stasi - "A necessary safeguard for the greater good ..." She then went on to say that the collapse of Capitalism was "inevitable" and that the only alternative was full Communism... The interviewer gave up after trying to get her to take several reality checks!
As we used to say in South Africa: Ja. Well, no. Fine, fine..." I don't think there's any cure for this sort of mental disease. It isn't stupidity, it isn't that they are unable to get the facts, they are just completely and utterly unable to face reality and to recognise their system is utterly and totally unworkable without its being imposed and enforced in breach of everything they claim to be trying to protect..
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As ever Josephus, you have it in a nutshell. The worrying thing here is that the current membership of Die Linke - who have around 67 seats in the Bundestag - are all old enough to have been resident and active in the former DDR ... Some are even known to have been active for the STAats SIcherheits Polizei, but now refuse to acknowledge that there were abuses or that there were outright injustices under their "ideal" state. Wonderful thing democracy, that in a "Capitalist" society they are free to sit in Parliament while in their "Socialist State" they were the only permitted Party.
ReplyDeleteAs you say, the "ideal" of Marxism is attractive to the young but the majority soon catch on to the model you have outlined and realise that it is and always was, unworkable. It is the 2% who cannot grasp that fact who worry me ...